Celebrity5 min(s) read
Published 09:46 24 Jul 2023 GMT
Jason Aldean's controversial song 'Try That in a Small Town' has been heavily criticized by The View hosts.
The 46-year-old country singer released the music video for 'Try That In A Small Town,' on Friday (July 14), despite the song being originally released in May.
The accompanying video garnered mass attention online as it featured a shocking scene of Aldean performing in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee - which is the historic site where Black teenager Henry Choate was lynched in 1927.
In addition to this, critics say that the song takes aim at Black Lives Matter protests that occurred after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and contains lyrics that warn people about causing trouble and attacking police officers in the narrator’s neighborhood.
Examples of violent actions condemned in the song include: "Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk / Carjack an old lady at a red light / Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store" before Aldean sings: "Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own."
The song has also garnered heavy backlash for its allusion to gun ownership and use, particularly as Aldean performed at Route 91 Festival in 2017, the site of the deadly mass shooting that left 60 dead and 400 injured.
In the wake of all the criticism, the music video has been withdrawn from rotation by the country music channel CMT, according to Billboard and Deadline.
State Representative of Tennessee, Justin Jones, condemned the song as a "heinous song for racist violence," and fellow country star Sheryl Crow, who hails from a small town herself, took to Twitter to slam Aldean directly.
"I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence," she wrote, tagging Aldean. "There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting. This is not American or small-town-like. It’s just lame."
Just like Crow, the hosts of The View didn't hold back on Thursday (July 20) when discussing the controversy surrounding the tune. Whoopi Goldberg started off by calling out Aldean for the music video’s imagery paired with the song's pro-gun messaging and racist undertones, saying: "He talks about life in a small town, and it’s different, and he chose these images."
Check out what the ladies on The View had to say:"He’s got folks from the Black Lives Matter movement, and he’s talking about people taking care of each other, and I find it so interesting that it never occurred to Jason or the writers that that’s what these folks were doing: They were taking care of the people in their town because they didn’t like what they saw."
She continued: "Just like you talk about people taking care of each other in small towns, we do the same thing in big towns. You just have to realize that when you make it about Black Lives Matter, people kind of say, 'Well, are you talking about Black people? What are you talking about here?'"
Following the 67-year-old's Sister Act actress' statement, cohost Alyssa Farah Griffin, 34, wanted to give the singer the "benefit of the doubt," believing that he did not intend to "stoke division," however, she said the song reminded her of Ahmaud Arbery's murder - as he was a "Black man in a small town in the South who got shot for doing nothing wrong".
Both Sunny Hostin and Joy Behar went on to share their issues with the song's alleged meanings. Behar, 80, described it as "deplorable" while Hostin, 54, couldn't help but think about the struggles her parents - who are an interracial couple - faced growing up in the small town.
"What was evoked for me was…. those sundown areas. My mother and father, because they were an interracial couple, were run out of South Carolina by the KKK," she explained while her mom sat in the audience. "My father is still scarred from that experience … so don’t tell me that not only was he aware of what he was doing by using that imagery, he embraces that imagery."
"Unfortunately, this became the No. 1 song on U.S. iTunes. We have a problem in this country about race, and the biggest problem is we refuse to admit that it exists," she added.
Hostin concluded the segment by reading out the 'Got What I Got' musician's statement on Twitter, where he denied the allegations that the music video was "pro-lynching".
"In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests," the singer tweeted.
"These references are not only meritless but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage - and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music, this one goes too far," he added.
Aldean explained that the song was intended to reflect "the feeling of a community that I had growing up" and contended that it contained no references to race. He also highlighted that the video clips were authentic news footage.
After listening to the 'Dirt Road Anthem' singer's tweets, Goldberg swiftly called him out once again by saying, "It does go too far? You’ve gone too far."
Following his denial statement on social media, Aldean paused his performance at Cincinnati's Riverbend Center on Saturday (July 22), to address "cancel culture".
