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Jason Aldean said that if he had the chance to do it all over again with “Try That in a Small Town,” he would do pretty much everything the same — except film the video in front of a courthouse where a lynching took place in 1927.
In an interview with CBS Mornings on Wednesday, Aldean once again went to bat for his controversial hit, which was released in April but became a cultural lightning rod after the video dropped in July. The video featured footage of protests (including some from, as Rolling Stone reported, Canada) and Aldean performing in front of a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, which was not only the site of a 1927 lynching but also a race riot in 1946.
Critics from the country music world to academia argued that the video promoted white nationalism and painted protests against racial injustice as lawless and violent. CMT even pulled the video from its airwaves, and portions featuring protests in Atlanta were later edited out.
Aldean said he wasn’t aware of the location’s history at the time of filming, saying, “I also don’t go back a hundred years and check on the history of a place before we go shoot it either. It’s also the place that I go to get my car tags every year. It’s my county that I live in.” Aldean also tried to bolster his argument by noting it’d be hard to find a small-town courthouse in the South that “hasn’t had some sort of racial issue over the years at some point.”
Aldean said he still didn’t “feel bad” about the setting, adding, “I know what the intentions were behind the location, the video, the song, all of it. And, you know, and I stand by all that.” He went on to say, “I would do it over again, every time,” with one caveat in retrospect: “Minus the setting, knowing what I know now, obviously, you know, knowing that that was gonna be a thing, you know, maybe you look at doing it somewhere else.”
As for his intentions, Aldean said he wanted to highlight “lawlessness” and “disrespect for cops” in his song, which he said was inspired by Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” He added that the song was also partly inspired by his harrowing experience at the 2017 Route 91 music festival shooting in Las Vegas.
“My pregnant wife was there. Our fans were there watching the show,” he said. “All hell breaks loose and you’re not prepared, you know, it’s like, ‘I got a guitar, what am I gonna do?’ … I do think it makes you look at things a little different when you go through something like that.”
Throughout the controversy, Aldean has dismissed accusations that the song was pro-lynching or that it had racial undertones. He did so again on CBS, pointing out that the music video features “people of all color doing stuff.”
Aldean continued: “There was white people in there. There was Black people. I mean, this video did not shine light on one specific group and say, that’s the problem. So, anybody that saw that in the video, then you weren’t looking hard enough in the video, is all I can tell you.”
The controversy surrounding “Try That in a Small Town” has, of course, benefitted Aldean greatly, with fans pushing the song to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August (it stayed there for one week before plummeting back down to Number 21). And while discourse surrounding the song did seem to taper off — or was just replaced by Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” — it’s returned as Aldean prepares to release his new album, Highway Desperado, on Friday.
