At least Jason Aldean's "Small Town" music video doesn't explicitly reference Black Lives Matter anymore
Six seconds of footage has reportedly been cut out of Aldean's controversial "Try That In A Small Town" music video
Country singer Jason Aldean crossed the line and now he’s finding out, per the wildly on-the-nose lyrics of his own not-quite-number-one song, “Try That In A Small Town.”
The singer and conservative lapdog has been courting controversy especially hard over the past week after the music video for his single “Try That In A Small Town” first rolled out. The video—an ode to “a feeling of community that [Aldean] had growing up,” per CNN—heavily features the site of an infamous 1927 lynching, and was initially interspersed with just enough specific protest footage to signal who Jason and his “good ol’ boys, raised up right” were apparently whining about.
Now, though, the scope of poor old Jason’s “cancellation” must really be hitting him in the face. On one hand, the singer snagged his best performing single ever, with “Try That In A Small Town” charting number two on the Billboard Hot 100 (beating his previous record, “Dirt Road Anthem”’s #7 spot); on the other, he had to let go of six precious seconds of footage—namely, a clip from Fox 5 Atlanta featuring 2020 Black Lives Matter protests—that really hammered the point home. Seems like you actually can’t get away with this in a small town, the city, or anywhere else—who knew!
Per The Washington Post, the video is now shorter than when it was originally uploaded to YouTube on July 14, although it’s unclear exactly when it was edited. (Representatives for Jason Aldean did not immediately respond to The A.V. Club’s request for comment on this story.) The video, which was pulled from CMT’s lineup last week after just two days, has already been viewed by 19 million people on YouTube.
Even with the scrubbed clip, Jason is still left with plenty of “real news footage” by his own statement, which—as a vigilante TikToker recently debunked—isn’t even all real footage in the first place. (Some of the clips were originally taken from stock footage websites.) You really showed ‘em, tough guy!