The contentious music video for Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town" was slightly changed as it continues to climb the charts and draw criticism. Did the singer finally cave in to pressure and the immense cancel culture?
The music video is currently six seconds shorter than when it was first uploaded on July 14, according to The Washington Post, which published this information on Tuesday, July 25.
The initial video appears to have been edited to exclude news footage from Fox 5 Atlanta showing Black Lives Matter marches and protests in 2020. In the initial version of the video, the snippets appeared twice.
The video was once shown outside a Tennessee courthouse that was supposedly the scene of a Black teen's lynching in the 1920s.
According to the Post, the video's conclusion has undergone more alterations. The final 30 seconds of the previous version had footage of a man in a baseball cap and an older man talking about small-town life.
After concerns about the lyrics surfaced online earlier this month, Aldean, 46, defended his song and its content.
Given that Aldean experienced a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, several listeners were taken aback by the song's pro-gun message; however, Aldean responded to criticism on Twitter as the conversation went on. He said that he has faced accusations of publishing a song that supports lynching (a tune that has been available since May) and have been compared to someone who (exact quote) wasn't too happy with the widespread BLM protests but this is not truly the case.
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He said the song nor the video has not advanced racist ideology and that these references are even harmful.
No song lyric mentions or allude to race, and every video clip in the song is true news footage, the singer continued. He even said that he can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music, this one goes too far.
While fellow musicians Sheryl Crow, Cassadee Pope and Jason Isbell called out Aldean's writing, he has one consistent supporter through it all -- his wife, Brittany Aldean, who told him to never apologize if he's telling the truth.
By making this edit, maybe the singer has also seen where the mistake lies.
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