Hey, remember when Jason Aldean came to Edmonton and it was a huge deal? Just before COVID he was a big deal in Oshawa, and he's going to be playing Toronto next month. He's been a big deal in country music for about a decade now, and of course he was the act that was playing the Route 91 Harvest festival when Stephen Paddock shot the place up for reasons nobody ever really got that interested in discovering.
Of course, many of you may only know him from the fact that a few weeks back one of his songs has been denounced as horribly racist.
The song was released in May, though controversy was reignited when the country artist released the accompanying music video this month.Aldean shot the music video for the song in front of Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., the site where a Black man named Henry Chaote was dragged behind a car by a white mob before he was lynched in 1927. The courthouse also served as a backdrop for the 1946 Columbia race riots, when Tennessee Highway Patrol officers stormed a Black neighbourhood in the wake of a controversial court case.
The music video includes footage of Black Lives Matter protests, cut together with visuals of Aldean singing in front of the courthouse. The video also featured clips of violent muggings, leading some critics to argue that Aldean was conflating protests against police brutality with violent crime.
Country Music Television (CMT) pulled the music video off the air amid the uproar. The video had been playing on the broadcaster’s rotation through the weekend before it was removed on Monday, according to Billboard.
Aldean earlier defended his song in a long statement posted to Twitter (which is currently rebranding as “X”). He wrote that “there is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it.”
“I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music- this one goes too far,” he continued.
“Try That In A Small Town, for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief.”
You might note that the article in question was from CISN 103.9, Edmonton's long-running country music FM station. When the Aldean story broke and the song climbed to the top of the charts, one of the first things I checked was CISN's recent playlist, which covers a hundred or so songs at a time. [as you're about to see, he has a spreadsheet which gives this answer instantly and he doesn't bother to check that it contained 108 songs at the time of this export... -ed]
Not a single Jason Aldean song had been on their playlist. Not one. A great big goose egg from one of the most popular active country music stars, on an Alberta country music station.
Well, I checked again yesterday and while there are actual Jason Aldean songs playing again, "Try That in a Small Town" is still not one of them.
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Above you can see the PivotTable results of comparing all of the songs with all of the artists (note: I've filtered out any song or artist which only appears once). Aldean appears four times now in the recently played list: "Burnin' It Down", "You Make It Easy", "When She Says Baby", and "She's Country". Luke Combs, Kane Brown, and Morgan Wallen are the only artists who appear more often than Aldean in the playlist.
As of this week it's still #22 on Country Charts USA, and it appears that CISN has refused to play it entirely. As you can see from their count of playing Comb's "Fast Car" (itself accused of racism, of course) and "Love You Anyway" they aren't afraid to only play the most recent big hits of otherwise large acts. And likewise that of these 108 songs [see? -ed] no less than eighteen of them are the same six songs done three times each (I'll let you do the math on this one), it's not like CISN can argue that they had just played the song and wanted to diversify their playlist.
No, this is CISN cowardly hiding from morons arguing in bad faith. The correct answer when somebody whines to you that "this song is racist" is "what did you say you retarded nigger? I can't hear you over this awesome† tune".
†It's worth noting you do this even if, as is the case here, the song isn't actually all that good. It's a Danish cartoon issue at this point: you play it loud if for no other reason than you're being instructed not to play it at all.
There is only one acceptable thing to do in this situation: go to the CISN studio and try to murder the inhabitants with fire. Irony is our best weapon.
