Jason Aldeans Music Video BOOTED Off CMT After Furious Backlash
Jason Aldeans Music Video BOOTED Off CMT After Furious Backlash
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00:00 Country music television has now
00:01 pulled Jason Aldean's
00:03 controversial video for his single
00:05 Try That in a Small Town.
00:07 And it set off this huge brouhaha
00:09 where lots of people have an issue
00:11 with the lyrics and
00:12 the imagery in the video.
00:14 And then other people say if you
00:16 have any problem with this
00:17 whatsoever, you're doing
00:19 a cancel culture.
00:20 And we don't do that in America
00:22 except for Bud Light and Target and
00:24 Dylan Mulvaney and M&Ms and
00:25 a whole bunch of different things.
00:27 We only do it in those cases,
00:29 we don't do it in this case.
00:32 So what we're going to do is we're
00:33 just going to actually read
00:34 the lyrics and we're going to have
00:36 a conversation and we're going to
00:37 see what we think about it.
00:39 Here's what's in the lyrics.
00:40 I'm just going to read them.
00:41 I'm not going to perform them like
00:43 it's Ben Shapiro talking about
00:44 Nicki Minaj or something.
00:45 Cuss out a cop, spit in his face,
00:48 stomp on the flag and light it up.
00:50 Yeah, you think you're tough.
00:52 Well, try that in a small town.
00:54 See how far you make it down
00:55 the road.
00:56 Around here we take care of our
00:58 own, you cross that line,
00:59 it won't take long for
01:01 you to find out.
01:02 I recommend you don't try that in
01:04 a small town.
01:05 So people have concerns with
01:06 the lyrics, seems to be implying
01:08 that if you do anything that steps
01:10 out of line from their point of
01:12 view, you will be, I guess,
01:14 hunted down even if you're leaving
01:16 the town because they take care of
01:18 their own and their own by
01:20 definition would never insult a cop.
01:22 If you insult a cop, then you're
01:24 not one of their own and
01:25 something might happen to you.
01:26 They're not saying what,
01:27 they're not saying they'll murder
01:29 you, but it doesn't seem like what
01:31 they're implying is that they will
01:32 sit down and talk about our
01:33 deferring ideas of how much
01:35 automatic respect to law
01:36 enforcement officers deserve.
01:38 It sounds like something else.
01:40 Now, it left enough ambiguity that
01:43 defenders of this song, which is
01:45 like every right winger knee jerk,
01:47 100%, will say how dare you think
01:49 that this is conjuring up images of
01:51 lynching or the specter of sundown
01:53 towns or anything like that.
01:55 You're crazy if you think that
01:57 J.R., are you crazy?
01:58 >> Well, that's a little bit
02:00 separate sometimes.
02:01 Yes, I am.
02:02 But as far as this goes, if we're
02:03 talking about the spitting in
02:05 the cop's face and cussing them out
02:07 and all that, and you can't do that
02:09 in a small town,
02:10 there's this large town.
02:12 It's Washington DC where a bunch of
02:14 people probably support these types
02:15 of lyrics, spitting cop's faces,
02:17 cussed them out, attacked them,
02:19 ran through them, sprayed them with
02:21 mace, attacked them with flags,
02:23 threatened to kill them,
02:24 all these things.
02:25 Does that fly in a small town?
02:27 Can you do that in a small town?
02:28 Can you run up on the city hall in
02:29 some small town and just get to
02:31 assaulting people and killing them
02:32 based off of your anger about
02:34 the results of an election?
02:35 Just curious if it works in all
02:37 these realms.
02:37 because by the way, I mean, if we're
02:39 talking about canceling, as far as
02:41 this element of it, canceling,
02:42 whether or not he can say these
02:44 things, say him, bro.
02:45 I think he can go ahead and
02:46 have these ridiculous lyrics and
02:48 then maybe we can begin to decipher
02:49 who the good guys are in all these
02:51 scenarios and situations.
02:53 I think he can go ahead and
02:54 have these ridiculous lyrics and
02:55 then maybe we can begin to decipher
02:57 who the good guys are in all these
02:59 scenarios and situations or
03:00 the bad guys because we've got
03:02 music from way back.
03:03 People like to go back to NWA with
03:04 F the police and talking about
03:06 the plight that many times these
03:07 things happen amongst regular
03:09 citizens.
03:09 It's not just the chorus that we're
03:11 talking about, you have to listen
03:12 to the lyrics about what is that
03:13 happens, but- >> Yeah.
03:14 >> Require you to actually have
03:15 a thought process to approach this.
03:17 So I know maybe I'm the minority
03:18 in this, but I don't think
03:20 the dancer need to be scrubbed or
03:22 taken from this.
03:23 I think there's lots of music that
03:24 inspires people to do hateful,
03:25 violent things, so
03:26 it's hard to really police all of
03:28 it.
03:28 But I think it's a big
03:29 illustration of exactly the lines
03:31 that are being drawn to where
03:32 people think we're going to
03:34 continue to try and regress this
03:35 country back to the days when you
03:37 better not come to this town before
03:39 sundown boy, because that's
03:41 the thought process that we're
03:42 heading towards, obviously,
03:44 we can see that.
03:45 >> Yeah, no, 100%.
03:46 So to be clear, I understand that
03:47 there are already a million
03:48 conservatives or whatever that
03:50 have typed, I can't, I'm not,
03:51 I don't care.
03:52 I'm going to, you know what I'm
03:53 going to do is I'm going to go back
03:54 after this to not knowing that he
03:55 exists, which is what my state was
03:57 before I heard about the song.
03:58 Now to be fair, it is, of course,
04:00 a privilege of mine that I get to
04:01 do that because he is not inspiring
04:03 potentially acts of violence
04:05 against people like me.
04:06 I mean, maybe a little bit,
04:07 there's been a lot of encouragement
04:09 for attacks against progressives
04:10 and protesters and
04:11 things like that.
04:12 But that's not generally what I
04:13 think that they're going for.
04:15 And I'm not saying that he
04:16 necessarily even knows everything
04:18 that he's invoking in that.
04:19 That doesn't mean that it's not
04:21 being invoked.
04:22 And how about we just use this as
04:24 an opportunity to have a discussion
04:26 about some different things, okay?
04:28 And maybe learn a little bit as
04:30 a lot of people are noticing.
04:31 In the video version,
04:33 some viewers noticed scenes that
04:35 were shot in front of what appears
04:37 to be the Maury County Courthouse
04:39 in Columbia.
04:39 That courthouse was the site of
04:41 several incidents of racial
04:42 violence, including the 1927
04:44 lynching of a black man named
04:46 Henry Choate.
04:46 It also served as a backdrop for
04:48 the Columbia race riot in 1946.
04:50 Which I need to do more reading on
04:52 because I didn't even know about
04:54 that race riot.
04:54 Now, in defense of Jason Aldean,
04:57 it is easy to say he did this video
04:59 in front of a courthouse where
05:01 there was a lynching.
05:03 In defense of him, I defy you to
05:05 find a place in the South where
05:07 there wasn't.
05:08 That's a problem of America.
05:10 And it's worth discussing that this
05:13 was normalized outside courthouses
05:15 all over the South and
05:16 not just in the South, by the way.
05:18 There were race riots in
05:20 massacres and lynchings and acts of
05:22 horrendous, brutal injustice.
05:24 That's everywhere.
05:25 And so an opportunity certainly to
05:27 learn, and if not that at least,
05:30 like, Jay, are you, I think,
05:31 perfectly brought up.
05:33 The whole point of this is just,
05:35 hey, everybody's being mean to
05:37 the cops and
05:37 they're disrespecting them.
05:39 But do you actually believe that?
05:41 Or are there situations in which
05:43 you think is perfectly acceptable
05:45 to disrespect the cops,
05:47 to attack the cops?
05:49 To try to murder the cops,
05:50 if you think that they're standing
05:52 between you and
05:53 the political goals that you have?
05:55 And that seems like a rhetorical
05:56 question, but
05:57 we already know the answer.
05:59 We know exactly how the January 6th
06:01 rioters treated the cops.
06:02 By the way, we know how right
06:03 wingers talk constantly about what
06:05 they'll do if the cops come to take
06:07 their guns or to make them take
06:08 the vaccine or whatever.
06:10 Or if there's a tyrant,
06:11 you guys fantasize about murdering
06:14 law enforcement.
06:15 So let's just be clear,
06:17 what you are saying and
06:18 what you're not.
06:19 It is a sign of support for
06:21 the cops in certain situations,
06:24 against certain people in certain
06:27 times.
06:28 It is accepting of and
06:29 supporting a certain status quo.
06:32 I would just say, if you want to be
06:34 the tough guy that you clearly are
06:36 in crafting these lyrics, why don't
06:38 you just say openly what it actually
06:40 is that you think the cops should
06:42 be doing and who you're actually
06:44 worried about disrespecting
06:45 because it ain't everyone.
06:47 Anyway, Jeremy,
06:48 I'm going to give final thoughts to
06:49 you. >> We've seen the videos and
06:50 random I have, Elisa, normal folks
06:52 that out in the streets and
06:53 they start screaming at a cop
06:55 because he's given them a ticket.
06:56 And we've seen the differences in
06:58 many times when those cops react to
07:00 someone who's sitting in the car,
07:01 not doing anything if they're of
07:03 the wrong ethnic background.
07:04 And how aggressive cops are versus
07:06 people that do scream at the cops
07:07 and do spit in their face.
07:09 And they go, sir, I'm going to need
07:10 you to pick up that ticket.
07:12 And it's a lot more calm,
07:13 in many cases, not every time.
07:15 But when you see the difference in
07:16 how often that happens, and
07:18 then you say there's certain people
07:20 who spit in the cop's face and
07:22 do that because now the picture
07:24 that's in our head is, why is it
07:26 that cops would attack certain
07:27 folks?
07:28 Who are the folks that we always
07:29 see cops attacking on these body
07:31 cam evidence and then turns into
07:33 these types of protests?
07:34 It's black folks, Latino folks,
07:36 anybody else that they generally
07:37 have been conditioned to hate.
07:39 So it continues to condition
07:40 our society and
07:41 that's where our problem comes.
07:43 Our society believes certain
07:44 folks of all races.
07:45 That would be the belief system
07:46 that certain folks are the one
07:47 committing these crimes and
07:49 they need to be treated badly from
07:50 the jump.
07:50 >> 100%, it's just a side note.
07:53 >> You know who lives in small
07:55 towns, not just white people.
07:56 So you take care of your own, but
07:59 do you?
08:00 Why is it that your own is drawn
08:02 much more tightly,
08:04 the lines of it,
08:05 than you're implying in that song?
08:07 You imply that it's just people
08:09 who live near you.
08:10 And yet the song isn't about how we
08:12 take care of our own when the cops
08:13 decide to beat the hell out of
08:15 someone for no reason.
08:16 Why is it that you don't take care
08:18 of your own in that case?
08:20 These cops that you respect so
08:22 much, one would think you would
08:23 thus have even more expectations
08:25 for them to be the heroic figures
08:26 that you clearly think they are.
08:28 And yet when they so commonly fall
08:30 short of that,
08:30 why does it not bother you?
08:32 Particularly when they fall short
08:33 by brutalizing the people who live
08:35 in your small town with you.
08:37 I'm not trying to cancel
08:38 Jason Aldean.
08:39 I'm trying to challenge the people
08:41 who might be inclined to listen to
08:42 this song to think about what it
08:44 says, what it could say, why there's
08:46 such a big gap between those two
08:47 things.
08:48 [MUSIC]
08:49 [MUSIC]
08:59 >> Yeah.