Still from “Jason Aldean - Try That In A Small Town (Official Music Video)” via Youtube.
Six seconds of footage from Fox 5 Atlanta’s coverage of a 2020 protest following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer have been quietly scrubbed from Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” music video, The Washington Post reports.
The FADER reached out to Aldean’s label, Broken Bow Records, for further comment, and received the following response from a representative of its parent company, BMG Rights Management: “A representative for BBR Music Group has confirmed that the video footage was edited due to third party copyright clearance issues.”
The clip in question appeared twice in the video’s original version, at one point projected behind Aldean on the façade of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. The building is widely known as the site where Henry Choate, a Black 18-year-old accused of assaulting a 16-year-old white girl, was lynched in 1927. It remains the video’s primary setting.
Jason Aldean first released “Try That In A Small Town” on May 19 to little fanfare beyond the singer’s outsized pop-country fandom. The song only became a subject of national debate upon the release of its music video on Friday, July 14, at which point it was widely decried by the American political Left and Center-Left as a racist dog whistle and roundly praised by the Right as a paragon of traditional Conservative values. The video aired on Country Music Television over the weekend but was subsequently pulled from rotation without comment.
This week, the track debuted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, just behind Jung Kook and Latto’s “Seven.” The latter track received a groundswell of support online in response to right-wing pundits urging their audiences to push “Try That In A Small Town” to the top of the chart.
Update, July 27, 7:35 p.m. EDT: This article has been edited to reflect a statement sent to The FADER by BMG after our post’s initial publication.
