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Joe Rogan has chimed in on the Jason Aldean ‘Try That In A Small Town’ controversy.
Last week, Aldean set the Internet ablaze when he released the music video for his new single.
The video and song feature controversial lyrics that many felt promote violence and racism, which led to CMT pulling the video off their channel.
Aldean released “Try That in a Small Town” in May, but its accompanying music video dropped July 14. The clip features the burning of the American flag, protests, looting and more, and some have criticized it for promoting gun violence and taking aim at the Black Lives Matter movement.
In the video, Aldean performs in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee — the site of the 1946 Columbia race riot and the 1927 mob lynching of Henry Choate, an 18-year-old Black teenager.
Aldean didn’t write the song, but it features the lyrics: “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face / Stomp on the flag and light it up / Yeah, ya think you’re tough / Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road.” Aldean later sings on the song, “Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up / Well, that sh–might fly in the city, good luck.”
During his most recent podcast, Rogan spoke about the Aldean controversy and was confused by all the outrage because he believes there are “hundreds of rap songs out that are infinitely worse” than the Aldean song that don’t receive the same level of criticism.
“The level of outrage, now I’m not saying that that’s the greatest song in the world’s ever known, you know, but the level of outrage coming from people that are upset about that song is so strange when there are hundreds of rap songs out there that are infinitely worse and also enjoyable,”
“And we’re not even talking about old stuff. There’s new stuff too. There’s hip hop, there’s wild rock songs. There’s a lot of wild sh– And to be focusing on that one, and it’s the racial aspect of it,” Rogan said.
Rogan said he wasn’t bothered by the ANTIFA/BLM footage in Aldean’s video.
“It was crazy because like the real ANTIFA problems that were happening during the BLM, I think it was a lot of white people doing that, right? Wasn’t it? It was a lot of like, lost liberal whites who were very angry, who decided to take up this movement and smash things,” Rogan said. “So like, the racial aspect of it, there’s nothing racial about the lyrics.”