A Jason Aldean music video has been edited to remove six seconds of TV news coverage that featured Black Lives Matters protesters battling police in 2020 after the death of George Floyd.
But the updates to “Try That in a Small Town” were made because of copyright clearance issues, the country star’s record label, BBR Music Group, told The Washington Post — not sensitivity considerations after widespread backlash over where the video was shot or over the accusations of racism that surfaced in light of the protest footage used.
Portions of the Fox 5 Atlanta coverage that were removed had also been projected onto an exterior wall of the courthouse Aldean and his band performed in front of for “Try That,” a second-story window from which an 18-year-old Black teen was lynched in 1927.
Aldean has defended the video, insisting it was not “pro-lynching.” He has not addressed the reason for filming it in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee.
News of the video’s update came a week after it was pulled from the playlist of the Country Music Television channel. CMT has not directly specified its reason for pulling the video.
Conservative media such as Fox News rushed to defend Aldean after the CMT pulled the video. Jeanine Pirro, a cohost on the network’s roundtable talk show “The Five,” went so far as to reason Aldean purposely shot the video in front of the site of the lynching, saying perhaps he was pointing out society’s lack of progress in the nearly 100 years since it happened — and that, today, Black Lives Matter was breaking the law.
