(NEXSTAR) – Sheryl Crow has become the latest to share her thoughts on Jason Aldean’s controversial song “Try That in a Small Town,” calling it “just lame.”
Aldean released the song in May, but it has been heavily criticized since the song’s music video debuted last week. The video — filmed in front of a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, the site of the 1946 Columbia race riot and the 1927 mob lynching of an 18-year-old Black teenager named Henry Choate — was removed from Country Music Television (CMT) earlier this week.
During the video, images from protests, criminal acts, and demonstrations that took place during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 are projected onto the courthouse.
The video has received fervent criticism online, with some claiming the visual is a “dog whistle” and others labeling it “pro-lynching.”
Sheryl Crow took to Twitter Tuesday night, calling the song “not American or small town-like.”
“I’m from a small town,” Crow tweeted to Aldean. “Even people in small towns are sick of violence. There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting.”
In 2017, Aldean was on stage at the Route 91 Festival in Las Vegas during the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The Nashville resident noted that in a tweet Tuesday as he defended the song, and made mention of the mass shooting at a Nashville school earlier this year that killed three students and three staff members.
“NO ONE, including me, wants to continue to see senseless headlines or families ripped apart,” he wrote.
“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,” Aldean continued. “Because they were our neighbors, and that was above any differences.”
The video and its subsequent removal from CMT quickly blew up into one of the periodic culture war clashes, with several conservative figures speaking out in favor of Aldean — including Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert.
“It’s too easy to get guns, first and foremost,” Aldean told The Associated Press after the Las Vegas shooting. “When you can walk in somewhere and you can get one in 5 minutes, do a background check that takes 5 minutes, like how in-depth is that background check? Those are the issues I have. It’s not necessarily the guns themselves or that I don’t think people should have guns. I have a lot of them.”
This isn’t the first time Aldean has been at the center of controversy. In 2015, he made headlines for dressing as rapper Lil Wayne as a Halloween costume, wearing blackface makeup and a wig with dreadlocks.
The Associated Press and The Hill’s Joe Jacquez contributed to this report.
