A music professor at Hunter College in New York is claiming that the lyrics to Jason Aldean’s hit single “Try That in a Small Town” promote “anti-blackness,” sidestepping the fact that they make no references to race or skin color.
Philip Ewell, a professor of music theory at Hunter College, argued Aldean’s lyrics are chock full of anti-blackness in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“Anybody really should understand that there’s a strong racial undertone to these lyrics,” he said. “Race is part of the lyrics. I think that’s pretty clear.”
He cited some of the song’s lyrics, including “pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store.”
“Someone’s robbing a liquor store — in the American psyche, the person who’s doing that without saying it is a Black [sic] person, right?” Ewell said.
“It’s just in our minds. It’s supposed to be that way. And when you paint that picture in someone’s mind of someone pulling a gun on an owner of a liquor store, the person pulling the gun is Black [sic]. The owner of a liquor store is probably Asian or maybe white. And there are these racial stereotypes that play out in lyrics like this.”
Ewell said he’s listened to some of Aldean’s music and thinks the country singer “is a pretty good artist.”
“But it’s just something that kind of comes out in culture, anti-Blackness [sic]. Because it’s part of the founding of our country. We shouldn’t run away from that simple fact.”
“Try That in a Small Town” doesn’t contain any references to race, skin color, or ethnicity. But this hasn’t stopped the mainstream news media from trying to smear the song and Aldean as racist.
Many outlets, especially NBC News, are obsessing over shots in the music video showing the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. The historic courthouse was the site of the 1927 lynching of a black man named Henry Choate.
But the courthouse has served as a filming location for a number of movies and TV shows — including Hannah Montana: The Movie, starring Miley Cyrus — without ever stirring up the media’s wrath.
They are also obsessing over news footage from the deadly 2020 Black Lives Matter riots featured in the video. But the race of the rioters is mostly indiscernible since they are almost all wearing masks or Antifa-style face coverings.
As Breitbart News reported, “Try That in Small Town” has hit another music milestone, recently reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s All-Genre Hot 100 Song Chart despite ongoing efforts by the mainstream media and leftists to cancel the country music star.
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