In The Booth with Shawn Booth
Jason Aldean‘s new controversial song is anything but racist, and is simply being twisted into something it’s not — so say Shawn Booth and Chuck Wicks.
The “Bachelorette” alum and country star were chatting on the former’s podcast — “In the Booth with Shawn Booth” — and they started talking politics, touching on how divided the country is. Eventually, they landed on the topic of Aldean’s track, “Try That In a Small Town.”
Chuck was quick to defend the song and its underlying message, which he says is incorrectly being labeled as hateful toward Black people — arguing that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Instead, he thinks it’s just a song about solidarity in a community — and the reason Jason used BLM looting footage is because it’s the clearest, most recent example of storefronts and small businesses being destroyed en masse … which Wicks says was objectively criminal and wrong.
He also says people quick to assign this to race are probably racists themselves.
Shawn pretty much cosigns everything Chuck says here, and they both agree the folks involved in writing the song and shooting the music video — most of whom they know — are not bigoted whatsoever.
Wick and Booth end up concluding the Aldean saga is just a microcosm of a larger issue of extremism in America right now — where things are either black or white, or this and that. It’s worth noting that Wicks is married to Jason’s sister, Kasi Williams Morstad … so, his opinion’s hardly unbiased.
Of course, Jason himself has defended his work … distancing himself from any notion of racism. Despite the controversy, or likely because of it, ‘Try That’ topped the charts last week — but also plummeted this week to number 21.