“The View” hosts began their Thursday show by saying that Jason Aldean should have known better when it comes to his controversial new song and its video, which details riots, looting and protest – and says “small town” America wouldn’t stand for it.
Joy Behar highlighted Fox reports consistently going after large cities, painting them as dangerous and crime-infested. The “small town” pride in the song is all well and good, she said, but it’s urban America that funds rural America, and there’s no reason to bash it.
“There are lyrics in the song — and I think, you know, he talks about life in a small town and it’s different, you know, and he shows these images, he’s got folks from the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Whoopi Goldberg, showing stills from the video.
“And he’s talking about people taking care of each other, and I find it so interesting that it never occurred to Jason or the writers that that’s what these folks were doing. They were taking care of the people in their town, because they didn’t like what they saw. Just like you talk about people taking care of each other in small towns. We do the same thing in big towns.”
She went on to question why Aldean would claim that the song didn’t have anything to do with racism.
“You just have to realize that when you make it about Black Lives Matter, people kind of say, well, are you talking about Black people?” Goldberg asked. “What are you talking about here? If we’re talking about America that’s taking care of each other, then it shouldn’t be about Black Lives Matter. You should be able to show all the different things that have gone on in our country where people stood up and said, no more. We do the same thing that small towns do. That’s my two cents to that.”
Even Republican Alyssa Farah Griffin agreed that some of the lines in the song were questionable.
“There’s a line that says, ‘Try that in a small town. See how far you make it down the road. Around here we take care of our own,'” she said. “For a lot who are legal gun owners, that’s what we do if someone breaks into a store. The right to defend yourself. What I thought of when I read that was Ahmaud Arbery, who got shot for doing nothing wrong. So, what becomes problematic — there is a lack of recognition of what this means to about 50 percent of the country whose experience isn’t Jason’s.”
Sunny Hostin, whose mother was in the audience Thursday, told a story of her parents being run out of South Carolina by the Klan because they were an interracial couple. She also recalled growing up in a small Georgia town near Aldean’s hometown and the racism she experienced there.
“Sundown towns” were so-called because by sunset, any Black person had to be out of town or they would be killed. It’s that imagery that prompted the public to say the song references “lynching.”
Goldberg asked, rhetorically, why everyone was talking about Black people if Aldean claims the song had nothing to do with race.
“The imagery is what becomes problematic,” Griffin agreed.
But the references to violence and intimidation also shocked them.
“This is a man who saw what happens when someone is out of control with their guns,” Goldberg said. “He was performing in Vegas and he was — he saw people — so I don’t understand how he could be that disconnected. How people around him didn’t say to him, hey, listen, you know what, maybe there’s a better way to do this because…”
“The imagery invoked race,” said Griffin.
Behar honed in on the guns piece of the song too, with the myth that the government was coming for people’s guns.
“They say one day they’ll round up. Well, that s— might fly in the city, good luck,” the lyrics say.
CMT has already pulled the video and Aldean released a statement denying allegations made against it.
See the full conversation in the video below or at the link here.
