Jason Aldean’s Controversial Music Video Gets an Edit, With Black Lives Matter Protest Footage Removed

After causing a firestorm of controversy, the video for country star Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” has gotten a makeover.

The music video has been edited to remove news footage of a Black Lives Matter protest, The Washington Post reports, and is now six seconds shorter. The edit wasn’t due to the controversy, however; Aldean’s record label BBR Music Group said in a statement that “the video footage was edited due to third-party copyright clearance issues,” which means they did not secure the proper permissions to reuse the news footage, which originally came from Fox 5 Atlanta.

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Aldean’s song has been mired in controversy since the video for it debuted earlier this month, with critics accusing Aldean of promoting vigilante violence against protestors with lyrics like: “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face/Stomp on the flag and light it up/Yeah, ya think you’re tough/Well, try that in a small town.” The video pairs these lyrics with footage of protests and riots, with Aldean and his band performing in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee — the site of an infamous lynching in the 1920s.

CMT pulled the video for “Try That in a Small Town” from its rotation last week after just three days of airplay — a decision Aldean quickly decried. He added that any claims that his song is racist or promotes lynching are “not only meritless, but dangerous… There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it, and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage, and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music, this one goes too far.”

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