After receiving loads of criticism, Jason Aldean’s current single, “Try That In A Small Town,” has come out on top.

The song, which originally released in May of this year took extreme heat that only intensified with the accompanying music video that showed clips of highly sensitive current events. Jason recently joined Audacy’s Coop to discuss his experience with all the controversy and clear the air for good.

“We put the song out in, I think it was May or something — and the biggest issue, I think, people had when we released the song was that it mentioned ‘having a gun that my grandfather gave me,’” Jason explained. “I mentioned a gun, that’s a no, no right now and I just remember thinking, ‘Man, you guys haven’t even seen the video yet.’”

Despite the initial response, Jason moved forward with releasing the music video as planned. While he anticipated some pushback knowing the video highlighted sensitive topics, he never anticipated it would cause him to be labeled “racist.”

“Between mainstream media and social media, things kind of take on a life of their own,” he shared. “They start making the song and the video into something that it’s not. It’s fine, we just live in a world that does that right now and I’m not gonna go out and explain myself every time somebody gives their own opinion of what my song or video means.”

He continued, “If you’ve got common sense, you can look at the video and see, I’m not sayin’ anything that’s not true. In the video, I’m showin’ you what happened — I didn’t do it, I didn’t create it — it just happened and I saw it, and I’m not cool with it.”

As criticism and opinions continued to fly, Aldean released a statement to clear up any miscommunications and then continued to stand firm with the song and its message. “Country music is blue collar music, it’s for every man out there and that was always my thing — it’s like, I feel like this,” he said. “I got eyes, I can see what’s goin’ on. I feel like I’ve got common sense and I can see that right is right and what’s wrong is wrong.”

“I don’t care which side of the political fence you want to stand on, but to me what I was seeing was wrong and nobody would say anything, especially in the music industry or entertainment industry. It’s very uncommon for someone to say something for fear of losing a job or losing some money… losing friends or whatever. It just kind of reaches a breaking point to where you’re like ‘somebody needs to say something, and if nobody’s gonna do it, then I’ll be the guy.’”

Jason wasn’t left to stand alone. His Aldean Army fanbase made clear they supported his blue collar message by skyrocketing streaming numbers and ultimately taking the song to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart — a first for Aldean.

After debuting at #2 on the chart, Aldean quickly moved into the #1 spot. To sweeten the win, while Aldean sat at #1, he was followed by Morgan Wallen at #2 and Luke Combs at #3, which marked the first time in the chart’s history three Country songs occupy the top three spots.

“At the end of the day, it brought a lot of attention to the song and the video,” Aldean concluded. “After a couple days, they’re lookin’ at it goin’ ‘I don’t get it, I don’t understand what the big deal is.’ To see the response around that song and video was pretty amazing, actually.”

Words by Monica Rivera Interview by Coop