Whereas Jason Aldean’s efficiency on the 2024 CMT Music Awards was pretty easy for the nation hitmaker, his look on the community’s signature awards present had some folks elevating their eyebrows.
Singing “Let Your Boys Be Nation,” a twangy rocker from his 2023 album Freeway Desperado and high 20 hit on Billboard‘s Nation Airplay chart, Aldean demonstrated why he’s one of many extra dependable stay performers within the style. Although the present was broadcast from the Moody Middle in Austin, Texas, Aldean’s efficiency was filmed outside on the College of Texas at Austin.
Various folks – each critics and followers of Aldean – questioned why he was included as a part of the present. Not fairly a 12 months in the past, CMT pulled Aldean’s “Strive That In a Small City” music video from its airwaves, prompted by criticism from individuals who stated the video demonized Black Lives Matter, if not Black folks usually, with some going so far as to name it a “modern-day lynching track.” Actually a pro-gun, anti-protest track that locations small-town America as a morally superior place to large cities, “Small City” wasn’t a runaway hit for Aldean till the controversy turned it right into a political lightning rod. “There’s not a single lyric within the track that references race or factors to it,” Aldean wrote on social media in response to the backlash, “And there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t actual information footage.” The following debate ended up propelling the track to the highest of the Billboard Scorching 100, with Aldean’s defenders supporting it in defiance of critics.
When Aldean tweeted about his CMT efficiency on April 3, feedback on X demonstrated that the polarizing track continues to outline public notion of Aldean. Some followers questioned why Aldean would hassle with the CMTs after they pulled his video; some stated they had been not followers after “Small City”; and a few subtweeted the CMT Awards for platforming him in any respect. Loads of X customers, nonetheless, merely expressed pleasure.
Aldean’s CMT efficiency, by the way, came about beneath the UT Austin’s essential constructing, also called The Tower. In 1966, The Tower was the positioning of a bloodbath when a scholar took a rifle and fatally shot 14 folks from the commentary deck. Aldean’s personal historical past, sadly, touches on one other gun bloodbath in American historical past. In the course of the 2017 Route 91 music pageant in Las Vegas, a gunman opened fireplace on the group throughout Aldean’s closing set, killing 60 folks.
