Jason Aldean makes it clear that some things just won't fly in a small town — specifically, swearing at the police, burning an American flag, and enforcing gun laws is a no-go. "Cuss out a cop, spit in his face/ Stomp on the flag and light it up/ Yeah, ya think you're tough," he sings, warning, "See how far ya make it down the road/ 'Round here, we take care of our own." Although it's not specified how they "take care of [their] own," it might have something to do the gun his granddad gave him (also mentioned in the song). Essentially, the country singer is daring "outsiders" to cross the line under threat of violence.
Critics have pointed to Adlean's music video as further evidence of the song's alleged racist undertones. The country star filmed in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee — according to Variety, this was the site of a famous lynching in 1927. Here, a black teenager by the name of Henry Choate was brutally murdered by a white mob. "I think there is a lack of sensitivity using that courthouse as a prop," Cheryl L. Keyes, the chair of the Department of African American Studies at U.C.L.A, told The New York Times. Inexplicably, the music video features footage from outside the U.S. (Canada, Germany, and Ukraine) — originally, the video contained clips from Black Lives Matter marches in the summer of 2020, but these were later removed.
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