A few years ago, the country singer Brad Paisley described his chosen genre by saying that it was a bit like hip-hop, “for a whole different ethnicity.” This is a claim that few of his peers would be likely to make. Not because they wouldn’t want to be compared to rappers—plenty of country singers have discovered that a dash of hip-hop swagger can be helpful. (The duo Florida Georgia Line currently has a hit with “Get Your Shine On,” which resurrects an old hip-hop commandment.) Paisley’s assessment was unusual because of its explicit reference to “ethnicity”: the world of country music is in large part a white world, but most singers see no advantage in acknowledging that fact, or its implications.

But Paisley has long been one of the genre’s most mischievous and self-conscious stars—he is preoccupied with the question of what makes country country, and why. When he titled his great 2009 album “American Saturday Night,” he was indulging in a bit of misdirection: the title track, which went to No. 2 on the country chart, paid all-American tribute to a nation full of imports. (“It’s a French kiss, Italian ice, margaritas in the moonlight / Just another American Saturday night.”) And “Welcome to the Future,” another hit from that album, began as a light-hearted tribute to consumer technology, and ended with an elegant verse that included an anecdote about the Ku Klux Klan and a veiled reference to the inauguration of President Obama:

I had a friend in school, running back on the football team

They burned a cross in his front yard for asking out the homecoming queen

I thought about him today, and everybody who’d seen what he’d seen

From a woman on a bus to a man with a dream

So no Brad Paisley fan should have been startled to hear that his new album, “Wheelhouse,” includes a collaboration with LL Cool J called “Accidental Racist.” No doubt Paisley was hoping to provoke; judging from the reaction he got yesterday, when the song appeared online, he may have succeeded too well. A post on Jezebel calling it “The Worst Song Ever™” was fairly representative of many early reactions, especially from publications not in the habit of writing about new Brad Paisley singles.

In a thoughtful interview with the Tennessean, Paisley explained that the song, which he co-wrote, was his response to people who said they were offended by a T-shirt he wore celebrating Alabama, the venerable country group, with whom he has collaborated. The shirt has a design that includes a Confederate flag, and the criticism got Paisley thinking about what it means to be white and Southern.

“Accidental Racist” begins as the narrator’s explanation—it’s not quite an apology—to a Starbucks barista, implicitly African-American, who was offended by the Confederate flag on his T-shirt. Intriguingly, Paisley never resolves the tension in the song’s title—that is, he never suggests that “accidental” racism is a contradiction in terms. Instead, his narrator is a “proud” Southern white man trying to incorporate some humility into his identity:

They called it Reconstruction, fixed the buildings, dried some tears

We’re still siftin’ through the rubble after a hundred-fifty years

I try to put myself in your shoes and that’s a good place to begin

But it ain’t like I can walk a mile in someone else’s skin

It seems clear that “Accidental Racist” would never have amused and horrified the Internet if Paisley hadn’t decided to ask the rapper LL Cool J to contribute a verse. Unlike Paisley, LL Cool J has never been much of a provocateur, and perhaps he wasn’t the right rapper to address a subject as ticklish as this. It’s LL Cool J, not Paisley, who delivers the song’s most puzzling lines, adopting an oddly supplicatory posture: “You should try to get to know me, I really wish you would,” he raps, adding, “I want you to get paid, but be a slave, I never could.” (The syntax is as mangled as the logic.) As Paisley sings the final words, LL Cool J says, “Let bygones be bygones”—a sentiment that contradicts much of what’s come before.

This isn’t one of Paisley’s best songs—he’s known for his wit and his hooks, but even before LL Cool J’s arrival, “Accidental Racist” is rather prosaic and inert, like a carefully hedged position paper set to music. But it’s also a more interesting artifact than some of its detractors admit—an awkward but earnest song about being “caught between Southern pride and Southern blame,” sung in the voice of a white man who suggests there are good reasons for both. In fact, Paisley’s “Southern” identity is more complicated than the song suggests: he now lives in Tennessee, but he grew up in West Virginia, which has a tangled relationship to the Confederate flag. He is “Southern,” then, in much the same way he is “country”: that is, somewhat by birth, and somewhat by inclination. It would be unreasonable, of course, to expect him to address all of that, too, in a four-minute country song—but then, as Paisley’s many hits (and occasional misses) attest, he might consider that all the more reason to try. With any luck, he’s already thinking of words that rhyme with “Wheeling Convention.”

Illustration by Philip Burke