Morgan Wallen: The fall of country music’s new star
“Is Morgan Wallen cancelable?” asked Rob Harvilla in TheRinger.com. Country’s fastest-rising star, whose second album, Dangerous, has topped the Billboard album chart for four weeks running, was approaching mainstream superstardom when a video surfaced last week showing the 27-year-old white singer using the slur “pussy-ass n-----” as he bid good night to friends after a night out drinking in Nashville. Wallen issued an instant public apology, but “swift and severe” penalties followed. His label,
Big Loud, suspended his contract, while his booking agency, WME, dropped him entirely. The nation’s two largest radio chains, iHeartRadio and Cumulus, banned his catalog, triggering an overall 98 percent drop in airplay. The Academy of Country Music even announced that Wallen will no longer be eligible for awards in April. But his record sales surged immediately, and because the country music industry is a business, “you know he’ll be back; it’s just a matter of when.”
Many Wallen fans have responded to the controversy by “taking a ‘We’ll show you, cancel culture’ stand,” said Chris Willman in Variety. Wallen’s Dangerous secured his fourth straight week atop Billboard’s album chart when combined sales leaped from 5,100 the day before the scandal to 35,200 two days later. Social media platforms and radio station phone lines have been flooded with angry demands for Wallen’s reinstatement. “One sorry element of the controversy is that, once again, in a situation where racism has reared its head, the story becomes, to some of those on the far right, another tale of a white man martyred on the altar of political correctness.” Fortunately, and perhaps surprisingly, industry heads don’t see the story that way. “We don’t want to be the backward genre anymore,” one top radio executive told Variety. “If the fans understand that or don’t, that doesn’t change our bottom line of what we have to do.”
The reaction of other stars was instructive, said Andrea Williams in NYMag.com. When Kelsea Ballerini tweeted that Wallen’s racist slur “does not represent country music,” Mickey Guyton, the only black female country singer signed to a major label, strongly disagreed. “This is exactly who country music is,” she wrote; “I’ve witnessed it for 10 gd years.” As Guyton acknowledged, Wallen does have a chance to redeem himself, however. And he will if he acts from a deep understanding of why a star with a mostly white audience has to act and speak differently. Those millions of fans aren’t going anywhere, said Kyle Coroneos in SavingCountryMusic. com, which is why their objections must be heard, too. The slur Wallen used shouldn’t be spoken by a white person, but “you can’t and won’t reach those people if you banish them from the public discourse.”