Morgan Wallen Reckoning of country music

The second biggest history of country music this week is TJ Osborne, lead singer of the muscular rockers of the Osborne Brothers, who turned out to be gay in an interview with Time on Wednesday. “I want to reach the peak of my career by being completely who I am,” he explained, revealing a secret that he kept throughout his eight-year career and three albums of Nashville’s rising stars. “I mean, I am who I am, but I’ve kept a part of me silent, and it’s been stifling.”

If you are an optimist, this is a golden opportunity for old, boring Nashville to expand your mind and embrace. “Others will now feel invited to the country music party for the first time,” Osborne’s friend Kacey Musgraves told the magazine. “Country music deserves an even more honest future than in the past.”

But the biggest story in country music this week, and in the large-scale music industry, is another story of a rising star who shows us who he really is. Tuesday night, TMZ posted an amateur video by Morgan Wallen – easily the greatest new country artist in years, whose second effort Dangerous: the double album, launched in January, surpassed the Advertising panel album stop for three consecutive weeks – using racial slander amid a rowdy group of friends outside a Nashville home on Sunday night. The last country star to have no. 1 record in America for three consecutive weeks was Taylor Swift; Wallen has, in the past six months, approached the precipice of complete mainstream superstardom – the height of his career, quite possibly – as a lovable idiot who makes the most of his multiple second chances. But what happens now will say in the same way who country music invites to the party and who doesn’t.

The industry’s negative reaction to Wallen was swift and severe. Big Loud, its record label and management company, announced that it had suspended his recording contract indefinitely. Radio conglomerates iHeartMedia and Entercom pulled their music from the airwaves at more than 150 stations, alongside other major companies Cumulus and SiriusXM; power of CMT cable TV removed their videos from all platforms, and the Country Music Academy announced that “Disrupt Morgan Wallen’s potential involvement and eligibility” ACM awards scheduled for April. Spotify (which has The Ringer) and Apple Music removed Wallen’s music from playlists, an especially significant blow given that much of his recent dominance on the charts is due to his popularity on streaming sites, a rarity within a county ecosystem still largely driven by sales of CD and ticket packages. If it weren’t for the pandemic, Wallen would probably be the main attraction of a successful arena tour now, and that tour would be in grave danger.

Wallen quickly apologized through a statement to TMZ: “I’m ashamed and I’m sorry. I used an unacceptable and inappropriate racial slander that I wish I could remove. There is no excuse for using this type of language, ever. ”

Meanwhile, other stars debated – on Twitter, of course – what it said about the country’s ecosystem as a whole, and what it didn’t.

Mickey Guyton is one of the few prominent black artists in Nashville’s dominant system; in 2020, after George Floyd’s death by the police and the national protests that followed, his single “Black Like Me” emerged as the rare country radio song to address the unsettling national climate in overwhelming terms: The chorus ends, “If you think we live in the land of the free / You should try to be black like me. ”In Trump’s years, Nashville became mainly political through vague and hilariously nondescript appeals for unity with titles like“ Most People Are Good ”and“ Get Along “; country radio, incidentally, is famous for barely touching any female artist. Ask pop singer Kelsea Ballerini, who tried to create a bond note after Wallen’s video leaked.

But Maren Morris – one of Nashville’s biggest crossover stars and one of the most politically expressive – disagreed vehemently.

Read the responses to that tweet – I don’t really recommend it – and it’s clear that there is no broad public agreement that Wallen did something particularly wrong; immerse yourself in this debate in some way and it is not entirely clear what the appropriate punishment would be, in terms of severity or duration. Wallen will not be “canceled” after all, whether you believe the cancellation is a real thing or not; although his removal from streaming playlists undoubtedly hurts, the reaction against him may well raise his numbers even more.

And here we have a total catastrophe: for Wallen, but also for the Nashville military-industrial complex that he only recently came to dominate. For a country launch, and even a big one, Dangerous received an unusually large amount of exceptionally brilliant reviews (including my own) that often revealed the contrast between his music – which in its most effective aspect is smooth and passionate, heavy but soft-spoken drinker – and his reputation as a loudly disturbing . I really enjoyed typing the full name of the Nashville bar (Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock ‘N’ Roll Steakhouse), outside of which Wallen was arrested in May and accused of public intoxication and disorderly conduct. And I counted, like almost all reviews, the step by step of the much discussed singer Saturday Night Live fiasco. (He was scheduled to be a musical guest in October, but was kicked out of the program for breaking COVID protocols after TikTok videos appeared from him at a party after a University of Alabama football game; SNL invited him back in December and also let him star in a skit parody of the entire fiasco.) A portrait was emerging from an unstoppable phenomenon that somehow made stupid decisions a crucial part of his brand.

But the country music scene is hardly a source of wisdom today, on any front. The decision in November to hold the annual CMAs – the other major awards of the genre – indoors and without a mask (Wallen was a prominent artist) was baffling and echoed a handful of smaller country stars who gave crowded concerts last summer, pandemic damn it. (Charley Pride, honored at the CMAs ceremony with the Willie Nelson Prize for his work as a whole, died a month after complications from COVID-19.) As for any issues involving race, remember the cold reception that country radio gave Lil Nas X from “Old Town Road” in 2019. Or, by the way, remember the ongoing mega-cringe saga of Grammy-winning artists, formerly known as Lady Antebellum, who announced in June that, after 14 years with that stupid name, they were changing him to Lady A. to show greater racial sensitivity, except that there was already a Black blues singer in Seattle named Lady A, who is now suing the band for copyright infringement. (Technically, the band sued it first.)

The Lady A situation is the kind of catastrophe that occurs when a great Nashville player at least wants to be visa how to do the right thing: add now, to this volatile environment, an extrovertable young superstar riding higher than any young country singer in the last half decade or more, whose various weaknesses and mistakes up to this point have only made him stronger and more popular , now recorded on tape casting racial slander for everyone to see and hear. What should the world of country music Does with Morgan Wallen, and under whose moral authority, exactly, should this be done?

Here is a nightmare vision I’m having trouble shaking: Wallen on stage at the April ACM Awards – given COVID, maybe not on the stage, but there is a precedent! – a painful duet with a black artist who will be named later, singing forgiveness, reconciliation and second chances. A very special performance. A moment of learning. A moment of healing. After all, most people are good. Is this inevitable? Is this vision of the future more honest than the past of country music? Is Morgan Wallen cancelable? It’s Morgan Wallen redeemable? You know he’ll be back. You know it’s just a matter of when. Anyone can really be invited to the country music party? And along with the question of whether this is justified, can anyone be expelled?