The Biggest Country Musician in America Is a Disgrace
It’s no exaggeration to say that one of the biggest artists in American music right now is a disgrace. Three weeks after the 27-year-old country singer Morgan Wallen said a racial slur on camera, his second studio album, Dangerous: The Double Album, is at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. His singles have been bobbing in the country-music top 10 and the cross-genre Hot 100. Billboard’s ranking of the most popular artists in the United States had him in the top spot for five straight weeks. Thousands of people are, at this moment, streaming Wallen’s songs, buying his records, and watching his music videos—putting money in the pockets of someone who has admitted to saying one of the most noxious things imaginable.
So whatever happened to cancel culture?
A former Voice contestant with a broadly appealing sound, Wallen had only recently achieved superstardom when, on February 2, TMZ posted a video of him yelling the N-word to a friend outside his house two days earlier. It wasn’t Wallen’s first scandal. In May, police arrested him for alleged drunk and disorderly conduct, and in October, Saturday Night Live disinvited him for violating the show’s COVID-19 safety rules. He apologized for those incidents and continued on his ascent, but when he was caught shouting slurs after a night of partying, the music industry’s reaction was swift and decisive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/morgan-wallen/618137/
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