At some point, it just has to be Morgan Wallen's fault right? Whenever there's a controversy in country music, he's usually not that far behind. You could look at the time he drunkenly hurled a chair off the balcony of Eric Church's bar. That held him up so much, Wallen couldn't even has his name on his own bar for a while. Of course, the biggest of all his incidents is when he was caught on camera saying the n-word.
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This moment radically draws a line in the sand for a lot of potential fans. A lot of people earnestly found Morgan to be a beacon of light in a pretty dim era of country in the 2010s. His tunes were fresh and he could occupy both indie level respect and mainstream aspirations. But that night of drunkenly saying a racial slur immediately casts a funk on Wallen that he'll likely never get over, limiting his audience to a certain degree. Sure, he does fine enough for himself but he's effectively set a ceiling for himself.
Morgan Wallen Won't Get Out of His Own Way
It certainly doesn't help that he won't stay out of trouble, even if his life depended on it. For instance, recently, he dramatically exited from an episode of SNL where he was the musical guest. There, he politely says goodbye to the guest host Mikey Madison before not-so-subtly storming off stage. Instead of slithering off stage much gracefully or just interacting with any of the cast, Wallen walks forward, past the camera, taking up much of the frame.
To make matters worse, he makes the incredibly thorny choice of posting on Instagram from his private jet, lamenting to the pilot to "get me to God's country." At best, this makes Morgan seem like a snooty prick, turning his nose up at others. At worst, you factor in his other controversies and start making some conclusions about how Wallen feels about being around minorities. Regardless, his album title I'm The Problem feels more and more apt everyday.
However, this is a far cry from the mildly endearing nature of Taylor Swift's self awareness when she cried out the same thing on "Anti-Hero." Instead, it feels like a drunk idiot chuckling his way through his obvious issues. You can't really give Wallen the benefit of the doubt either. This isn't a one-off occasion where the optics look bad. This is a consistent display of behavior. Eventually, those frequent apologies he spews stop meaning anything. It falls on deaf ears because there's no change backing any of this up. If you're always at the center of controversy, empirically, you have to be the problem. However, his track record suggests that he doesn't intend on solving it.
