One thing I cannot stand in country music is when an artist feels compelled to rap. That's not to say it can't work in a nut shell. There are rappers that can take on a country aesthetic well enough. Nelly and Tim McGraw's "Over and Over" is incredibly cheesy but that's a jam. Nelly looks like too much of a stranger on "Cruise," a silly guilty pleasure from a group I otherwise hate. But the other way around? Absolutely not though? Absolutely not. Country artists can't rap for to save their lives. Guys like Jason Aldean and Morgan Wallen end up delivering the most synthetic, plastic sounding music imaginable.
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I've said enough about the former's uncool, constipated sounding raps in the past. But the latter is relatively untapped territory. It's quite simple. Morgan Wallen needs to stick to "7 Summers" and "More Than My Hometown." It doesn't help that he spends his album giving people dozens of songs and a lot of them are bad. Sure, the songs that are good are genuinely brilliant. But oftentimes, it sounds like he's barely working in country at all, whether it's too poppy or lame in its rap influences. Regardless, I speak on behalf of a lot of people when I say Wallen can leave the rapping to professionals. Thankfully, it seems like we might finally be there.
Morgan Wallen is Finally Ditching Trap Inspired Songs
Recently, Morgan went on This Past Weekend with Theo Von ahead of his upcoming album I'm The Problem. There, he details some of his creative choices for the record. Moreover, he emphasizes the importance of monitoring what fans want from him in 2025 vs past albums. "It's just subtle changes. It don't have to be huge things, you know? My last album I had plenty of trap beats and stuff like that. This time I was like, 'Hey man, let's tone that back a little bit,'" Wallen explains.
"I'm tired of it. I'm tired of hearing it. So if I'm tired of it they're probably tired of hearing it," he adds. "It's just certain things that, you can still get that same swagger, you can accomplish certain things without doing the same exact thing."
Unfortunately, we aren't completely out of the woods with Wallen and his fixation of rap influences. He plans on torturing Keith Whitley's classic "Miami, My Amy" with a forced rap rendition. "I got a song on my record called 'Miami.' It's a Keith Whitley flip... that's one of his bigger songs, I guess. But we flipped it and turned it into more of a rap style. But it's cool, I like it," Morgan says.
"It seemed like it could use rapper on there, but I didn't end up using a feature, we ended up just making a second verse. But it's one of those songs that it wouldn't be surprising if we got a remix and did that once it's out," Wallen continues.
With all due respect, I hope he eventually leaves it to actual rappers to do this sort of thing.
