Morgan Wallen is learning about racism, although what those lessons are may be subject to interpretation.
A few weeks after hurling some drunken epithets, including the n-word, in his driveway, as caught on video by a neighbor, Wallen is still top dog on Billboard. His “Dangerous: The Double Album” has been No. 1 for five weeks, according to The New York Times, which also notes his songs were streamed 146 million times last week, and his traditional album sales were up 49 percent.
Remember, this is after the driveway incident.
I must confess ignorance to Wallen’s music. My own dabbling in country-western includes some Johnny Cash, a smattering of Kenny Rogers, and a few songs at wedding receptions or in the background of TikTok videos. I have never, to my knowledge, heard any song by Wallen.
What I do know is his first appearance on Saturday Night Live was canceled after he was spotted partying in a bar without a mask, a reckless choice. I also watched his apology video, a five-minute monologue in which he sounds sincere, blaming his racist comments in part on an extended bender of which he is also ashamed.
The singer’s situation is being used by some conservatives to further their argument about “cancel culture,” an alleged practice said to punish people on the wrong side of various social and political issues. Such public rebukes, the argument goes, are somehow a violation of the offenders’ rights to free speech, as if they should be allowed to say what they want free of consequences.
It doesn’t work that way.
For years, it is true, many rich and powerful people have been shielded from blowback because their money has purchased or coerced silence from those they have transgressed against or the whistleblowers who would have otherwise revealed their misdeeds or problematic language.
Today, however, fewer government agencies, sports franchises and entertainment conglomerates are willing to look the other way at such behavior, either because their stakeholders have grown an ethical backbone or they worry voters and consumers will abandon them. Likely, it’s a mixture of moral fiber and financial fear.
For a while (say, the last four years), the practice of blurting out half-formed thoughts enjoyed a resurgence among Americans who fancied themselves as straight-shooters — just sayin’ what others are thinkin’ — when in reality they were merely boorish, misogynistic or racist. Or all three.
Often, but not always, such ramblings went hand-in-hand with behaviors that were more common fifty or one-hundred years ago, when America was supposedly great — and if only this spirit could be rekindled, the argument goes, we could make it great again.
Any pushback against such sentiments and the people who voiced them is disparagingly dubbed “cancel culture” by those who pine for such times. Such is the state of white-grievance politics.
But it’s not fair to say Wallen is being cancelled. His albums are obviously still available, or how else could his sales increase? His record company did not end his contract, but rather “suspended” it, whatever that means. (A typical school suspension lasts three to 10 days. Maybe Wallen’s will follow a similar timeline.)
Nor is it fair to say, as some on the left have, that the increase in Wallen’s streaming and physical sales is evidence that country music is filled with racist fans.
My hypothesis is that the sales jump is another example of the time-honored maxim that all publicity is good publicity. People like me, who have only a sketchy sense of who Wallen is, might be enticed to peruse his work, if only because this is the first we are hearing of him.
In some ways, it’s like the sales spike that accompanies a celebrity’s death, when their movies, books or songs are suddenly of interest to the public once again. Nothing pumps life into a career like death. And a racist revelation is a kind of death, after all, or maybe more of a career suicide.
Consumers may also be responding to what they perceive as the sincerity of Wallen’s apology. Americans love a redemption arc, perhaps especially in country music, whose subject matter frequently focuses on unending sadness and unredeemed failure.
This could be a moment for the young artist to demonstrate a willingness to stare down his own shortcomings and emerge better for the experience. A time to show he’s genuinely sorry for what he said, and not just sorry for being caught.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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