morgan wallen

He seems to be trying to invoke whatever Keith Whitley represents for him -- this drunken angel who died too soon and too young -- but without the grace.

I liked about a third of the last album; this one just tired me out. "Tennessee Numbers" and "One Thing at a Time" totally work.

Every Morgan Wallen song I’ve heard has been at best terrible

I didn't bother giving this one another listen after the initial download.

jordan's post got me to listen to "you proof" - i like it!

The song I heard on pop radio was "Last Night." Makes sense--it has the same talk-singy quasi rap thing that you hear from the Jonas Brothers or any other male pop act these days.

'last night' is crazy. amazing song. whoever wrote that put their foot in it

I absolutely hated “You Proof”

same

I don't think I've ever heard them play a country song before.

they hadn't played any dan + shay, florida georgia line (tbh the first time i heard "last night" i thought maybe it was them, lol), lady antebellum, gabby barrett or whatever?

quite a few country songs are being crossed over radio-wise rn actually. there's a kane brown ballad w/ his wife from not too long ago that's... eh. also some parmalee song that's extremely boring and undistinguished. and a luke combs cover of "fast car" that is competent but whose most interesting part is that the 'checkout girl' lyric is left unaltered.

My primary thing, which I’ve purposely avoided spelling out given the rest of the context of this thread, is that this guy’s music is such absolute horseshit that I don’t understand why anyone posting here would give him the time of day after his well-documented racist outburst, given the political demographics of the posters in this thread.

otm

My primary thing, which I’ve purposely avoided spelling out given the rest of the context of this thread, is that this guy’s music is such absolute horseshit that I don’t understand why anyone posting here would give him the time of day after his well-documented racist outburst, given the political demographics of the posters in this thread.

― Marvel Puzzle Quest is my favorite gasm (DJP), Tuesday, May 9, 2023 8:41 AM (two hours ago)

well, i don't think his music is horseshit... the first post of this thread makes that clear. your point is an "if a, then b" statement but a doesn't apply to me. so then what? it's an internal negotiation about how much one likes art made by a person who says or does things that are otherwise offensive to one's sensibilities. unless you're someone who is driving an extremely hard line on what kinda art you consume, this isn't a very atypical situation. as a gay guy who grew up listening to rap music, i am -- for better or worse -- quite practiced at the art of compartmentalizing artists i love from the offensive things that they say. i never stopped loving lil wayne even though he rapped about how "you homos" are "getting AIDS in the ass" on a hit song that was played on the radio all the time. i loved the song. i still love the song! and i still hear that song. i'm not saying everyone should compartmentalize to that degree, but tons of people do, even now. i was just at a janet jackson concert last night & when she performed "scream" they showed clips of michael from the video & the crowd went crazy. no one could argue w/ a straight face that morgan wallen is a worse human being than a serial child rapist -- is it just that michael's music is so good that he clears some bar? or that his crimes and music are so far in the past that we don't really need to confront them? that they weren't caught on tape?

i mean, m@tt, since you enthusiastically otm'd the post... you're one of the biggest hip hop heads on this board. as a politically progressive, anti-sexist, anti-homophobe, you must have pretty developed thoughts on listening to music made by ppl who say things, or hold views that are, offensive to you. or is it just that the rap music you like isn't horseshit enough?

i mean am as full of shit as anyone else wrt to this stuff, yes.

though i do find the wallen thing particularly shitty, as it's pretty clear that his support among a large part of his audience actually grew as a result. like he's bigger and more ubiquitous than ever, and honestly a lot of this is having grown up in the rural midwest it's always grated on me the degree to which ilx seemed to have this weirdly idealized idea of who the audience for country music was.

but you're point about hip hop esp w/homophobia is well taken

as a gay guy who grew up listening to rap music, i am -- for better or worse -- quite practiced at the art of compartmentalizing artists i love from the offensive things that they say. i never stopped loving lil wayne even though he rapped about how "you homos" are "getting AIDS in the ass" on a hit song that was played on the radio all the time. i loved the song.

or simpler - i understand your thought process here but i think it's like how pundits would try to say people loved trump "despite" all the shit he said, but they specifically loved what he said. i think wallen got more popular because of what he said, which in fairness isn't what we were debating though.

though sometimes i do find it hard to listen to some old time rap favs from the 80s and 90s now, it's easy to forget how ugly it was wrt homophobia and i'll hear some song i haven't heard in years and be like goddamn that is hateful, like brand nubian is hard for me, partially because of jamar, just one example

I posted remarks similar to sarge's in the other thread.

i can't listen to death certificate much these days, despite it being just an amazingly produced album.

it's pretty clear that his support among a large part of his audience actually grew as a result.

This is a ridiculous claim

i can listen to Death Certificate mostly because of how educational it was to me about racial tension in America, things I hadn't really been exposed to in my charmed life. I just skip "Black Korea" and the song where he says his ass is a virgin mostly

yeah, i don't think i buy that, really. (xp) maybe a handful of people glommed onto him because of the incident(s?) and to fight the impending cancelation or w/e, but for the most part, his audience has grown because he makes incredibly catchy country-ish-meets-hip-pop music about drinking and smooching and there is a whole generation or two of people out there who have lived their whole lives shuffling country, pop and hip-hop.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/02/06/morgan-wallen-airplay-down-sales-streams-up-after-racial-slur-video/4419728001/

sure didn't hurt

he makes incredibly catchy country-ish-meets-hip-pop music about drinking and smooching and there is a whole generation or two of people out there who have lived their whole lives shuffling country, pop and hip-hop.

This. Younger country fans have grown up listening to The Weeknd, Future, and Drake.

sure didn't hurt

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, May 9, 2023 1:17 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No, it didn't, but that's an entirely different claim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiUcY4dECqA

so there was no correlation between those numbers and what happened is your claim.

just magical timing i guess

My claim is maybe not everyone who fills arena after arena to listen to the guy who released what was already probably the most anticipated album of the year is some ultra-online weirdo who knows or cares what stance Variety or whoever is going to take on Morgan Wallen going forward

His new album wasn't out when he saw the post-scandal bump discussed in that usatoday article

I'm def sure a sizable percentage of his billion streams are patriots furiously owning the cancel culture lib cucks by politicizing their last.fm scrobbles as opposed to just listening to the incredibly popular musician they like

They do know that he was punished (songs taken off radio playlists, etc.) immediately after the video of him using the n-word came, though, and they responded by buying and streaming his music harder in response. ("The country music industry acted swiftly to publicly rebuke him and radio stations and streaming services removed his songs from their playlists. But fans responded by playing him even more.

Billboard reports that his latest album sold 25,000 copies during the week ending Feb. 4, an increase of 102%, according to MRC Data. Billboard reported that that the album’s streaming numbers slightly increased by 3%, representing roughly 160 million on-demand streams. Song downloads from the album also went up by 67%.")

He's clearly benefitted from reactionary grievance against 'cancel culture,' which is certainly not an issue restricted to ultra-online weirdos.

Yeah, I don't see why that's so hard to believe... same with the (unfortunate) R. Kelly bump also discussed in the piece

yea not just ppl who were trying to own the libs either but also ppl for whom its a marker of authenticity or w/e, like hes really one of us

Yeah, look at those monster spikes in that USA Today article

Billboard reported that that the album’s streaming numbers slightly increased by 3%

On Tuesday his popular song "Wasted On You" was ranked No. 14 on the Top 200 chart, but by Thursday, two days after the video was released, "Wasted On You" jumped to No. 9.

Truly must have been an army of angry, drooling CHUDS hate-streaming to stick it to cancel culture and the libturds instead of media outlets saying "Morgan Wallen" for an entire week then wondering why there's an uptick in interest in Morgan Wallen

Benefiting from cancel culture = a 3% uptick in streams.

I hope Morgan Wallen donates the $800 he's going to get from that

You picked the less-impressive sounding stats, and skipped these:

Billboard reports that his latest album sold 25,000 copies during the week ending Feb. 4, an increase of 102%, according to MRC Data. (...) Song downloads from the album also went up by 67%.

The bump in interest extended beyond just Wallen’s current album. Daily sales of his first album “If I Know Me,” released in 2018, also increased from 200 to 2,500 on the week ending Feb. 4, according to data provided by MRC Data.

this is a moronic argument. obviously there are people who think libs and the industry trying to shut down an artist for a slur makes them want to fight back. no one is saying ppl dont really like his music. im sure they do. but you cant unfold the racial slur from that. its an animating aspect of his brand

xpost Yeah, look at those impressive stats

I wouldn't dispute that he saw a big uptick in streams immediately afterward (and that sucks!) ... but I guess what I'm saying is that out of the massive numbers of people streaming his music and seeing his shows right now, the % of those motivated by his racist incident / racism is small. The vast majority are listening / attending because he makes music they like.

if you could quantify such a thing, how many of the 20,000 people in So-And-So Arena last week do you think were there because he said the n-word and how many were there because his songs remind them of drinking too much, kissing a boy and then passing out?

Why are we nit-picking ums's statement so much.

The thing he said isn't false, we are arguing over degrees and significance here.

Sorry by we I mean WGW

xpost Yeah, look at those impressive stats

xp LOL, you're the one who chose to skip over them. Look, your argument seems to be that folks here are somehow condescending to his listeners by not assuming that they heard "Morgan Wallen said the n word" and had an unthinking pavlovian reaction to his name alone

I think the guys acting like a very widely disseminated public gesture isn't a part of an artist's ability to attract and audience or that it doesn't shape the nature of that audience are deluding themselves to feel good about liking the artist

im not personally saying you cant still like the artist but I do object to the idea that minimizing what happened makes any sense. he got the n-word stimulus pack, imo it absolutely helped drive him even more centrally w/in the country music industry (which initially took moves to marginalize him that clearly had little to no effect long term), pretending otherwise is a bit delusional

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/does-the-mexican-american-community-still-love-morrissey-despite-everything/

https://laist.com/news/entertainment/do-latinx-fans-still-love-morrissey

Do we think all the Latinx Morrissey fans are "doubling down" too?

no one is saying that there aren't people who listen to morgan wallen who know what he did and don't care even though they disagree or are offended by it -- not really relevant

the question is whether his use of the slur accelerated or animated his fandom within country and I think it absolutely did -- some percentage outright racists, some anti pc culture warriors, some who dont think of themselves as racist but feel much more comfortable when white people can get away with saying it because they "didn't really mean it," some who don't agree with it but think an authentic country music star is probably a little racist and so it feeds into their image of what Real Country is, and so on, a spectrum that all sort of feeds into this and has pushed him closer to the center of the country world

acting like all these fans are just completely detached from this event & are simply responding to ever-improving music seems naive

I can't imagine being so racist that I'd spend $75 on a concert ticket just because someone was caught saying a slur on someone's Ring doorbell, but whatever

https://www.newsweek.com/anti-woke-beer-costs-four-times-more-bud-light-1794319

this whole argument is pretty boring bcuz it's just an argument about strawmen and incomplete data. the fact of the matter is we have no idea at what rate his music would have grown if not for this incident. we have no opposite test case. it may be even bigger, who knows. like...

They do know that he was punished (songs taken off radio playlists, etc.) immediately after the video of him using the n-word came, though, and they responded by buying and streaming his music harder in response. ("The country music industry acted swiftly to publicly rebuke him and radio stations and streaming services removed his songs from their playlists. But fans responded by playing him even more.)

is it supposed to be significant that after the guy's songs were erased from the radio people sought out other methods of listening to his music? it feels like the most simple logic imaginable that streams and sales would increase after the other main method of distributing his music was erased overnight. the implication is that people were supposed to just pretend his music didn't exist anymore and his streaming numbers would fall off a cliff? this gets into fantasy land about how people consume art that they have affection for.

in any event, it's worth noting that DJP's post was about why people in this thread are listening to the music & not why morgan wallen's fanbase at large listens to his music, or whether they listened to his music more or after the slur. one topic is actually pretty interesting & doesn't rely on strawmen fictions of the imagination that exist in all of our heads about a group encompassing millions of people that, let's just be honest here, very very few to nobody in this thread is interacting w/ on a daily basis

we also have zero historical context for an artist at this level in the streaming era having something like this happen to him or her & what effect that has on how ppl consume the music. you have to keep in mind that we're at the most nascent stage of having data on just about every time the large majority of america presses play on a song. so we can throw all sorts of data out there but any scientist or mathematician (which i am not) would tell you that its significance -- at either end of the argument -- is speculative at best bcuz our context for this situation in this environment is minimal to nonexistent. the implication w/ the streaming data is that 1 play = 1 protest and i would really push ppl away from that idea, generally, bcuz i don't think it would be found to be rooted in fact

in any event, it's worth noting that DJP's post was about why people in this thread are listening to the music & not why morgan wallen's fanbase at large listens to his music, or whether they listened to his music more or after the slur. one topic is actually pretty interesting & doesn't rely on strawmen fictions of the imagination that exist in all of our heads about a group encompassing millions of people that, let's just be honest here, very very few to nobody in this thread is interacting w/ on a daily basis

Start donating to my Patreon; if the number gets high enough I'll go door to door out here in rural Montana and ask my neighbors for their Morgan Wallen takes.*

*do not send me money; I will not do this

ehh jordan I think you're being a little dismissive of the idea that americans being ok with an artist willing to throw around racist slurs has absolutely zero causation, pure correlation, with his own success, based on like, history