morgan wallen

double album dropping this week -- who else is excited?

"7 summers" & "somebody's problem" are two of my fav songs of 2020, and the jason isbell cover and "more than my hometown" are also great. going back to the last album, "chasin you" & "whiskey glasses" are classics to me.

piece on him by kelefa sanneh in the new yorker recently

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/28/how-morgan-wallen-became-the-most-wanted-man-in-country

30 songs seems like a lot! have you heard it? is it mostly/all good?

i haven't heard it! easily one of my most anticipated albums of the year tho

30 songs is def crazy, i'm sure they know it will help him stream. you can tell just looking at the tracklist that it's pretty ridiculous ("country ass shit" -> "whatcha think of country now" -> "me on whiskey" -> "need a boat" lol) & the sanneh story backs that up. i'm not really complaining tho. it does seem like the first record is better & more what i'm into of his, the stuff that has a bit of a softer touch.

thinkin bout them tan lines, and i'm thinkin damn i'd
love to drown in them heartbreaker blue eyes

this is my fav lyric of the year

i'm a dinosaur who looks at an album as a whole, whereas 30 tracks will help his streaming #s and ppl will just put the songs they wanna hear on playlists anyway.

i like all the singles, looking forward to listening to Dangerous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpFuqF4ASXA

fuck me up

banger

i'm pretty happy w/ how this album turned out ... the second disc is more tuneful than i would've guessed, stuff like the title track, "rednecks, red letters, red dirt." some of the melodies on that side are actually a bit more developed than on the first disc. the first disc really has some knockouts tho... "sand in my boots," "865,"... "whiskey'd my way" especially.

he has this incredible knack for writing songs that are easy to memorize... his choruses are often verbose but simple, economical in their own ways. "somebody's problem", "whiskey'd my way" ... i was able to sing these entire songs back from memory after listening for less than an hour... even going back to "chasin you," the way that chorus unfolds, same with "7 summers"... it keeps unspooling the imagery in a way that is efficient but also generous

and then lyrically there's these bits in his songs that feel as if the tropes are being examined w/ fresh eyes... the "heartbreaker blue eyes" line in "somebody's problem", or in "sand in my boots" when he sings about dodging potholes in his "sunburnt silverado." he has this goofy meatheady public persona but his music is overall very romantic and often intelligently written (save the song on here about buying a harvard sweatshirt from goodwill and ppl then assuming he's smart)

looks like he partied too hard during a pandemic again: https://www.tmz.com/2021/02/02/morgan-wallen-n-word-nashville-neighbors/

i listened to this a few times last weekend while working around the house.

no surprise, there is a very good 12- or maybe 15-track album to be found within the sprawl of Dangerous.

but ... given this most recent news, this seems to be a very clear "there are plenty of country singers to listen to besides this guy" situation.

i don't know if this lines up w/ what j0rdan was saying (i think it does), but dude definitely has a way of making choruses (and even verses) that feel like they shouldn't work because they're crammed with way too much stuff ... work

and yes, i was humming 865, 7 summers, somebody's problem, etc., the next day

Yeah well

Morgan Wallen's recording contract is suspended, dropped from country radio after using racial slur https://t.co/XvgxJ6vVSg

— Tennessean (@Tennessean) February 3, 2021

I have no opinion on his music, haven't heard anything beyond the just okay songs he did on SNL, but he seems to be extremely good at shooting himself in the foot.

As a resident of East Tennessee (area code 865) let me say how deeply unsurprising all of this is.

I dunno, I'm a little surprised to see country radio making a quick response like this. Can't say I expected that to happen.

One legacy of the George Floyd protests, I think corporations have learned to move fast on that stuff.

But by unsurprising I meant the behavior rather than the response, to be clear.

Oh, yeah, I was just trying to look a the bright side of him seeing some swift consequences. Given country radios', uh, problematic past, I don't know that something like this was guaranteed.

it puts country as a community and genre (in a business sense) in a very tough place bcuz he's easily the biggest new country star in what... a decade? since taylor swift? they can suspend him or put him off radio for the time being but his enormous fanbase is not going to walk away from him, i assume most will actually rally around him, talk about cancel culture, urge forgiveness etc

he has 11 songs or something on the hot 100 right now like he's travis scott... streaming is a double edged sword in these scenarios bcuz the process is so democratized that labels only have so much control over the flow of music now. 6ix9ine and tory lanez are gross problematic pariahs who to different degrees have been blackballed from the major label industry but who have no problem finding and cultivating large audiences on streaming... morgan isn't going to drive attention in a trollish aspect the way those guys go but you can't shut off the tap when it comes to streaming

damn the way that rolled off his tongue you can tell it's an everyday thing

I don't expect any of these bans to last too long, but he's going to have to do ... something, I don't know what, but more than just an apology. And he'll need to disown or keep at bay fans wanting to use him as a "cancel culture" poster child.

he's shown absolutely no reason to have any faith in him

Probably just team up with Luke Combs for a duet and call it done.

I quite dig the album, and it's fun to dip around in like any double or triple thing, and what he said should surprise no one.

Guess corporate America's seen the PR possibilities in #woke

Wallen’s behavior is disgusting and horrifying. I think this is an opportunity for the country music industry to give that spot to somebody who deserves it, and there are lots of black artists who deserve it. https://t.co/14B77zLgMR

— Jason Isbell (@JasonIsbell) February 3, 2021

This doesn't belong here, but it's good news: TJ Osbourne of the Brothers Osbourne came out today.

*Osborne

Guess corporate America's seen the PR possibilities in #woke

this seems startlingly cynical to me. what do you think they should have done (if anything)?

guy shoulda been dumped from the industry after he was caught partying during a pandemic (and yes i'm aware that other artists i'm a fan of have probably been partying it up too)

this seems startlingly cynical to me. what do you think they should have done (if anything)?

― excuse me while I fold my pants (morrisp)

Exactly what they did today. As Murgatroid said, though, they should've done so last winter after the mask-free partying.

Isbell saying that is also notable because IIRC Wallen covered a song of his on the new album.

Gotcha. I see the partying as different from this.

For Nashville, maybe in 2021 the politics of masking is too hot to touch.

i don't think someone should have their career ruined for flouting covid guidelines.

not that i defend partying during covid. but i think it's a different category of offense than this.

Yeah, that partying was dumb, but not losing your career worthy imho. But that doesn't matter because he's since proved that was only the tip of his own dumbfuck iceberg.

idk potentially killing others (even indirectly but when the alternative, staying the fuck home, is the easiest thing to a successful musician) seems like a career-losing offence to me!

i just noticed he's "suspended indefinitely" from his label....which is not the same thing as "dropped"

speaking of cynical

idk potentially killing others (even indirectly but when the alternative, staying the fuck home, is the easiest thing to a successful musician) seems like a career-losing offence to me!

drunk driving obviously isn't, historically

yeah, i thought that was a suspect move by Big Loud. they wanna wait for this to blow over.

i have only read a couple links but i still don't understand what 'suspending' his contract really means

i'm not sure i agree w/ the suggestion that the audience that delivers him his superlative streaming numbers wouldn't also be put off by this incident. given that his project just came out recently, i guess we'll see! frankly, the streaming ecosystem is not really that democratized, and yeah while there was a contingent of folks who felt weirdly energized to stick up for tory lanez after that whole saga, it frankly... didn't really help him commercially? like, yes, the fact that he was getting on the hot 100 at all was good by his standards, but none of his entries since the incident has lasted more than two weeks -- i strongly doubt he'll ever have a real hit again. similarly, save for "gooba" (briefly) 6ix9ine has also been on a precipitous decline and will also probably never have a hit again.

morgan wallen is a major star in country right now, easily on the level of like luke bryan a decade ago, but he's also come along at just the right time to benefit from a major surge in streaming usage among the country audience as more listeners have adopted services like amazon and apple music in recent years. country singles are charting better pretty much across the board over the past ~2 years as a result, so he is hardly the only artist to be benefiting from this wave. luke combs, to name one obvious example, is basically at his heels commercially. there will be other huge stars sooner than one might expect. is he really that unique? i personally don't think so, tho i haven't gone deep on his catalog and probably never will.

if this nips his career in the bud, i don't think it will hurt the label system much. some fans will be spurred to defend him or clamor for some kind of reconciliation, but many are already repulsed. the country audience isn't quite as hard-right as people sometimes presume.

you're focusing too much on singles and the hot 100. tory lanez's album is in the top 100 on apple music a month after its release w/ not just no label backing but a complete promotional blackout on all streaming services. there might be like 2 or 3 indie albums in the country doing better than it right now. the hot 100 is harder to crack for a variety of reasons, but outside of like idk the 50 most successful songs in a given year, an album that streams well matters more (in a dollars sense) than a song that streams well. it's a quantity game and tory lanez is making a lot of money w/ no label skimming off the top of his streams. morgan wallen will have to fall very far for his album to not be highly profitable for him & the label. outside of rap and a few pop acts, he's in his own stratosphere of streaming. luke combs is only at his heels commercially in a superficial sense... from billboard:

Dangerous' 265,000 opening-week units, streaming equivalent albums (SEA) comprise 184,000, equaling 240.2 million on-demand streams of the album's songs; album sales contribute 74,000; and track equivalent albums (TEA) equal 7,000. The set scores the largest streaming week ever for a country album, more than doubling the 102.3 million streams achieved by Luke Combs' What You See Is What You Get (Nov. 7, 2020).

it's not slighting country fans to say that most of this guy's enormous audience is going to stick by him through this controversy and/or accept his reconciliation and subsequent comeback. that's pretty much the entire history of fandom

He'll probably try to go to rehab and hope people are dumb enough to believe that alcohol makes you racist.

Just because he's one of the more vocal:

And yes, alcohol doesn’t make you use that word. They don’t actually put Jack Daniel’s blood in it

— Jason Isbell (@JasonIsbell) February 4, 2021

Looking at Twitter....yeah...he's gonna be fine

If Ariel Pink can get a sympathetic ear from Fucker Carlson I’m sure this clown can too

Imagine what a absolutely shitty neighbor Morgan Wallen must be if someone on his street took the effort to examine their Ring footage, download it and then send it to TMZ

Now dropped by his agency (WME).

Yeah the whole busted-by-Ring aspect of this is very Black Mirror.

XXX and Kodak basically had full media/radio blackout too

that part is immaterial, honestly. is the implication that fans of artists who have done way worse shit than say a slur are less responsible for their support of said artists if there was not an institutional blackout in response to their crimes? the industry never wavered in its support of chris brown so we shouldn’t expect his fans to stop supporting him? kodak black never got dropped from rap caviar so… we shouldn’t expect his streams to drop even tho everyone knows he’s a shitty person with documented assault allegations who routinely does creepy shit to women in public? it’s a nonsensical argument

xxxxpost His songs returned to Country radio in August 2021. So that was about 6 months.

And he was taken off of Spotify featured playlists for One Week

J0rdan, thank you for breaking down the album sales; I agree the bump doesn't seem as significant when viewed that way (even if you would hope that 0% of an artist's fan base would make "protest buys" in that situation).

according to Billboard, 25% of his US revenue for 2021 sales and streaming came in the 9 days after the video surfaced.

The album was released 25 days before the video surfaced. I wonder what percentage of his US revenue for 2021 sales and streaming came in those 25 days?

J0rdan, thank you for breaking down the album sales; I agree the bump doesn't seem as significant when viewed that way (even if you would hope that 0% of an artist's fan base would make "protest buys" in that situation).

― Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Wayne Manor (morrisp), Thursday, May 11, 2023 11:27 AM (forty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, I was tellin J0 that if someone told me the % of people that would immediately stop or start listening to an artist as a response to a controversy was 3%, I would find that stat totally believable. I still hear MJ all the time. Chappelle stays touring arenas. People without online brainworms don't have the time nor inclination to litigate this shit then translate it into an informed consumer decision

I think a lot about when Seinfeld went on Letterman and let Michael Richards do his apology and had to go IT'S NOT FUNNY! STOP LAUGHING! because the audience of New York tourists had no fucking clue what Kramer was on about

xpost yes, it's not like the video came after his album had fallen off the charts. Those post-video sales were also coming off of an on-going promotional campaign.

yes, and it didn't fall off the charts after those 9 days either. it spent 10 weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 and 15 weeks on top of the country chart.

It's the longest running top ten album in history.

Beyoncé said "sp*z" and her album was immediately knocked from number one by Bad Bunny. Makes you think.

Eminem did not get wiped from playlisting. Neither did xxx, neither did Kodak, and neither does Kim Petras. Chris brown is playlisted all the time. Of the younger artists mentioned, ie the ones relevant to the current cultural paradigm, their careers were at the very least *set back* by what happened. Kodak is not at the center of the genre in the way this guy is to his. Tay k’s career is in jail so I’m not sure what the point of bringing that up is.

If your point is that anti social behavior can bolster artists in other genres, no shit .. that’s exactly what I meant when I brought up drill. But it does feel like country music fans rallied around this guy in a way that reflects an anti-woke industry dynamic, in a way that has lead to him being the leading voice in the genre

Obviously, as I said earlier, not all of them would explain it as “anti woke” or frame it in those terms, but it’s fundamentally underlying his continued success in a way I maintain you guys are being far too dismissive about

i have access to luminate (formerly nielsen), the company that tabulates all data for billboard charts, bcuz of my work. here is the streaming and airplay data from the 8 weeks starting w/ dangerous being released and continuing on past the slur video. this is catalog data meaning streams for both dangerous & all his previous records

notes: the dates here are all the final day of data counting for the given week. "radio audience" is a measure based on the number of radio spins. i don't feel like digging into each's week data to look at how many spins he did, but just for reference in the first week where he had a "radio audience" of 68 million that was equal to roughly 20,000 spins. and these are "on demand" streams, US only, meaning apple, spotify, youtube, pandora etc

1/14/21 (dangerous first week)

259 million streams / 68 million radio audience

1/21/21

194 million streams / 61 million radio audience

1/28/21

172 million streams / 59 million radio audience

*tmz video is posted feb 2*

2/4/21

180 million streams / 42 million radio audience

2/11/21

171 million streams / 1.2 million radio audience

2/18/21

131 million streams / 1.1 million radio audience

2/25/21

130 million streams / 1.2 million radio audience

3/4/21

122 million streams / 1.9 million radio audience

so yes, it's true that there was a slight streaming uptick in the tracking period that encompassed the first three days (feb 2/3/4) after the video's release. but by the next tracking period the streams had dipped back down to the number from the week prior to the video, and three weeks after that he had lost 50 million streams. if you extend it out another month -- to the tracking period ending on 4/8/21 -- he did 100 million streams. his streaming numbers were in decline every week through the tracking period ending on 5/20/21, when he did 89 million streams. so his streaming numbers essentially were cut in half in the ~3 months following the slur. you see the first uptick the next week (5/28/21), where he jumps from 89 million streams to 91 million streams. this seems to coincide with his first public performance (on 5/19/21) since the slur, but it dropped down the next period, and for the period ending on 6/10/21 he was under 85 million.

for everyone's sake i'll stop here, but the data beyond just the first week shows that his streams were cut pretty severely over time. he's continued to be a massive star setting all sorts of album chart records but that's because he was already starting from the insane heights reached when he released dangerous (260 million streams).

what that first week data really shows is that when a musician is in the news because of a controversy, people are basically reminded to listen to their music. frank ocean was brought up as an example earlier. here is a post on jezebel looking at different cancelled artists & their streaming data... r kelly's streams had a spike in the week following his gayle king interview, for instance

https://jezebel.com/these-musicians-were-canceled-but-people-kept-listenin-1840150589

for reference, last week wallen did 260 million streams. so you could maybe say his audience has returned to where it was when he dropped dangerous, but these are cumulative numbers including another 36 song album, so if his audience was completely unaffected -- or had grown -- we would probably expect to see even higher numbers

and just for fun here are last week's catalog numbers (US only) for some major artists if anyone is interested

taylor swift -- 317 million
morgan wallen -- 260 million
drake -- 194 million
the weeknd -- 113 million
sza -- 104 million
bad bunny -- 60 million

and now i should get back to my actual job...

Had no idea chastising country fans was a felony

https://i.ibb.co/RDkRH8C/Screenshot-20240408-152410.jpg

This guy may have a problem.

Apparently he threw a chair from the top of a sixth story rooftop bar down to the street below.

he did. the felony comes from almost hitting two cops (so I guess he has some redeeming qualities amidst the awfulness)

off a six-story building ... damn, dude is fortunate he's not facing assault or manslaughter or whatever.

I feel like there should be a term for dropping things off a building onto cops

Morgan Baller

what a dope. glad no one was hurt.

I'm surprised the cops didn't open fire, mistaking the chair for falling acorns.

What color was the chair?

So this was at Eric Church's bar. I wonder if it's classier than Kid Rock's bar (where Wallen was also arrested.)

I Love This Bar (But Not This Chair) and Grill

tbf He mistook the chair for Obama

I'm especially glad no one was hurt/killed because I cannot think of a worse evening than blowing money in Nashville's most obnoxious tourist trap bars and then being crushed by a chair thrown by Morgan Wallen

that's one for the epitaph

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nh-NsqBsGE

lol

All the obvious signs of a dickhead with a drinking problem. Which obviously is in line with the male-country-singer canon, but throwing a chair off the roof of Eric Church's dumb bar is hardly the stuff of George Jones legend. Try harder.

He could drive a riding mower off the roof of Eric Church's dumb bar.

then it might land on someone

The cops could cordon off the block

Cool. I don't care if anything happens to Morgan Waffen

It would be the best thing he's ever done.

Foreshadowing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GOkEmhQucY

His new "I'm the Problem" is another double album with 37 tracks.

Probably a gambit to get the most songs by a single artist in the top 100.

It's got wonderful songs and crap songs as usual.

sometimes I listen to the Apple Music Top 100 for an idea of what regular people listen to, just a straight here's the 100 most streamed songs today.

Currently FOURTY of them are Morgan Wallen.

Yep. But music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine in the free part of his substack that I get says in part:

Pugnacious in public, Wallen is insufferably polite on record. Able to hit his marks while approximating feeling, he doesn't invest his songs with distracting emotion, choosing to ease along melodies that are affable, not commanding. Lyrics are a distraction to the hooks, the hooks can spoil the vibe and the vibe is paramount. All this makes I'm The Problem profoundly boring. It hums along in the background, never asking anything of the listener and never giving them anything, either.

choosing to ease along melodies that are affable, not commanding. Lyrics are a distraction to the hooks

this is a correct assessment of the songs on the album that don't work, but not of the ones that do

i think it's easily his worst album since he blew up, fully half of it didn't need to be heard by the public. there is a definite effort to move towards a more melodically driven FM radio type sound, there is basically no song that is deeply country, there isn't a lot of clever songwriting, it leans a lot more into the tone of his voice and his ability to carry different melodies than his previous albums

it's a very acidic album but in a way that i don't think is all that interesting -- i would disagree w/ the notion that he's "insufferably polite." i think by that STE is saying that the album is sorta quiet -- you could play it at a dinner party -- but no close engagement w/ the lyrics would leave you feeling like he is overly polite. on the contrary his dickheadedness is distracting ... something like "kiss her in front of you" is unlistenable in that way, just really one dimensionally pigish. there is something chris brown-ish about the way he leans into villainy on the worst moments on this album. being a public pariah is infecting the music

there was a similar strand of spite in the last album but i thought it worked because it was aimed at himself -- it's a whole album about how he's a hopeless shithead addict. even on the songs where he celebrates that identity there was a pathos that softened the spikiest parts of the songwriting, for me anyway. this album is largely directed at unnamed exes, flings etc and isn't able to carry that dynamic over in the same way really at all

however you have a bunch of high level professionals aiming to write catchy soft rock pop songs for a great vocalist and so there's still a lot to like if you want to put in the effort of sifting through what is basically a big landfill of music. ofc can't blame anyone for not wanting to do so

I think he's peaking at a singer; even the songs I like wouldn't work if another singer didn't yarl over them.

My keepers:

Just in Case
Skoal, Chevy, and Browning
Falling Apart
Leavin's the Least I Could Do
Jack and Jill
Drinking Till It Does
Working Man's Song
Lies Lies Lies
I'm a Little Crazy
Nothin' Left

I'm in the opposite end of sarge's position. He's defensive in a way he hasn't been before, and, yeah, he's more loutish than he ever was, but it suits him. Depends on to what degree you approve of how well he reined in his swinishness on the last three albums and to what degree you think he's learned as a singer new ways of expressing it. "Jack and Jill" is a bitter lament, as incisive as anything by Haggard or Jones about how drugging can kill a relationship. 2021's "Somebody's Problem" now has proper names attached to it.

Also, "Working Man's Song" is the only white boy blooze I've heard from this genre in years that convinces me he's Method-acted through the imagined class politics.

"i got better" "if you were mine" "i ain't comin back" "missing" and "miami" are my favs of the ones you didn't mention

Can't remember which single I heard a week or two ago, but it sounded so similar to Rod Wave with autotune and a slow tempo.

"Miami" is based on a lovely early Keith Whitley song.