The Week - USA (2021-02-19)

Review of reviews: Music ARTS 23

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“Is Morgan Wallen cancelable?” asked

Rob Harvilla in TheRinger.com.

Country’s fastest-rising star, whose sec-

ond album, Dangerous, has topped the

Billboard album chart for four weeks

running, was approaching mainstream

superstardom when a video surfaced

last week showing the 27-year-old white

singer using the slur “pussy-ass n-----” as

he bid good night to friends after a night

out drinking in Nashville. Wallen issued

an instant public apology, but “swift and

severe” penalties followed. His label,

Big Loud, suspended his contract, while

his booking agency, WME, dropped him

entirely. The nation’s two largest radio

chains, iHeartRadio and Cumulus, banned

his catalog, triggering an overall 98 percent

drop in airplay. The Academy of Country

Music even announced that Wallen will no

longer be eligible for awards in April. But

his record sales surged immediately, and

because the country music industry is a busi-

ness, “you know he’ll be back; it’s just a

matter of when.”

Many Wallen fans have responded to the

controversy by “taking a ‘We’ll show you,

cancel culture’ stand,” said Chris Willman

Wallen performing in 2019

in Variety. Wallen’s Dangerous secured his

fourth straight week atop Billboard’s album

chart when combined sales leaped from

5,100 the day before the scandal to 35,200

two days later. Social media platforms and

radio station phone lines have been flooded

with angry demands for Wallen’s reinstate-

ment. “One sorry element of the controversy

is that, once again, in a situation where rac-

ism has reared its head, the story becomes,

to some of those on the far right, another

tale of a white man martyred on the altar

of political correctness.” Fortunately, and

perhaps surprisingly, industry heads don’t

see the story that way. “We don’t want

to be the backward genre anymore,”

one top radio executive told Variety. “If

the fans understand that or don’t, that

doesn’t change our bottom line of what

we have to do.”

The reaction of other stars was instruc-

tive, said Andrea Williams in NYMag

.com. When Kelsea Ballerini tweeted that

Wallen’s racist slur “does not represent

country music,” Mickey Guyton, the only

black female country singer signed to a

major label, strongly disagreed. “This

is exactly who country music is,” she

wrote; “I’ve witnessed it for 10 gd years.”

As Guyton acknowledged, Wallen does have

a chance to redeem himself, however. And

he will if he acts from a deep understanding

of why a star with a mostly white audience

has to act and speak differently. Those mil-

lions of fans aren’t going anywhere, said

Kyle Coroneos in SavingCountryMusic.

com, which is why their objections must be

heard, too. The slur Wallen used shouldn’t

be spoken by a white person, but “you can’t

and won’t reach those people if you banish

them from the public discourse.”

“Some will no doubt wonder: Why

Nashville?” said Barry Mazor in The

Wall Street Journal. But the new National

Museum of African American Music, which

opened last month across the street from

Nashville’s famous Ryman Auditorium, has

“succeeded stunningly” in answering the

far more crucial challenge of presenting an

engaging and thorough 400-year history

that “powerfully affirms the centrality of

African-American music to this country’s

music story as a whole.” A central corridor

styled like a river serves as “the jumping-

off point for an incredible journey,” said

Another side of Nashville: Music City’s ambitious new museum

Ron Wynn in the Nashville Scene.

A short film provides an overview

of the larger story while rooting so

much of American music since 1619

in the call-and-response song pat-

terns and intricate drumming that

originated in Africa. Six galleries

branching out like tributaries from

the main hall offer excursions into

dozens of musical genres and sub-

genres. “No matter your personal

taste, there’s something that will

appeal to it.”

James Brown bursts to life in

that main hall on a 13-foot video screen,

said Tracey Teo in The Atlanta Journal-

Constitution. Because as brilliant as the

museum is at laying out complex history,

“it’s also big on fun.” The footage of the

Godfather of Soul gives way to Prince belt-

ing out “Purple Rain” at his 2007 Super

Bowl halftime show, making the kind of

cross-generational connections the exhib-

its excel at. Elsewhere, visitors can don

church robes to sing with the backing of a

gospel choir, attempt to copy dance moves

from various decades, or construct a beat

or rap to take home. Sacred relics such

as a Louis Armstrong trumpet and a Lisa

“Left Eye” Lopes stage costume share space

with tributes to lesser-known contributors

to a cultural history that spills beyond music

itself. Striking 1940s cigar-factory work-

ers get their due for turning a hymn into a

protest song that later evolved into the civil

rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

Nashville is not an entirely odd location for

the museum, said Travis Levius in Condé

Nast Traveler. A century and a half ago,

the Fisk Jubilee Singers, from Nashville’s

Fisk University, were the first perform-

ers to sing black spirituals to audiences

overseas, and through the 1960s, the city’s

clubs and radio stations were incubators of

black musical innovation. But the museum,

which realizes a long-gestating dream

of local leaders, speaks for itself, said

Margaret Renkl in The New York Times.

It sits in dialogue with Music City’s many

country music landmarks. Like the best of

them, “it honors the musical traditions of

the past in a way that helps us understand

that the past is never truly past, that it is

always tugging up both its treasures and its

tragedies and carrying them insistently into

the future.”

The museum’s unifying theme, courtesy of Funkadelic

Morgan Wallen: The fall of country music’s new star