Did we always live in a time when the most popular male singer in America could also be one of the most disliked male singers in America — and the country just had to hold these opposing thoughts? Even with anything resembling a pop-culture monoculture long gone, the extreme polarization some of our top artists generate can feel staggering … and surprising, if you’re in the kind of bubble where you’re unaware your loving or loathing is not shared by the nation as a whole. Take Drake, a supposed big loser in the Kendrick Lamar feud. Wasn’t he shamed into slinking off with his tail between his legs? Not in the real world, where his “Nokia” song has been lodged in the top 5 for months on end. More significantly, take Morgan Wallen, who is, of course, a scourge … except to the adoring masses that have made him the most successful recording artist of the past five years, and one of the top-grossing stadium headliners to boot.
Wallen’s new album, “I’m the Problem,” is expected to debut with about 500,000 units when first-week results come out May 25. If that prediction holds, it would be the top bow of the year and on par with his previous effort, 2023’s “One Thing at a Time,” which spent 19 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the longest such run for any artist since Adele’s glory days in 2011-12. Wallen is the superstar that folks in “God’s country” most love to love … and that some coastal types wish would hurry for the exit even faster. Should we be alarmed by this divide, which goes deeper than any holler? How “bad” is America’s reigning bad boy of choice? And is the USA making a moral statement, or merely a musical one, by constantly reelecting him to the position?
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Listening to “I’m the Problem” all the way through — no small task, with its 37 songs clocking in at 1 hour and 57 minutes — what’s most remarkable is how little interest Wallen has in actually playing the provocateur. His run-ins with cameras, the law and COVID protocols notwithstanding, the country superstar couldn’t make a deliberately controversial statement if his life or social currency depended on it. The only audiences that could possibly take offense at his actual content would be evangelicals (“Under that full moon she was ’bout halfway naked in my truck bed, so I helped her with the rest” is his endorsement of alfresco sex) or vegetarians (“He told me, hold the light / Pulled out a buck knife / We talked about life / While I held the left leg,” he sings about racking up bro time on a hunting trip). Yes, there is a token country-boy-versus-slicker anthem (“Come Back as a Redneck”), but it nearly counts as conciliatory, compared with some of Hank Jr.’s vintage anti-city rants, let alone Jason Aldean’s mean streak.
No, to be aggrieved by Wallen, you still have to focus on his extramusical achievements — most famously, the casual use of the N-word that could have derailed his career in 2021, before it ultimately turned out to give it a boost. Wallen, who is not given to extravagant reflection, ducked his head and skated free on a technicality … that technicality being the mass popularity that makes any infraction forgivable. Conservatives saw an absence of actual malice in Wallen — as opposed to, say, a Kanye West — and saw some liberals’ ongoing desire to banish him from public life as proof of cancel culture’s extremes. There are still minefields in that gulf: Anger was directed at “SNL” just for booking him, even before the question arose of whether he was giving them the middle finger with his abrupt walk-off. When the New Yorker delivered a lengthy critique of “I’m the Problem,” there were tweets attacking the publication for affording such an obvious racist and public menace the space for even a negative notice.
Wallen really comes off as a guy who wants to be left alone to be an apolitical, genial, romantically sulky superstar. The vast majority of the 37 “Problem” songs bemoan tough breakups or his own admittedly self-destructive tendencies. This may be why America’s vast middle loves him: not because he’s a possible fellow MAGAT, but because he sings about being a fuck-up … whether or not he went far enough in addressing that big elephant in the room of a 2021 fuck-up. “Stars: they’re just like us — drunkenly pining for the one that dumped us.” Immaturity laced with redemption is the brand. Does that come with a side order of culture war? Maybe. But for Wallen fans, it may be most about his relatability as the guy struggling for vindication — whether against perceived cancel culture or just the country hottie that got away.
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With 37 songs to take in, “I’m the Problem” is both so sprawling and so slight that you could argue that it bears a lot of scrutinizing, or none at all. It’d be hard to take issue with either approach. Leaving past or present controversies or infractions out of it and considering the album on its own terms — which may or may not be a defensible isolation booth — there is plenty to say about it, although about as much as you’d have to say about a more compact 10-song country album. Because of course it didn’t need to be an hour and 57 minutes long, and of course most of the album consists of variations on just a few highly predictable themes, and of course the epic volume of it represents his third shot in a row at running up massive streaming numbers, not some heavy artistic weight an auteur needed to get off his chest. But taking all those things into account as givens, can there still be something moderately impressive about the assembly-line stunt of it all, if most of the songs have some kind of craft about them, however emotionally reiterative they become?
I was imagining what the writers’ room was like for the creation of these three dozen-plus songs (with Wallen co-writing most but not all of them, and usually relying on his usual stable of co-writers even for the ones he didn’t chip in on). I started thinking of Lucy at the chocolate factory, struggling to keep up… but the confections here being lines that were being thrown out about lost love and horniness and excessive drinking (and, occasionally, positive life lessons).Working in volume like this? I don’t think Hank done it this way, or Harlan Howard either. But I found myself admiring dozens of good lines I came across — there’s probably not a song on the album without at least one — even as I bemoaned the groaners that came across the transom, too. I thought: These are mostly the products of a bunch of Nashville dads punching the clock to get together to hold up and try to imagine or remember what it’s like to get shitfaced over an ex. Sometimes, they remember it pretty well, and put a good hook to it. In other words: It’s not a horrible album, however much you or someone else might want it to be. It’s also something that would be twice as good at a third the length. (Was anything left on the cutting room floor? Probably, and at that notion, the mind boggles.)
But there is an advantage to having the artist offer so much output in a sort of artistic data dump, and it’s that a worldview does finally begin to form, just through the sheer number of songs about the same few topics. For starters, there are very few happy songs here, which may reflect where Wallen’s head is at, or may just reflect the commercial power he now holds to do what every country artist I’ve ever talked to says they wish they could do, and concentrate on the more melancholy stuff. The few times that Wallen entertains an upbeat attitude on the album, it’s because he’s focusing on a scrape that he believes God gave him out of, or thinking back on a good talking-to a wiser man gave him. Or, sure, because he is about to get laid. But the lays are mostly one-night or two-night stands, and for the revenge of it as much as the pleasure of it. There is one song of note, “Superman,” in which Wallen sings about having a son, and knowing he hasn’t been the best example (“One day you’re gonna see my mugshot from a night when I got a little too drunk”). But the idea of a mother is absent from the tune, and there’s no track on the album in which you imagine a truly long-term relationship with a woman happening, past or present. In the so-called golden age of country, there were a lot of songs like these, actually, about a guy losing himself in the bottle (or in revenge sex) because of being left behind. But in those days, when country fans skewed older, you imagined D-I-V-O-R-C-E being part of the picture. It’s impossible to imagine Wallen or any of the women he sings about being married. This is the New Country — young, focused on hook-up culture, and the pursuit of pleasure — and growing pains from the loss of it — that few people much beyond their 20s have the luxury of directly relating to anymore. But we’ve all experienced the rejection that Wallen devotes so many songs to. Even if you’ve graduated from the days of being left behind at the country/hip-hop line dance, you can still feel nostalgic for it.
What are his fans to make of that album title, though? As little remorse as he’s shown for his past public indiscretions beyond the initial perfunctory apologies, is he using “I’m the Problem” to let us know that he knows that he’s problematic, and offer some sort of general mea culpa? Well, at times, but he’s not real consistent there. (Surprise.) In the title track, he insinuates that he’s not actually the problem — because if he were, why wouldn’t his steady have left him by now? It’s not me, it’s you seems to be the actual theme of that song. The following song, “I Got Better,” falls along in the same line of general defensiveness: The narrator got better once she got gone. So much for accountability.
As the album goes along, though, he gives in to his sad-sack tendencies a lot more. “Nothin’ left there in the bottle / Nah, it’s all up on my breath,” he sings. “Just some lonely nights ahead since the girl I f’ed it up with that I wouldn’t trade for nothin’ left.” (Good luck diagramming that sentence, but you get the gist.) There’s a whole song that’s so about depression, the girl seems to have been thrown in just to offer some sort of motivation to the lyric, because otherwise it’d be too bleak: “Sunset is when it starts / Sky ain’t all that’s getting dark ‘til daylight.” Morgan Wallen looked into the void, and the void looked back and said: Here’s a bottle of Johnny Walker with your name on it.
You hasten to take any of this too seriously with an album whose very length speaks to how much it’s being offered as a commodity. And however downbeat it gets, Wallen does occasionally perk up and offer his listeners a lift, as in the party anthem “Miami,” which he already correctly predicted in an interview would make him a pariah among country traditionalists, for the way it interpolates a classic Keith Whitley single into something that… is not classic. (The influental website Saving Country Music called “Miami” “the worst song of his career or anyone else’s.”) An N-word controversy is one thing, but for a niche of country stalwarts, disrespecting Whitley counts as the unforgivable sin.
Mostly, though, Wallen is content to concentrate on being sadcore… probably correctly assuming that few people who are not music journalists will listen to the whole two-hour stretch of it at once and think too hard about the just how many bummers are stacking up. Some of these downbeat tunes have the strength to make it not feel like a slog — “Smile,” for instance, a late-album entry, has him leaning in less hard on his accent and breaking out a stronger balladeer voice than you ever knew he had.
But the hint of redemption is all that Wallen will allow himself… on record, anyway, and maybe, who knows, in life. Being bad is good for business, as he found out when a whole nation of fans reacted to his alleged cancellation by vowing to up their consumption. And does the world really love a guy who crows about how he’s learned some lessons? Being a cocky screw-up who’s on the verge of a wake-up, but never quite getting there, is the persona that’s helping Wallen stumble all the way to the bank. He’d be a fool to get wise.
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The post How Problematic Is Morgan Wallen, Anyway? In ‘I’m the Problem,’ He Doesn’t Want to Rile Up a Nation — Just Be Country’s Saddest Bad Boy appeared first on Variety.
