Based on music alone, the country singer Morgan Wallen should not be a polarizing figure. The eastern Tennessee native sings about drinking, girls, God and life in a small town. His style is endearing bro-country lite – tight jeans, T-shirts, slight mullet, husky twang. Yet his massive commercial success presents a conundrum in American popular music: an artist ubiquitous to some but unheard of to others. And his chart dominance continues to drive at times baffled headlines, in large part because of a February 2021 video, first published by TMZ, of Wallen shouting the N-word at a friend outside his house. The use of a racial epithet torpedoed Wallen’s crossover appeal and generated a short-lived corporate backlash, but didn’t put a dent in his staggering commercial base.
By the time Wallen arrived in Chicago for back-to-back concerts at Wrigley Field this weekend, he had already spent more than half of 2023 atop the Billboard charts, with more weeks at No 1 than any country album in 30 years, and the longest consecutive streak atop the Billboard 200 since the Titanic soundtrack in 1998. His third studio album, One Thing at a Time, was streamed more than 52m times on its release day, setting a single-day Spotify record. His eponymous album tour is not only one of the biggest country music tours of all time, but one of the biggest tours in music, originally encompassing 58 shows in four countries, including 30 stadiums. While Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has generated headlines and become a social media reality show for the better part of the year, Wallen’s sojourn across the country has, with notably less mainstream press owing to his splintered celebrity, become America’s other major tour.
