It’s early, but Morgan Wallen has been the biggest thing in country music this year.
His double album, Dangerous, has been at the top of the Billboard charts since its release three weeks ago, the first time a country album has pulled off three straight weeks at #1 in 8 years… and it’s not even close. With 130,000 equivalent album units this past week, the album sitting at #2 only had 45,000.
And all of that came crashing down in the blink of an eye.
Video surfaced of Morgan yelling the n-word (among other profanities) outside of his house after him and a group of friends obnoxiously arrived home from a night of partying.
And according to Variety, in less than 12 hours of the news breaking, he has been removed from all of Cumulus Media’s 400-plus radio stations. As of midnight, program directors across the country received the following message:
“MORGAN WALLEN — EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
Team, unfortunately country music star Morgan Wallen was captured on video Sunday evening using a racial slur. Effective immediately we request that all of Morgan Wallen’s music be removed from our playlists without exception. More to follow.”
And according to one radio source who wanted to remain (lol) anonymous:
“Morgan Wallen appears in virtually every half-hour of music across 4000 stations across America right now. How’d you like to get that message at midnight, that you have to take him out of the music blocks you already set up for Wednesday? If anybody has other songs they’ve been wanting to hear in the morning, they may get to hear them tomorrow.”
It also appears that Morgan has been removed from various Apple and Spotify playlists, as well as any cover art/promotional material that he was featured in.
At this point, it’s too early to tell how long this will stick, what further repercussions Morgan will face, and what this means for the rest of his career. Maren Morris sounded off on the incident, calling out country music’s history of protecting their artists (and more importantly their wallets) when things like this happen.
It actually IS representative of our town because this isn’t his first “scuffle” and he just demolished a huge streaming record last month regardless. We all know it wasn’t his first time using that word. We keep them rich and protected at all costs with no recourse.
— MAREN MORRIS (@MarenMorris) February 3, 2021
Here’s the full video: