Back in 2021, the leftist cancel culture tried to end country singer Morgan Wallen’s career over something he said on a viral video. But fans have ignored the left-wing scolds and continue to support the singer. And here at the start of 2023, he has a number-one hit despite the attacks against him and despite the lack of a new album since his cancellation.
Wallen’s song, “Last Night,” topped the streaming, airplay and the sales chart called Hot Country Songs this month for at least two weeks. The song has earned 28.3 million streams in the U.S.A., has seen 1.3 million plays on the radio and sold 10,000 according to Billboard.
The tune also led Country Digital Song Sales for three weeks and Country Streaming Songs for two.
All this despite Wallen being called a racist in an industry supposedly infested with racism.
“Concurrently, Wallen banks his eighth Country Airplay No. 1 with ‘Thought You Should Know’ (33.2 million, up 4%). Both songs preview his 36-track album ‘One Night at a Time,’ due March 3,” Billboard added.
Furthermore, Wallen’s recent album, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” has spent an amazing 95 weeks in the number one spot on Top Country Albums by selling more than 44,000 units.
Wallen is the first country music act to dominate all the main country charts in the top slot since 2019. Only one other artist has led all five charts at the same time since 2017, when Kane Brown achieved that honor, according to the entertainment news outlet.
This is all quite an achievement, considering that the cancel culture hit Wallen with everything it had in February of 2021, when leftist scolds decided that a video in which he said the “n-word” was reason enough to destroy his career.
The video of his utterance of the forbidden word came from a private recording of him and his friends when they were returning from partying after a night out in Nashville, Tennessee. In the video reportedly taken by his neighbor, Wallen was heard referring to one of his buddies, saying, “take care of this p**** a** n*****.”
Once the video gained wide release on social media and the cancel culture scolds started in on him in earnest, he apologized for saying the word.
“I’m embarrassed and sorry. I used an unacceptable and inappropriate racial slur that I wish I could take back. There are no excuses to use this type of language, ever. I want to sincerely apologize for using the word. I promise to do better,” Wallen told TMZ at the time.
Despite the apology, the video resulted in a heavy backlash, causing Wallen to be dropped from radio networks and major streaming platforms. The Country Music Association drummed him out and he was also disqualified from the 2021 ACM Awards. For a time after the attacks began, his airplay plummeted, CNN reported.
Wallen tried another tactic in apology and donated $500,000 to various black music organizations in penance, USA Today reported last year.
Since the incident, he has been a constant focus by navel-gazing leftists, who hope to cancel the whole of the country music industry because of its alleged inherent racism.
In a recent article for CNN, for instance, writer Lisa Respers France wrote that Wallen’s predicament is only a small part of the problem and added it’s “an issue much bigger than just one artist and one moment.”
“Country music has long been associated with symbols like the Confederate flag, which represents Southern pride to some and America’s painful history of racism and slavery to many others,” she wrote, adding, “Country music culture, it seems, is largely still segregated.”
And black country artist Daniel Gerard Breland (known professionally as just “Breland”) insisted that the cancellation of Wallen didn’t do a single thing to address the racism inherent in the country music scene.
“Canceling someone without getting to the root of a problem is lazy. It is the social combover that does nothing but temporarily and ineffectively hide a bald spot,” Breland wrote last August.
“Country music, like America, has a long and violent history with race,” he insisted. “Canceling Morgan and removing him from the public eye can’t and didn’t erase racism in country music, because it isn’t a problem that he started, it is a larger system of which he is a by-product.”
But while 2021 was a difficult year for Wallen, it was almost immediately that things began turning around, quite despite the cancel culture’s attempt to end him. Indeed, fans soon responded to his attempted cancellation in a big way as downloads of his album quickly sent him to number one on the charts. And his popularity hasn’t waned among the music-buying fans since then.
A year later, he was still making appearances on stage to the raucous applause of his fans. And with a pair of well-received new songs, he is about to drop a huge comeback album that will likely cause the industry to re-evaluate his cancellation and return him to full membership after this two-year hiatus.
Ultimately, the fans have spoken. They won’t allow Morgan Wallen to be canceled.
Wallen made a simple mistake by using a word fraught with social context far too casually. He apologized. Now the fans think it is time to move on.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
