Morgan Wallen is the elephant in the room

The documentary Hands on a Hardbody is one of the most American artifacts late 20th century cinema produced. In 1995, 24 hopefuls showed up at a Nissan dealership in Longview, Texas, ready to compete to win a new Nissan truck by keeping a hand on the vehicle, literally, for longer than the other competitors. These poor, ambitious contenders pray, eat Snickers, joke around, sweat, hallucinate, laugh maniacally and drop off one by one until, 87 hours later, one stands alone and victorious. Director S.R. Bindler intercuts footage of the contest with conversation from the participants, all of whom have their fairly depressing reasons for letting their limbs go numb for a payday: One needs new braces, another wants to stop riding her bike six miles every day to her waitress job.

You can view Hardbody as a tragicomic fable about late-capitalist dreams and delusions, but I’ve also always thought of it as an update of the parable of the blind men and the elephant, who place their hands on the beast without seeing the whole, and can’t identify what they’re touching. In Hardbody, the truck becomes the elephant, a repository of ideals, dreams and resentments. It’s so much more than what people believe it is, even though it’s also exactly what it appears to be, and less than what they’d hoped.

Morgan Wallen, the country superstar whose fourth album, I’m the Problem, has just arrived ready to indefinitely dominate the pop charts, has been the elephant in pop’s room for a while. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking he’s more like that truck — the slippery subject of myriad puzzled inquiries, an ideal to some and a nightmare to others whose whole being never quite comes into view. I’m the Problem has been breaking streaming records since it was released. It currently holds the No. 1 spot on Billboard‘s album chart. On the Hot 100, it has the top three spots locked down and all but one of its 37 songs are sprinkled throughout the rest of the chart. None of this comes as a shock, since his 2021 release, Dangerous, is the 21st century’s biggest album, according to Billboard, and its follow-up, One Thing at a Time, remains in the top five more than two years after it came out. What’s interesting to me is the unspoken agreement running through coverage of I’m the Problem: that it’s time to treat him as a typical pop star slowly shedding his baggage, instead of a pariah.

More: Black musicians question The Opry’s dedication to anti-racism after Morgan Wallen’s performance

Since 2021, when he was caught on video uttering the worst racial slur you could imagine, Wallen has been the subject of a quiet moratorium in much of the music press. He’s acknowledged but rarely celebrated; his ubiquitous music rarely receives thorough scrutiny. But that hasn’t lessened his enormous popularity, and watching Wallen’s new album roll out, I’ve noted that critics, at least, are making an effort to grasp why this artist appeals to so many — essentially, to understand why he’s not a problem to millions of fans. (The reviews themselves have been mixed but thorough and respectful.)

Let’s talk for a minute about how we got here. Wallen’s thoughtlessly racist remark after a night of drinking with his bros occurred at the height of an absolutely necessary national conversation about racism’s long legacy and made him a vector for the bitter disputes coming to dominate public life in the early 2020s. One minute, he was just another self-styled baller with an all-white friend group blaring a Rick Ross mixtape on a boat. The next, he was the subject of informal boycotts and public chastisement on one side and loudly defensive support on the other. It had to be baffling to Wallen, who’d grown up in the kind of unofficially segregated spaces where it’s easy for white people to avoid such conflicts. (Enrollment at his high school just outside Knoxville, which country icon Kenny Chesney also attended, is 86% white.)

He handled the situation the way any country star with media training and a “team” would have. He apologized for being impolite, but gave off the vibe that this whole thing was an overblown distraction. Noticing that his fans agreed with him — sales of Wallen’s then-current album, Dangerous, were surging — Nashville’s mainstream music industry soon reinforced that stand and welcomed him back like a prodigal son. He’d been dropped from country radio for about six months and missed one cycle of the annual CMA awards. After that, he simply kept on making his hip-hop-influenced, hard rock-inflected style of country, as if the issues of appropriation and exploitation that bubbled around within it didn’t exist.

Wallen’s callous carelessness — and there were other troubling incidents, before and after the main event — did not offer a revelation about one particularly egregious backward baseball hat act so much as an affirmation of the de facto racism that had plagued Nashville’s music industry since its inception. To Wallen’s detractors, the message was clear: A white artist would be forgiven for bad-boy behavior as long as he continued to achieve commercial success.

For years, Black and Latin musicians have been struggling to make headway in country music and facing insurmountable roadblocks. At exactly the same moment when Wallen stumbled, some of these artists and their allies began openly fighting for equity, forming organizations like the Black Opry and finding support at institutions like CMT and the Country Music Hall of Fame. DEI was (and is) a thing in Nashville. But for another group of people, maintaining the status quo was equally compelling, and working for diversity felt unnecessary, because, they thought, it was happening anyway. Wallen’s friend and predecessor at the top of the Country Heartthrobs list, Luke Bryan, implied as much when he criticized Beyoncé for not campaigning for CMA recognition after releasing her country album, Cowboy Carter. “Come into our world and be country with us a little bit,” he said. Bryan later clarified that he meant this as a form of encouragement, apparently not realizing how fraught the issue of inclusion has been since long before Ms. Carter donned a cowboy hat.

How did Wallen move through this time of conflict and alienation? Confidently. He released a collaboration with the rapper Lil Durk and posted an Instagram pic of them fishing together. He gave a heartfelt interview to Billboard‘s Melinda Newman in 2023 in which he said he’d become a different person since his public shaming. At the same time, he said he’d never really been that racist guy — if he had been, “I wouldn’t have apologized.” So there he was, still the elephant. Was his willingness to admit wrongdoing while also saying it wasn’t exactly his fault enough? Not to many people. As Wallen worked to put his past in the rear view, the conversation about who could make country music raged on. Cowboy Carter and Shaboozey‘s “A Bar Song,” a monster hit on country radio whose maker first gained wide recognition as part of Beyoncé’s project, were confident assertions that country music not only has room for Black artists but can be award-winning, chart-topping and culturally game-changing in their hands. Ignoring Morgan Wallen forever felt possible, even as a country fan.

I’m here to say that is a completely acceptable position. It’s always fine to say no to music that doesn’t feed you. I myself ignored Wallen for years, until “I Had Some Help,” his inescapable radio smash with Post Malone, sucked me in last summer. It happened that the Wallen scandal had coincided with a period during which I’d grown disenchanted with mainstream country for a few different reasons — I was busy checking out those Southern artists the genre had squeezed out, and exasperated with the retrograde attitudes keeping country semi-segregated. I was also just ready to listen to something else after five years in Nashville, so I turned my attention back toward R&B and jazz and indie music. But Wallen just kept getting bigger, and so did country — as a hit generator, a crowd pleaser and a matter of debate. I started to wonder why Wallen is the guy representing the genre as it makes its latest pop move. What made him so relatable to so many? I’m the Problem, an album Wallen has said expresses his desire to accept and express accountability, gave me a chance to meet him where he claims to be.

Here’s what happened when I put my hands on the truck. I found a bundle of contradictions shooting through Wallen’s worldview that made me more interested in him than I expected to be. Some have haunted and propelled American music since its beginnings; others are very much of the moment. Like Elvis Presley, Wallen identifies openly as a working-class white Southerner but tacitly as an absorber of Black culture and style as a means of personal empowerment. Like Madonna, he specializes in songs that focus on sexual pleasure but is more ambivalent about the potential for enduring love. Like Eminem, he makes power plays using his skills as songwriter and a vocalist while cultivating the persona of an outsider, someone perceived by others as a loser and even a threat. Like Britney Spears, he has a tightly modulated, subtly powerful voice that sounds perfectly human while also mixing well with synthesizers and programmed beats. Like Drake and The Weeknd, he articulates the grievances held by men of his generation, but he also accepts his role as the object of women’s grievances. Like Taylor Swift, he is a collaborator first, having learned his trade within Nashville writing rooms, and he’s figured out how to make music that reads as confessional yet is also highly crafted and trend-aware. Predictably, he doesn’t like to talk directly about politics, seeing no need to drive potential listeners away by taking a stand. (That said, he knows how to send a readable signal: Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, recently posted a picture of himself and Wallen turkey hunting on his socials, captioned, “It’s been a heck of a spring.” As far as I can tell, Wallen didn’t post the image on his own socials.)

In other words, Wallen is, in many ways, an old-fashioned pop star: a charismatic individual whose ability to bring a particular set of artistic and personal touchstones into the mainstream changes both the margin where he originated and the center where he comes to dwell. In Wallen’s case, that margin is the back-country white South that country music has historically fetishized, even as its fans have grown more diverse (in some ways). Wallen’s audience is overwhelmingly white, but beyond that, it’s hard to pin down the demographic — many Wallen fans are rural, conservative and working-class, but others are city dwellers with college degrees. A good portion are young women who probably also love Swift.

Striving to appeal to his base while leaving room for alternate points of view, Wallen and his collaborators have created a body of work that radiates ambivalence. The man knows how to pivot: from the piety of “Revelation,” in which he moans, “I wish I still sang to Jesus,” to the profanity of “I Ain’t Comin’ Back” with Post Malone, in which he declares to an ex that, unlike the Christ, he will not be returning; from party songs to rock-bottom laments; from unapologetic horniness to regret-sodden heartbreak.

If I’m the Problem leans toward the latter, there’s still plenty of room here for classic Music Row-style puns and country corn. Slapstick comedy and gothic tragedy have always intermingled in the genre, but Wallen’s particular gift is for blending the up and the down within one song. So much of the wordplay on I’m the Problem makes these hairpin turns, from the title track, which names itself as a confession but quickly directs itself vindictively at an ex, to “Lies Lies Lies,” which does the opposite, staging a diatribe against a treacherous lover that quickly implicates the addicted singer himself. If the mood is darker on I’m the Problem than on Wallen’s previous albums, it’s still all over the place. (The track list runs 37 songs long, after all.) These outpourings of jumbled feeling operate a lot like the poison-pen power ballads of ’90s rock bands like Wallen fave Nickelback. They self-immolate, melting into a mess of accusations and regret implicating everyone involved. It’s possible to see the seed of Wallen’s latest opus in Chad Kroeger’s roaring, sobbing performance of Nickelback’s signature ballad, “How You Remind Me.” The rage is there, undeniable; so is the regret.

I’ve long suspected that this is what makes Wallen appealing to so many women fans. In his songs, women are not confined to pedestals. They’re human, with the same desires and limitations men have. He and Post Malone achieved a light-hearted balance on that previous chart-topper “I Had Some Help,” a playful takedown of a woman who won’t accept her part in a high-proof, high-maintenance affair. “Teamwork makes the dream work,” the chorus declares with a wink. Wallen takes this line of thought into uglier places throughout I’m the Problem, painting a complicated portrait of grievance culture. The relationships his songs describe are rife with misunderstandings and careless treachery, and can turn violent. There’s a ton of empty sex.

The moments of clarity come when both parties keep their expectations low, as on Wallen’s current chart-topping duet with pop singer Tate McRae, “What I Want,” a dating app-era update of that much-covered classic of swingers’ culture, “Angel of the Morning.” Calm and cool, the Wallen song’s exchange is all about keeping expectations low. “You ain’t gonna hurt me tonight,” Wallen and McRae declare to each other over a gently rolling mechanized beat. They’re making a promise. But to whom? The singers’ voices overlap and almost seem to bury each other. “It’s like they’re competing,” my daughter, an astute critic of pop seductions, says. What I hear is something else competing: the need to be vulnerable versus the urge to be self-protective, a ruling tension in these days of swiping on screens.

Wallen’s don’t-call-it-love songs resonate in an era of hookup culture, in which romantic trappings have been stripped away to expose and codify the transactional aspects of romance. This isn’t new territory for country music — a whole subgenre of cheating songs follows the logic of Lee Ann Womack‘s 2004 hit, “I May Hate Myself in the Morning.” But again, it’s Wallen’s commitment to ambivalence, expressing tenderness and cynicism in the same breath, that make his brand of broken love particularly suited to our times.

His swagger has always conveyed belligerence as well as playfulness, and on I’m the Problem, the weight of his defensiveness threatens to smother that appealing ability to pivot, to stay light on his feet. This is especially true when he goes beyond the bedroom to consider what might, in the loosest term, be called social issues. Wallen didn’t write his 2016 debut single, “The Way I Talk,” a charming expression of Southern pride that captured what it feels like to be turned into a curiosity by people who don’t understand your background. But he’s maintained that sense of alienation from urban elites as a strong thread throughout his songbook, from “More Than My Hometown” on Dangerous to One Thing at a Time‘s “180 (Lifestyle),” about converting a city princess to country ways. (The latter is one of Wallen’s most hip-hop-inflected songs, sampling the Rich Gang song “Lifestyle”; urban music, what’s that?) Now he’s letting a bitterness redolent of Jason Aldean‘s later work slip into his paeans to country life. “When you die, I hope you come back as a redneck,” he and collaborator HARDY spit at a “city man” in the road-rage provocation with that name.

Even here, there’s a tiny twist of ambivalence: “I didn’t choose my raisin’ and you didn’t choose yours,” he intones in the second verse. The same small window opens in the small-town anthem “Don’t We”; in it, Wallen sings protectively about the huntin’ and truck drivin’ life, but also confesses that, for at least a while, he “used to hate it.” Leaving the country made him want to return, Wallen asserts, though the line “my green all comes blue collar” hasn’t been true for Wallen since he was a contestant on The Voice 11 years ago. If he could lean into the thorny complexities his sex songs consider when contemplating the region he’s idealizing, Wallen’s redneck songs might actually gain some value as social commentary. Instead, they mostly resist confronting the forces that have made many small town lives miserable, placing blame on faceless, distant profiteers — or, in the opioid operetta “Jack and Jill,” on a cheating wife who leads both herself and her brokenhearted husband to an early grave.

His best songs prove that he doesn’t have to dwell in such clichés. “Don’t We” ends with Wallen in church, praying that his small town won’t disappear. The fact is that Hancock County, where Wallen spent a middle-class childhood as a pastor’s son, is one of five Tennessee counties officially classified as distressed. Underemployment plagues the area; the most recent boost to the economy was the opening of a regional call center in 2018. In his best attempt at a Springsteen cop, “Working Man’s Song,” Wallen adopts a convincing bluegrass cry to complain about low wages and endless debt — but there’s no mention of payday loans or shrinking social services, only that anonymous, distant boss and that persistent folk demon, the IRS. “Ain’t nobody lookin’ out for me but myself,” his sheetrock-punching protagonist declares. He’s ready to put his hands on a hardbody, to fight his way out of the hole, but he just doesn’t know how. What would a Wallen song be like if it looked hard at accountability in a context like that one? Maybe he isn’t the only problem. Maybe he’ll get to thinking about that some day.

Correction: May 30, 2025
An earlier version of this story misspelled Abel Tesfaye’s stage name, The Weeknd.