When Strahan asked Wallen if country music had a racing problem, Wallen could only shrug: “It seems so, yes. I haven’t really thought about that.” It was a heartbreakingly honest answer from a star who probably hadn’t thought about the plight of black artists in Nashville, or perhaps black people in general, before.
His use of the slur echoed the callous and thoughtless way many white Americans play with the signifiers of black culture without any awareness of their history. It was slick and, in Wallen’s description of his use of it among friends, a feel-good offense for private spaces.
The number of white pop stars revealed to have used that epithet is staggering simply because it’s not zero. In addition to Wallen, there are at least three: Eminem and Justin Bieber, who were both caught on footage of their childhood that surfaced when they were famous. And then there’s John Mayer, perhaps the most telling example, who said it in a 2010 Playboy interview. Each was convicted, but the damage to their careers was short-lived, surprising especially since all three of them spoke in traditionally black idioms. to work. But while Wallen expresses his love for hip-hop, and has occasionally taken up rap singing himself, he rarely nods directly to contemporary black music in his own songs, and country itself has largely erased the black foundations of the art form from its self-historicization.
Before the January incident, Wallen generally avoided presenting his politics in overt ways, unlike some of his genre contemporaries. In 2020, he was banned from performing on “Saturday Night Live” for violating Covid-19 protocols. (His performance was moved.) In November 2020, in response to the public celebrations of Joe Biden’s election, he wrote on Instagram: “If it’s okay that we party in the street without ‘social distancing’, then we can book shows straight away.” Late last year, he and the host joked about President Biden’s mannerisms on his associate Ernest’s podcast.
But Wallen’s spike in album sales immediately after the video of the incident went public led to his emergence as a cudgel of the culture war. Listeners took to Wallen’s music as a sort of protest against the way he was treated by the country music industry. (Wallen said he donated $500,000 to black charities, the estimated amount he earned from his peak sales; how much money has reached those organizations has been challenged.)
Wallen, the biggest star in country music, was primed to be the kind of breakthrough figure who expanded the genre’s reach into the pop mainstream, akin to Shania Twain or Garth Brooks. That now seems unlikely.
