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Morgan Wallen has offered heartfelt apologies to fans and others who might be offended by his choice of words after videos emerged of him uttering racial slurs and cursing, Variety reports.
The country singer is once again in the news for the wrong reasons. Months earlier, precisely in October, he was yanked off the guest-list for Saturday Night Live after disregarding COVID-19 guidelines when he partied with friends at a bar in Alabama.
In his apology, Wallen said he was embarrassed and sorry. The Whiskey Glasses singer noted that he used a language he wished he could recant. He said there was no excuse for his behavior and promised to do better.
TMZ first posted the current video of Wallen uttering profanities. According to the celebrity tabloid, a neighbor of the country singer had recorded the encounter when Wallen was with a group just outside his Nashville home.
Wallen is one of the most promising country singers at the moment, with numerous hit songs and awards to his credit. Among his numerous awards include a Country Music Association Award and an iHeartRadio Music Award.
Wallen has now been blacklisted in major radio stations across the country, with Cumulus giving the directives to the many stations under its belt to refrain from playing songs by the singer.
Entercom is another media group that has blacklisted the singer, directing its more than 200 stations to drop the act from their playlist. Entercom confirmed its decisions when media outlets reached out to it, CNN writes.
Wallen was not spared the consequences of his actions by his record label, which suspended the singer from the label indefinitely. Big Loud said that its distributing partner, Republic Records, was in consonance with the move.
Country Music Television also took the decision to ban Wallen’s content on their platform. According to a spokesperson with CMT, the company said it was removing Wallen from all of its platforms because the actions of the country singer went against its core value of promoting equity, inclusion, and diversity.
The Academy of Country Awards is among the many organizations dissociating themselves from Wallen. The academy revealed that Wallen is set to be dropped from performing at the award. Asides from suspending Wallen’s performance, the ACM went a step further to remove Wallen from competing in the awards.
A fellow country musician Mickey Guyton said the comments of Wallen put into perspective the kind of hate she had received so far because she was a person of color in a music genre dominated by the Whites. While she commiserated with Wallen at the sheer amount of backlash he has had to face since his actions became public knowledge, she said he must be allowed to feel the weight of his behavior.
However, Guyton noted that she was against the cancel culture that completely turned a star into a pariah whenever they took a wrong course of action. This culture, she said, was capable of adversely affecting a person’s mental health.
Investigations by Country Aircheck, a leading publication in the country music scene, showed that airplay for Wallen dropped drastically by as much as 80%. Drops could even be steeper if more radio stations that made adjustments late on Wednesday are taken into account.
Source: variety.com
