There was no mention at the Bell Centre of the 2021 controversy in which Wallen was caught using a racial epithet, and no sign the incident has damaged his career.
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Is Montreal a country-friendly city? On the evidence of Saturday night’s sold-out and raucously received Morgan Wallen concert at the Bell Centre, the answer is a resounding yes. Don’t make too much of it, though — so is every other place.
The sands of popular culture have been shifting for some time, and the truth is now staring us in the face: We live in a world where a country star doesn’t have to cross over to the mainstream, because country already is the mainstream. A perusal of Billboard’s No. 1 albums and singles of the 2020s confirms it: This is arguably the most popular music in the world, and that’s true even if you don’t count globe-dominator Taylor Swift — who, lest we forget, comes from country.
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Wallen’s rise from small-town Tennessee to chart-ruling superstardom before he hit 30 came not through years of traditional dues-paying in the honky-tonks, but from a high-profile two-round campaign on The Voice, where his team leaders were Usher and Adam Levine and some of his most vocal support came from Shakira. We’re a long way from Waylon and Willie here, folks. Most contemporary country stars will cheerfully own up to having grown up with pop, rock and hip-hop — as, indeed, have their fans. Authenticity doesn’t mean what it used to.
Especially by country concert standards, the Bell Centre crowd skewed young, and within that demographic it skewed noticeably female. (Last month, I remarked on the strong female representation at Metallica’s Olympic Stadium show. Well, I hadn’t seen anything yet.) In terms of fan devotion, all the ingredients for long-term domination are thus firmly in place.
It wasn’t acknowledged from the stage in any way, shape or form Saturday night, but an incident in early 2021 will always be part of the Wallen story. At the end of a self-confessed three-day bender, returning home with some friends late at night in Nashville, Wallen used the N-word. A neighbour captured the moment on a phone, TMZ ran with it and the story blew up.
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Career-wise, Wallen pretty much sailed through the resulting controversy. Despite official censure from the country establishment, the incident’s aftermath saw sales of Wallen’s then-current Dangerous: The Double Album spike dramatically from its already astronomical levels. To his credit, Wallen apologized, issued a statement asking his fans not to defend him and made donations to a number of Black cultural groups. The incident happened in February; by October 2021, Wallen’s songs were back on playlists, and in practical terms it was as if the whole episode had never happened.
So, what did Wallen Nation make of it? A few people were canvassed by this reviewer on the way out of the Bell Centre Saturday night, and it shouldn’t be shocking that in a roomful of buzzing Morgan Wallen supporters — people who had paid very good money to be there, forked over for the merch and showed absolutely every sign of having had the time of their lives — the responses tended to take a certain tone. One reply can stand as representative: “I’d have preferred he hadn’t done it,” said Lynn, 23, of Montreal. “But who’s never done something stupid? And he apologized. What more can you ask?”
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Saturday’s three-act bill was less a conventional star-plus-opening-acts setup (though it was that, of course) than a community of rising stars of whom Wallen happens to be the most famous. Ernest’s middle set was probably the most conventionally country, with a prominent spotlighting of the signifying pedal steel guitar and frequent exhortations to the effect of, “Do y’all want to hear some country music?” (The collective response, not surprisingly, was always in the affirmative.) Ernest’s full name is Ernest Keith Smith; might his professional choice to go mono-moniker be a subtle nod to old-school country legend Ernest Tubb? The elderly among us can only wonder.
The all-important eyeball test, certainly with Ernest and exponentially with Wallen, showed that practically everyone in the building knew all the words to every song. This reviewer hasn’t seen audience investment and deep-cut knowledge on such a scale since the heyday of the Tragically Hip. Even bottom-of-the bill Bailey Zimmerman, limited to a short seven-song set, had the whole house helping out unprompted with his quadruple-platinum-in-Canada Rock and a Hard Place.
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Wallen, midway through his One Night at a Time tour (and yes, attendance records are being broken at practically every stop), worked the stage with the assurance of someone far beyond his years, steering smoothly through a genre mélange incorporating hard rock, Adele-style balladry, traces of trap/R&B and, yes, contemporary country. Notably, his songs in tribute to women evince an appreciation that can’t be faked — at its best, it verges on the courtly. Nonetheless, as the two-hour set proceeded, a certain sameness crept in, perhaps down to Wallen’s admitted fatigue at having played seven shows in the last 10 nights.
Something else crept in too, though, and that’s the knowledge that no fewer than 49 co-writers were involved in the making of Wallen’s current One Thing at a Time album. Take a minute to absorb that number: the album, for all its emotional outreach with fans, is a product of the ruthlessly efficient Nashville machine. The man with his name on the cover had a writing hand in only 14 of the 36 songs, something that sits slightly uneasily with the artist’s general this-is-the-real-me stance. Even his biggest hit and first pop No. 1, Last Night, was written by four people, none of whom is named Morgan Wallen. Does it matter? Millions would say no. But it’s hard not to feel that we’re still some way from knowing the real Morgan Wallen.
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Random musings
Origin stories loom large in country. All three acts Saturday night took the time to give spoken accounts of how they came to be standing on the stage in front of us, and the testimonials were pretty similar, their message boiling down to: “Chase your dream, and don’t listen to the haters.”
The unlikely journey of Sweet Caroline shows no sign of ending. A song that peaked at No. 4 in Billboard on its original 1969 release has seen a long, organic growth into its unquestioned status as the go-to singalong at large-scale public events. When it came on the PA before Ernest’s set, the opening bars were enough to set off a roar; by the time the chorus rolled around, it was as if the Habs had just won the Cup in overtime. Neil Diamond is smiling somewhere.
State of Morgan Wallen’s mullet: non-existent. When Wallen first adopted the iconic haircut — he says it was inspired by an old photo of his father — it was a statement of identity both personal and cultural, and it coincided with his meteoric ascent. Now it’s been shorn. Did anyone care? Not that you’d have noticed.
Estimated number of cowboy hats worn in the crowd of roughly 15,000: roughly 5,000. Total number of cowboy hats worn onstage: zero. (There was a mohawk, though.) This headwear disparity is sure to become the subject of rigorous academic study, if it isn’t already.
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At least one country tradition is in a vital state of health. Drinking songs — defined here as songs whose lyrics strongly feature alcoholic beverages, their consumption, the venues where they are consumed, and the social, domestic and romantic fallout thereof — were beyond a motif Saturday night. They were dominant. Not for nothing was Wallen’s full-circle show-closer his first No. 1 country sales chart hit, 2018’s Whiskey Glasses. Could it really have been anything else?
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