The singer’s record-breaking success spotlights the divide between coastal city culture and what’s played elsewhere
For the past six weeks, Miley Cyrus’s Flowers, the most dominant song on the Billboard charts, was decently ubiquitous, as much as one can determine song ubiquity in my particular bubble of Brooklyn. I heard it in Ubers, at the nail salon, during at least two pop-ins to Duane Reade. References to it were all over Twitter and whatever TikTok stream reaches me. The same cannot be said for its usurper on the Billboard Hot 100: Last Night by Morgan Wallen, a 29-year-old country singer from eastern Tennessee. The song is one of five that he has notched in the top 10 this week, all from his third album, One Thing at a Time, released earlier this month. (In 2023, Billboard charts are calculated by a combination of radio airplay, sales and streaming numbers.) He’s the first core country act to achieve the mainstream music feat – which, depending on where you are, is either obvious or head-scratching.
Wallen’s career presents a conundrum: he is not only the biggest star in country music, but one of the biggest stars in pop music, period. One Thing at a Time, which runs at nearly two hours and has 36 songs, had the largest streaming debut of any album so far in 2023, according to Spotify. His 2021 release, the 30-song Dangerous: The Double Album, was the third most streamed album in the US in 2022, behind Bad Bunny and Harry Styles and ahead of Taylor Swift’s Midnights. And yet his popularity is one of the starkest examples of cultural silos in the US. Loosely, what Paramount’s Yellowstone is to TV – the most popular show on cable television with strong viewership in smaller markets but largely ignored in coastal cities – Wallen is to popular music: regional, segmented, massively recognizable to some and unheard of to others. You either listen to Morgan Wallen or you don’t.
Be First to Comment