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Morgan Wallen and the Aesthetics of 'Countryside'

Morgan Wallen may be the music star you've never heard of. He had three albums in the Billboard Top 10 this week.

Báo Tuổi TrẻBáo Tuổi Trẻ08/06/2025

Morgan Wallen - Ảnh 1.

Morgan Wallen performs at the 57th Annual CMA Music Awards in Nashville, Tennessee, USA in August 2023 - Photo: Reuters

Who else has done it before him? Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, Prince. Prince only did it at the time of his death. But you still might not know who Morgan Wallen is.

Pure country music

People complain about Beyoncé and Swift's long albums. Their last two: Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter is 78 minutes long; Swift's The Tortured Poets Department is 122 minutes long.

I'm The Problem, Morgan Wallen's latest album released in June and immediately becoming the best-selling album of the year in the US, is also 117 minutes long.

Dare to make a long album despite the average person's ability to concentrate on music, which is only seen in artists who have built empires too big to fail. (Remember, even Swift's original album was only 65 minutes long.)

Nothing about Wallen's music screams stardom.

Morgan Wallen - Last Night (One Record At A Time Sessions)

His country music was rustic: its stories were of a working-class man struggling to make ends meet, unable to afford a ticket to New York, smoking pot, drowning himself in whiskey, and fond of blathering in bars with other men about women, politics, God, dogs and cats.

In short, stories that are complex in a very simple way, stories that could not be more "straight," more "white," more "masculine" - all things that are challenged by new intellectual movements.

The music arrangement is also "rustic", or to put it mildly, rustic: almost everything is arranged in an acoustic direction, becoming gentle country ballads, only occasionally accented with electronic sounds.

Even the album cover is unstylish: a portrait of Morgan Wallen in a white shirt, neatly coiffed, in a very classical style, with a generic aesthetic that could have been drawn by a novice artist or a street artist.

Morgan Wallen sings country music, but unlike Taylor Swift's "princess" country music of the 2010s or Beyoncé's unique country music of recent years, Wallen pursues a very "purebred", very local country music that perhaps only Americans like.

Not to mention the music videos .

It's 2025, but Wallen's music video stories are nothing new, they're very old. The music video for the song Smile from this album, for example: a sad singer has to perform on New Year's Eve, the producer tells him: "Don't forget to smile."

Then he went on stage and sang a song that was not prepared, which confused the whole crew, but he sang it so well that his girlfriend appeared below the stage, looking at him with sad eyes. A scenario that couldn't be more cliché.

But is it the "rusticity" that Morgan Wallen builds that makes him different in a music world where everyone wants to be different, everyone has a statement about aesthetics, everyone has a philosophy about fashion, everyone is a rebel, everyone is bending the boundaries of music genres, everyone is against something, everyone is full of strange ideas, everyone is versatile, everyone has 1,000 faces.

Morgan's music, Morgan's style, is the complete opposite: consistent year after year, every time he appears people know what to expect from him, no more, no less.

And in an industry that is always racing to see who can do the most unique, the most bizarre thing, an industry that is always glittering like a giant metropolis, Morgan Wallen - if you will, act it - is like a small town that is outside all the movement, all the waves of change, all the glitz. And no one wants that town to be any different.

HIEN TRANG

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/morgan-wallen-va-tham-my-cua-su-que-mua-20250608095954483.htm


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