Morgan Wallen Retreats Into Sadness, While His Protégés Party On
The country superstar’s “I’m the Problem” is a despondent self-portrait. But a generation of singers blending Southern rap and Nashville songwriting are thriving.It seems like the more melancholy Morgan Wallen becomes, the more successful he gets. In just a few short but smash-filled years, he has become the most prominent and committed miserablist in pop — the contemporary star most preoccupied with failure, and the most adept at turning it into something like beauty.Unlike Drake, who is perhaps his closest analogue, Wallen almost never dwells on his successes. He forever lives in the space just beyond loving himself, and allowing himself to be loved. As a result, even his best and most engaging songs have a somber pallor hovering just over them.On “I’m the Problem,” his moody and melodramatic fourth album, Wallen is almost unrelentingly despondent. Women are ruining him, and whiskey is rescuing him (by ruining him even further). Some representative moods: “I just wanna love somebody that don’t want me falling apart”; “Every square inch of this house is as messy as you left me”; “Too young to feel this old.”It’s tragic, concerning and pointedly effective stuff: “I’m the Problem” is already on track to become one of the most commercially successful releases of the year. At 37 songs and almost two hours long, it’s a structural beast, a chart-clogging data dump. But rather than use that grand scale to explore different sonic approaches, Wallen largely digs in to several microtones of weariness.“Kick Myself” laments the one thing an addict can’t ever escape: himself. “Just in Case” tells a story of never letting anyone get too close. “Jack and Jill,” a morbid song about a broken couple, recalls “Whiskey Lullaby,” the unbearably tragic Brad Paisley-Alison Krauss duet from 2004.After Morgan Wallen, Lil Nas X and Shaboozey, Nashville is going hip-hop yet again. “Oil Money” by Graham Barham is the latest example of a long lineage, our critic explains from the driver’s seat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More