These are my favorite kind of articles: An entertainment magazine informing their readers on how not to be MAGA.
Apparently the new MAGA red flag is if you listen to Morgan Wallen.
I'm not joking.
Does listening to an uber-popular rap artist posing as a country artist make you MAGA? Let's find out from Variety.
So if owning a Tesla truck has become the equivalent of a red MAGA hat, does listening to Morgan Wallen's new album 'I'm the Problem' have the same effect? And is enjoying — and financially supporting — a person's creative work the same thing as endorsing or overlooking their stated beliefs or opinions, even if there's no overt reflection of those views in their work?
So right off the bat they're admitting that there's not any "overt reflection" of MAGA in Wallen's music.
They take a very shallow dive into Wallen anyhow.
While Morgan Wallen has done some very offensive things in public, he's no Kanye West or even Kid Rock ... [In 2020], he broke Covid protocols just days before he was scheduled to appear on 'Saturday Night Live,' clearly running the risk of infecting the entire show's cast.
Just a few months later, after an apparently inebriated night out, he called one of his white friends the n-word, unaware that a neighbor was recording him on their phone.
Things grew more serious in 2024, when he threw a chair off the roof of a six-story Nashville building and nearly struck two police officers ... And just a few weeks ago, he returned to 'SNL' as a musical guest and abruptly walked off the stage during the traditional show-ending onstage grip-and-grin — later posting a photo of his private jet with the caption, 'Get me back to God's country,' tacitly transforming the incident into an owning-the-libs moment, complete with merch.
I'm sorry, but this is what Variety is spending their time on???
There's more, and it's something special.
But at a time when an unapologetically sexist and arguably racist convicted felon won the presidency after running on a platform based on hatred, threats, intolerance and retribution, it also captures a spirit of this era and is even, arguably, a MAGA-flavored brand of punk rock.
Wallen has never publicly endorsed Trump, but he doesn't need to: His behavior and image are indisputably MAGA-coded. His songs might be about drinking and bad decisions and being a badass — and defiance about the results of that drinking and those bad decisions and that badassery — but it's hard to separate them from the very Trumpy, middle-finger-to-the-world spirit that his non-musical actions seem to reflect. Even the video for 'I Had Some Help,' his airwaves-dominating song with Post Malone, is filled with (comical) bad behavior, drinking, pick-up trucks and American flags, and the song itself is about deflecting responsibility for bad behavior: Someone else is to blame for my current unsatisfactory circumstances, an attitude central to the appeal of MAGA and Fox News.
Somehow the body of this article is better than the headline!
🤣🤣🤣
And I simply cannot believe Morgan Wallen and Post Malone had American flags in their video.
They leave us with this, and then go on to mention R. Kelly, Diddy, Chris Brown, Marilyn Manson, and Bill Cosby and how we still consume their art even though they've sinned against humanity.
Whether or not that's who Wallen actually is in real life — or whether a superstar's 'real' self, as opposed to their public selves, is even relevant — it still raises a question. Is playing and enjoying his music, and contributing approximately $.003 per stream to him and his musical collaborators and business associates, an endorsement of all of the above?
"The above" meaning all the MAGA coding, I'll assume. I'll also assume the seventeen readers of Variety Magazine will never listen to Morgan Wallen again (or will at least plug their ears when it comes on the radio).
To end, I wish I could tell you this article was written by a woman with purple hair and a nose ring. Unfortunately, it was somehow written by this bro right here:
Something tells me in a few years it's actually possible that this man will be a purple-haired woman named Jemma.
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