Is Morgan Wallen the problem with country music?

June 23, 2025·36 min·2 clips

Sloan compares Morgan Wallen to Frank Sinatra — both have 'the perfect phrasing of a melody, so that once you heard him sing it, you couldn't really hear anyone else sing it' — and Harding admits he listened to the 37-song album multiple times despite expecting to skip most of it.

1. Switched on Pop launches Country Week with an episode on Morgan Wallen's 37-track album I'm the Problem, framing it as a case study in what contemporary country music has become. 2. Charlie Harding (songwriter, host) and Nate Sloan (musicologist, host) co-host; no additional guests appear. 3. The episode's central question is whether Morgan Wallen, as the most commercially dominant country artist of the moment, represents the problem with country music or its logical culmination. 4. I'm the Problem has spent four weeks atop the Billboard 200 and places 20 simultaneous songs on the Hot 100 at the time of recording; the album's lead single sits at number six. 5. Sloan describes the lead single's sound as a collision of two eras: a flat-picked acoustic guitar in a bluegrass style with a crying slide guitar recalling Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western scores, combined with a hard-hitting 808-style bass line from hip-hop that arrives in the chorus. 6. The song wavers between F minor and D-flat major throughout, matching its lyrical ambivalence — Wallen positions himself as the problem while simultaneously blaming his partner. 7. The modulation at 'and it got me thinking' introduces a chord not heard elsewhere in the song, leading to the reversal 'maybe you're the reason I'm the problem' — a device Sloan identifies as the 'hinged figure,' named by country music scholar Jimmy Rogers, where a phrase opens two simultaneous meanings. 8. The episode traces the 'who gets to be country' debate from 2019, when Lil Nas X was removed from the country Billboard charts, through Beyonce's 2024 Cowboy Carter album, the first Black woman with a number-one country hit, which also featured Shaboosie — a Black country hip-hop act whose single Bar Song became a radio hit. 9. Sloan cites Tasha McMillan Cottom's New York Times article 'Country Music Is Entirely At War With Itself' to name the structural divide: 'reparative multiculturalism' on one side, 'reactionary whiteness' on the other — the latter separating Black art from Black artists and repackaging it as white authenticity. 10. Jelly Roll is presented as a case study in reactionary whiteness: beginning his career as a rapper on 2011's Gambling on a White Boy, he transitioned to country as he got sober and became more religious, moving freely between genres in a way artists of color are not typically afforded. 11. Post Malone is also discussed as a white rapper who moved into country, gaining credibility through a collaboration with Beyonce on Levi's Jeans before releasing the country album F1 Trillion featuring collaborations with major country stars including Morgan Wallen. 12. Morgan Wallen's scandals include multiple bar fight arrests, being caught partying during COVID lockdown, and being documented using the N-word — which led to $500,000 in donations to the Black Music Action Coalition, the National Museum of African American Music, and Rock Against Racism — with most incidents resulting in increased sales. 13. His 2023 album One Thing at a Time outsold Taylor Swift's Tortured Poets Department without receiving comparable critical attention or public discourse. 14. Sloan compares Morgan Wallen's melodic phrasing to Frank Sinatra's, citing their shared ability to own a melody so completely that no other version sounds right, demonstrated in the specific delivery of 'last night we let the liquor talk' from Last Night. 15. The collaboration with Tate McRae on What I Want is analyzed as an example of the album's structural hip-hop influence: the song opens with the hook rather than a verse, features bluegrass flat-picking by guitarist Brian Sutton alongside trap 808 beats, and follows the Drake-era strategy of releasing 37-song albums to maximize streaming totals. 16. The hosts consider whether the 37-song album qualifies as a triple album — noting it is pressed onto three vinyl discs — comparing it to Wallen's 2021 double album Dangerous (30 songs, also three vinyl discs) and discussing the ontological definition of album format in the streaming era. 17. The episode is conversational and music-first, with the hosts playing clips and analyzing them in real time; Harding occasionally plays musical examples on an instrument while they talk. 18. The tone is critical but not hostile — Sloan admits he listened to the full album multiple times 'despite not looking forward to it,' and the hosts are explicit about the tension between admiring craft and objecting to conduct. 19. Listeners interested in the intersection of race, genre, and commercial music in contemporary country will find the Tasha McMillan Cottom framework and the Beyonce/Shaboosie/Post Malone lineage useful. 20. Listeners who want to avoid engagement with the racial politics of country music, or who find Morgan Wallen's conduct disqualifying, will find the episode's ambivalence uncomfortable.

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