The compartmentalization of Wallen’s popularity is partly due to the genre bounds of country, which remain Nashville-based, predominantly white and exurban, even as country music itself, and particularly the pop-leaning, bro-country lane in which Wallen traffics, borrows beats and styles originated by hip-hop. There is, for better and for worse, a perennial appeal to a man wearing a backwards hat who just likes his beer and can’t seem to help his habits, his aching heart, or himself. A 2020 New Yorker profile of Wallen quoted a South Carolina mother on Instagram – “Lord have mercy im bout to bust”, she commented on a picture of him leaning against a truck – which remains an apt summary for that segment of his fanbase. Female fans on TikTok responded to his insouciant charm and assertively retro style enthusiastically. Wallen’s post-Voice makeover for his 2018 debut album, If I Know Me, took a nod from 90s country and Brooklyn fashion – objectively ugly but worn with such confidence that it works – with a Billy Ray Cyrus twist (a mullet and sleeveless flannels). (“But if I never did put that can to my mouth / I wouldn’t have nothin’ I could sing about, yeah”, he sings on the new album opener Born With a Beer in My Hand, which ambivalently handles Wallen’s newfound sobriety.) They’re easy songs to drink to, which is, as I’ve mentioned, a recurring theme. His songs are boozy, drenched in nostalgia, swilling about the evergreen draw of someone bad for you or mining the fantasy that you could make such an impression on a man that he’d sing about it for years afterward. It’s at best charming and surprisingly clever, sometimes cliched far beyond the point of self-parody, but generally catchy. His music is almost aggressively median bro country – beer, the Bible, women, whiskey, regret, reclaiming the word “redneck”. His voice is twangy and husky yet commercial, the woodgrain raspiness of Chris Stapleton filtered through the machine of reality television Wallen first gained recognition as a contestant on The Voice in 2014, when he was 20 years old and working as a landscaper in his home town of Knoxville, Tennessee. Wallen’s appeal makes sense, at least for a longtime country music listener like me.
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