For three weeks now, the music industry has agonized over what to do about Morgan Wallen.
One of country’s newest stars, Wallen had been caught on video casually shouting a racial slur to a friend. After the music world banded together last summer, promising to hold itself accountable for racial inequities, there needed to be action.
Denunciations poured forth on social media, and Wallen’s record label “suspended” his contract. Radio stations and streaming services quickly scrubbed his songs from playlists. Artists and commentators gathered at roundtables, wrestling over Nashville’s rocky history with race. Wallen apologized. Twice.
But the marketplace has apparently been less troubled by Wallen’s transgression, sending his breakthrough release, “Dangerous: The Double Album” to No. 1 once again. It has held the top spot on Billboard’s album chart for six weeks in a row now, the longest run in the peak position since Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” last summer, and the only country album to spend its first six weeks at No. 1 since Garth Brooks’s “The Chase” in 1992.
In its sixth week out, “Dangerous” had the equivalent of 93,000 sales in the United States, including 112 million streams and 10,000 copies sold as a full album, according to the tracking service MRC Data, which is owned by Billboard’s parent company. So far, “Dangerous,” which has 33 tracks in its “bonus” version, has logged just short of one billion streams in the United States.
“Dangerous” has been aided by minimal competition. This week, the strongest contender against it was “After Hours,” the nearly year-old album by the Weeknd, who played the Super Bowl halftime show on Feb. 7. Last week, “After Hours” had the equivalent of 42,000 sales — less than half that of “Dangerous” but enough for No. 2 on the chart.
Also this week, Lil Durk’s “The Voice” is No. 3; Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon” is No. 4; and the Memphis rapper Pooh Shiesty’s “Shiesty Season” is No. 5 in its second week out.
