'SNL' Musical Guests, Ranked From No. 1 To Morgan Wallen
A year ago, Saturday Night Live's 45th season ended in a swirl of late adjustments: A planned 21-episode run had to be shortened to 18, with the final three shows cobbled together from the performers' homes. Ranking the season's musical guests meant comparing, say, a knockout production starring Lizzo to black-and-white footage of Chris Martin singing a Bob Dylan cover. Out of 18 performances, two featured former members of One Direction and two featured current members of Coldplay. It was, taken as a whole, as much of a mess as you might expect.
But for Season 46, which ended Saturday, Studio 8H was healing: Crowds, albeit sparse (at first) and masked, showed up to clap and hoot, while each and every musical guest performed in person. That makes it considerably easier to concoct — for the fourth year in a row! — a ranking of the latest season's 20 musical guests, even as the genres they represented varied wildly.
This season marked a bit of a shift in SNL's musical direction, most notably in favor of rock acts with guitars, while still bringing back a few mainstays to perform in consecutive seasons. But this season's batch still added up to a robust assortment of fresh talent, fresh conversation-starters and, yes, the occasional cinder of fresh hell.
We've linked to every performance that's still officially posted on YouTube, but all 46 seasons of SNL — including the musical performances — are available for streaming via Peacock. So let's do this!
20. Morgan Wallen, "7 Summers" and "Still Goin' Down"
It's tempting to plop Morgan Wallen in last place for reasons of context alone. The country star's SNL debut was delayed by two months after Wallen flouted NBC's mask protocols — why he was invited back at all remains an open question, given how recently he'd been willing to risk the cast's safety — though he at least paid us all the courtesy of waiting nearly two more months after his eventual performance to be filmed using a racial slur. Wallen has long had a "repeatedly arrested outside Kid Rock's bar" vibe to him, although to be fair, he's only been arrested outside Kid Rock's bar once.
But let's set all that aside, in the interest of objectivity, and focus solely on Wallen's smirky, listless performance. The guy's singles aren't bad, but in these performances they weren't exactly hook-forward, especially given Wallen's tendency to sing through his nose. Though "7 Summers" never sank below bland competence, "Still Goin' Down" somehow seemed both lazy and try-hard, in a way you can only really pull off while clad in a crisply laundered garment from the Larry The Cable Guy collection. Would it have killed him to at least make the music fun?
19. Jack
