The rise of Morgan Wallen, America’s controversial country music star

For the past six weeks, Miley Cyrus’s Flowers, the most dominant song on the Billboard charts, was decently ubiquitous, as much as one can determine song ubiquity in my particular bubble of Brooklyn. I heard it in Ubers, at the nail salon, during at least two pop-ins to Duane Reade. References to it were all over Twitter and whatever TikTok stream reaches me. The same cannot be said for its usurper on the Billboard Hot 100: Last Night by Morgan Wallen, a 29-year-old country singer from eastern Tennessee. The song is one of five that he has notched in the top 10 this week, all from his third album, One Thing at a Time, released earlier this month. (In 2023, Billboard charts are calculated by a combination of radio airplay, sales – which, depending on where you are, is either obvious or head-scratching.