Morgan Wallen to perform on TV for first time since racial slur scandal

The Morgan Wallen comeback practice is selecting up pace.

The 28-year-old nation singer will carry out on subsequent month’s Billboard Music Awards, occasion organizers introduced Friday, his first tv gig since he was caught on tape final 12 months drunkenly utilizing the N-word in a video printed by TMZ.

Wallen’s use of the phrase threatened to derail a fast-moving profession: Radio stations pulled his music from the air; his report label “suspended” his contract (with out ever fairly making clear what that meant); and varied trade teams — together with the Nation Music Assn., the Academy of Nation Music and the Recording Academy — disqualified or merely ignored him for main awards.

However Wallen’s 2021 “Harmful: The Double Album” — full of hit singles like “Any individual’s Downside,” “Sand in My Boots” and “7 Summers,” the final of which went viral on TikTok — by no means stopped connecting with listeners on streaming providers like Spotify, and the 30-track assortment ended up final 12 months’s most-consumed LP.

Even now, 15 months after its launch, “Harmful” sits at No. 2 this week on the Billboard 200 — a staggering show of endurance in a enterprise with extra churn than ever.

The music trade was slower to reembrace Wallen, who’s apologized for the incident on quite a few events. However in current months the limitations have largely come down: The singer’s music is once more a mainstay on nation radio, and he’s at the moment on the street enjoying sold-out area reveals. In December he teamed with rapper Lil Durk for the country-trap monitor “Broadway Ladies”; final month “Harmful” was named album of the 12 months on the ACM Awards.

And this week Wallen’s new single, “Don’t Suppose Jesus” — an acoustic ballad a couple of small-town boy who strikes to the town and begins “chasing the satan by honky-tonk bars” — debuted at No. 7 on the Scorching 100.

Wallen was barred from attending the 2021 Billboard Music Awards (although he gained three prizes, together with prime nation artist and prime nation album). In a press release to Billboard on Friday, MRC Dwell & Different, which produces the awards present, stated, “After a radical evaluation and sturdy discussions internally and with the artist’s crew, through which we discovered a demonstrated and ongoing dedication to significant work and outreach, we prolonged an invite to take part on this 12 months’s present.”

The 2022 Billboard Music Awards will air dwell Might 15 on NBC from the MGM Grand Backyard Enviornment in Las Vegas.