Weekly Shot #6

Emergency Weekly Shot From the Editorial Desk At HellorHangover ft. Morgan Wallen

I don’t usually do emergency posts because I know at some point in the near future I will probably look dumb for writing what I’m about to write in such a hasty fashion. But…I don’t care. I’ve looked dumb before – I will look dumb again. This is a reoccurring theme in my life.

For those of you who live under a rock, country star Morgan Wallen was arrested for throwing a chair off a six-story building in Nashville onto a busy street. When I read the headline I didn’t even bat an eye. A rock star…threw a chair…out of a building. Ahh, yea, duh? That’s what rockstars do. That’s what I want my rockstars to do anyway. Why is this news?

Mr. Wallen was subsequently arrested and smacked with a plethora of charges that I think fit the crime. You throw a chair off a rooftop onto a crowded street endangering people and you should get charged. My gripe is not with holding someone accountable for their actions, my gripe is about the reaction. Or, as some would call it, the pussification of America.

I am a big fan of BarstoolSports.com. I’ve been reading their site for over a decade. They are usually the buffer between an America that has become soft with the America you used to know and love filled with people who were unafraid to say what they want to say. So consider me shocked when a blogger named Karim went on to say this about the Morgan Wallen situation:

“I don't want to be old man yells at cloud here, but part of me thinks if you reach a certain level of success and fame and are doing shit drunk that a college kid would do, you're probably not worth supporting.”

Uh…what? That’s exactly what happens when you reach a certain level of success and fame.

Ever hear of the Rolling Stones? There is literally video footage of Keith Richards throwing a TV out of a window ten stories up (albeit not on a crowded street). But just imagine for a second all the shit he did without a camera on him.

What about Led Zeppelin? One time John Bonham, the bands drummer, rode his Harley Davidson through the Chateau Marmont. There’s another story about Led Zeppelin that sounds atrocious but also par for the course. At a certain hotel near a certain body of water they went fishing for sharks, hung them up in their hotel room, and then used said sharks as sex props with groupies. Yikes!

There are thousands of these stories from Amy Winehouse to Noel Gallagher (a theme here, the Brits really know how to party) and we get it. Rockstars do rockstar shit. I mean Morgan Wallen somehow got a pass after dropping the n-bomb but now we are going to act holier than thou because of a fucking chair throw that didn’t actually hurt anyone? Please.

The people complaining about this are probably the same ones who were “shocked” when a 19 year old super-duper-out-of-this-world-mega-star Justin Bieber was caught speeding in his Lambo in a neighborhood. Gasp! The Horror! I mean for Christ’s sake if you had a camera on me when I was 18-26 I’d have done countless things per weekend that would have given these softies a heart attack. And I was fucking TAME compared to some of my friends and an ANGEL compared to a rockstar.

Don’t you think us as a society are clutching our pearls for the wrong people here? Out of our two presidential candidates one has clearly raped a woman and the other won’t acknowledge his granddaughter. Yet you have people talking about these two imbeciles as if they were Jesus resurrected, come to save our great nation, that are astonished when rockstars rockstar.

So please…miss me with the softness and miss me with the hypocrisy. Rockstars gonna rockstar. Do you think mug shot t-shirts make themselves? No. No they don’t. 

P.S. – If it comes out that Morgan Wallen killed a family of five, including three small children, with the chair I take everything I said back.

P.P.S. – If he didn’t kill anybody, I guess I’ll just have to purchase tickets to his One Night At A Time Tour and let the liquor talk.

P.P.P.S - Karim is one of the guys keeping Barstool a blog, so though I disagree with the take, I respect the hustle.