Nelly is speaking out on the situation surrounding Morgan Wallen and the stigma of racism behind country music.
During an interview in early February with RADIO.COM‘s Natasha Castles, the “Lil Bit” singer said he was completely unaware of Morgan Wallen’s use of the n-word and after learning of it, he was at a loss for words and admitted that it is “shocking.” He continued to explain that he knew Wallen and thought he was a great dude.
“Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen this video that has just surfaced of country singer Morgan Wallen dropping the n-bomb and of course the country community is speaking out.” Castles explained to Nelly in the interview. “Artists like Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton are disassociating themselves and even radio stations across all platforms are dropping his music out of rotation and I wanted to ask you. With racism being such a common stigma within Country music, do you ever feel like walking away from this space altogether?”
Nelly replied, “No you can’t and that’s crazy because I didn’t know that. God, that’s crazy because I know Morgan. Morgan was a great dude. Obviously, I gotta learn a little bit more about what just happened, I’m not trying to vouch for anyone, I’m just saying wow, that’s shocking. That’s really shocking, I will probably have to do my investigation to understand what’s going on, so I can understand what the hell just happened here.”
The singer then went on to comment on the stigma of racism surrounding country music explaining that, “Well, yeah, it’s grass roots, let’s not avoid the elephant in the room. But the thing is, everybody has a chance to evolve, everything is evolving. A lot of Country music is evolving, and a lot of people are evolving with Country music.”
“It’s the same way with the world though, I don’t think they should just be excluded out as being the only ones who need to evolve. No, it’s a lot of people who need to evolve.” He continued. “We all need to evolve as people. Whether it’s about racism, sexism, or whether it’s about whatever it is, we all need to evolve. And we all got to do it together, some of us have to be patient with everybody and then sometimes we gotta know that it is zero tolerance.”
Nelly also explained that people make mistakes and we are all human and nobody is perfect.
“Sometimes we gotta know that people do make mistakes and we have to allow people to learn from them too because if we don’t allow people to learn from mistakes, then now we’re saying that everybody has to be perfect and we all know that that’s impossible.” Nelly said. “And we are all just sitting around waiting for somebody to eff up so we can point the finger and that’s not humanly possible, and that’s not going to lead us anymore but we all have to want to be better, that’s the thing.”
Later adding, “When you do make a mistake, let’s recognize it, let’s speak out about it, and let’s understand that you know a lot of people was hurt behind that and learn like ‘yo this is what I did wrong and I want to apologize for that cause I shouldn’t have did that.’ We have to hope that people learn from that and we need to move on but no I didn’t know, I have to investigate that, I really hate that happened, that’s crazy.”
