“He ain’t canceled,’ Durk told TMZ of the country star caught using the N-word in a leaked video last year.
Almost a year after country singer Morgan Wallen was caught on tape using the N-word, his recent rap collaborator thinks other hip-hop acts should follow his lead. Chicago MC Lil Durk, who recently scored his first No. 1 as a lead artist on Billboard‘s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart with the Wallen collab “Broadway Girls,” told TMZ that he Kendrick Lamar should take his example and record a song with the “Wasted On You” singer.
“That’s my boy,” a masked Durk said when a TMZ cameraman caught up with him as the rapper chilled in an SUV. Noting that the unlikely pair had hit No. 1 with “Girls,” Durk, who is Black, was not phased when the reporter asked about Wallen’s N-word controversy and whether he considers the country star a racist.
“Nah, he ain’t no racist, that’s my boy,” Durk said, noting that the pair had had a “long talk” behind closed doors and he had no qualms about collaborating with the singer who he insisted “was not canceled. He ain’t canceled, I talked to him. When I say you ain’t canceled, you ain’t canceled.” When the reporter noted that Wallen has said he would like to work with Kendrick Lamar as well and asked Durk (born Durk Banks) what he thought of the idea, the rapper said, “for sure.”
During a late 2021 appearance on a Clubhouse talk show hosted by Black comedian Druski, Wallen tapped Moneybagg Yo as his current favorite hip-hop artist and it would be “pretty cool” to team up with Lamar while citing the late Young Dolph, Drake, Gunna and Ye as other acts that were in his end-of-year top songs list on Spotify.
The success of “Girls” came as Wallen’s bookings and radio play began to tick up in late 2021, just 10 months after his N-word incident was caught on tape, a situation Wallen discussed in July on Good Morning America with host Michael Strahan. “I was around some of my friends, and we we say dumb stuff together,” Wallen told GMA. “And it was — in our minds, it’s playful … that sounds ignorant, but it — that’s really where it came from … and it’s wrong.”
The video resulted in Wallen’s music getting pulled from radio and streaming, as well as his suspension from his label and pulled invites to a number of major awards shows. Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album was named 2021’s year-end No. 1 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart. The set was released in January, debuted atop the weekly Billboard 200 chart dated Jan. 23, and spent 10 weeks atop the list in 2021.