Why You Have Every Right To Know All The Dirty Details of the Jelly Roll Divorce

Random Notes 62 Comments


So Jelly Roll is getting divorced from his wife Bunny Xo. I’m sure you’ve heard, and no, you don’t need to hear about it from Saving Country Music. So save the angry comments. If you want more details, they’re all over the the place. They won’t be served to you here. Go hog wild somewhere else if celebrity gossip is what you’re into. But what I am here to do is fiercely defend your right to stick your nose squarely into the personal affairs of Sir Jelly and wife Bunny as deeply as you want. And here’s why.

For the last five years or so, Jelly Roll and Bunny Xo have been using the very personal details of their lives and relationship to sell themselves to the public via the stenographers in the media, and the public has been buying it wholesale. Jelly Roll isn’t a musical artist as much as he’s a lifestyle brand, with music as the excuse for him to be an individual in the public spotlight. Ditto for Bunny Xo who is famous simply for being famous.

It’s been their marriage and relationship, embellished stories of their rehabilitation, the finding of religion, the giving to charities, the crying of alligator tears, and Jelly Roll’s shake shack preacher sermons from the podiums of award shows that have firmly placed them in the cult of celebrity to the point where even your prudish grandmother is singing the praises of these former convicted felons with face tattoos because she believes they’ve become warriors for Christ.

“I am disgusted at how invested everyone is in a very clearly private family matter,” Jelly Roll’s daughter Bailee Ann said recently upon all the fervor around the divorce. “It’s fkn crazy. Go on somewhere yall.”

But it should be no surprise why everyone is so heavily invested in the very personal details of the Jelly Roll and Bunny Xo story. They’ve been using those private details to sell themselves to the public for years now. We’ve seen hundreds of headlines about Bunny Xo’s “IVF journey.” There was a whole franchise of articles about Bunny “clapping back” at online commenters about her “IVF journey.”

Bunny just released a new biography called Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic full of personal details. It became a New York Times Bestseller, and the Yellowstone production company is making a film based on it. She’s made millions selling her private matters to the public. There were dozens of stories about the couple’s sex life after Jelly Roll’s weight loss. The reason there’s an insatiable appetite for the details of the Jelly Roll / Bunny Xo divorce is because they created it.

The private affairs of Jelly Roll and Bunny are basically all that we’ve heard about this couple, not Jelly Roll’s musical influences, sonic approach in the studio, or the stamp he wants to leave on popular music. That’s because he has no creative stamp. His entire career has just been one giant canard to separate gullible Americans from their well-earned dollars thinking they’re contributing to a better America by supporting a man exploiting the current religious fervor for his financial gain. Jelly Roll is the Joel Osteen of country music.

But this isn’t entirely on Jelly Roll and Bunny Xo. The media have been very willing partners, laundering their reputations in click bait human interest garbage, knowing low brow consumers will eat it up. Forget that Jelly Roll is a convicted felon many times over, and Bunny Xo has publicly acknowledged pimping other women out, as if that’s okay because she’s a woman herself.

Not only is/was Jelly Roll and Bunny good for generating clicks, Jelly Roll’s distinctly non-country sound was exactly the kind of “country” music the media outside of country loves to peddle to undermine country music’s unique sound.

That said, it’s always fair to state that Jelly Roll has clearly been on a path of self-improvement. Irrespective of all the marketing, clearly he’s kept himself out of prison, and lost lots of weight. And good for him. It very well might be this divorce is actually part of Jelly Roll’s attempt to continue to become a better person. According to many accounts, Bunny Xo has always been the Svengali of the relationship. helping to transform Jelly Roll from an underground Nashville hick hopper into a supposed Global superstar.

But even some of Jelly Roll’s supposed superstardom seems to be astroturfed, embellished by the media once again, and benefiting from favorable playlisting, and of course the always dubious metric of country radio. The low ticket sales for his tour with Post Malone that saw the first leg cancelled tells the story that Jelly Roll might not be as popular as we’ve been sold. Or perhaps his appeal is wearing off.

Even the media who continues to curiously shield Jelly Roll from backlash from revelations that he said the naughty N-word on tape three times turned on him for having the audacity to say “Jesus” in his speech accepting the Grammy for Best Contemporary Country Album in February. Even the media is starting to sour on the whole shake shack preacher bit since they’ve decided he “codes MAGA,” even though like many other country stars, Jelly Roll hasn’t made any direct political pronouncements.

The whole thing just feels like a big American hustle. So much that happens in the United States these days is predicated on lies, creating a facade of popularity, credibility, and sincerity to try and cover up the crumbling of society. That’s why the Jelly Roll/Bunny Xo divorce feels like such a broken promise to many. They were sold on the idea that Jelly Roll and Bunny were an American success story whose love prevailed over troubled times and shady pasts.

If this divorce is Jelly Roll’s latest or final effort to truly extricate himself from his past transgressions and continue his path to self-improvement, then good for him. And those criticizing him for his religious beliefs (or for his presumed political affiliations) are misguided. If religion is what Jelly Roll is using to become a better person, more power to him.

But spare us the moralizing that the private affairs of this very public couple are in no way the public’s business. That ship sailed years ago, and was Jelly Roll’s and Bunny Xo’s own personal decision. It is pretty disgusting that people care about this personal stuff. People should pay more attention to their own affairs as opposed to the ones of celebrities. But this is the bed Jelly Roll and Bunny Xo made for themselves. Now they have to sleep in it … separately.

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