Analysis: Billboard tried to fit 'Old Town Road' into a neat box. But that’s not how we listen to music anyway.
By Bethonie Butler Bethonie Butler Reporter covering television and pop culture Email Bio Follow April 13 at 7:00 AM Billboard “quietly” booted Lil Nas X’s twangy trap hit “Old Town Road” from the Hot Country Songs chart last month, but the controversy that followed has been too resounding to ignore.
Lil Nas X’s original version of the song, which found its early fan base on TikTok, a social network known for generating music-based memes, wasn’t country enough for Billboard. Rolling Stone reported last month that the company had removed the song from the Hot Country Songs chart, where it had spent a week at No. 19. Billboard told the magazine that the song did not “embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.”But it sounded plenty country to Cyrus.
In a recent statement, Billboard said that it would “continue to monitor how ['Old Town Road'] is marketed and how fans respond,” and that the decision to remove the song from the country chart could be “revisited.” But when it comes to Billboard’s standards for what constitutes country music, Lil Nas X’s addictive track has put a spotlight on genre-bending music by white artists that has been embraced by the country community.
The R&B/Hip-Hop chart took the biggest hit, according to Molanphy. “What is perhaps worst about this system is how Billboard, supposedly objective chart-maker, is now in the sorry business of trying to decide who qualifies for an R&B chart, with all the bizarre identity implications,” he wrote. As white artists appear to have flourished in cross-genre collaborations, black musicians have spoken out about feeling pigeonholed into so-called urban genres. While Billboard scrutinized the song’s country bona fides, there was apparently no ambivalence about keeping “Old Town Road” on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart, where it has occupied various spots for the past five weeks.
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