Switched on Pop - Why Country Music Dominated 2023's Charts

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Country music's had a massive year. Seriously, not since 1958 have we seen so many country tunes topping the Hot 100 in a single year – and it's not been without its share of controversy. Leading this country music revival? Morgan Wallen, for starters. He bounced back from being shunned for dropping a racial slur with his number one single “Last Night.” Then there's Jason Aldean with “Try That in a Small Town,” a song and music video that which unsubtly lynching references. Next up, newcomer Oliver Anthony Music dropped “Richmond North of Richmond,” weaving in QAnon references and welfare shaming into a track largely about government distrust. On a lighter but still contentious note, Luke Combs covered the mega 90s hit “Fast Car,” turning Tracy Chapman into the first black woman with a number one country hit. And let's not forget Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves' beautiful duet “I Remember Everything” about a past romance, which also climbed to the top. Many of these songs have just been nominated for Grammys, including “Last Night,” “Fast Car,” and “I Remember Everything.” When all this started happening, we were scratching our heads. Country songs topping the Hot 100? Sure, but not this many in quick succession. Something felt different. And we think we've finally figured it out after diving into Chris Molanphy's new book: Old Town Road. Chris, a music and charts critic, author of Slate’s Why Is This Song No. 1 column, and host of the excellent music podcast Hit Parade, explores country music's chart history in his latest book “Old Town Road,” part of Duke's Single Series. He zeroes in on Lil Nas X's 2018 “Old Town Road” and its 2019 Billy Ray Cyrus-amped remix as a case study. So, to get the lowdown on 2023's country chart toppers, we've got to rewind to 2018 and re-examine “Old Town Road” with Chris Molanphy's insights. SONGS DISCUSSED Lil Nas X - Old Town Road Lil Nas X, Billy Ray Cyrus - Old Town Road remix Morgan Waller - Last Night Jason Aldean - Try That In A Small Town Oliver Anthony Music - Rich Men North of Richmond Luke Combs - Fast Car Zach Bryan, Kacey Musgraves - I Remember Everything  Lil Nas X - Sonic Shit Nine Inch Nails - 34 Ghosts IV Billy Ray Cyrus - Achy Breaky Heart Luke Bryan - Light It Up Morgan Wallen - Thinking’ Bout Me Jason Aldean - Burnin’ It Down  DeFord Bailey - Fox Chase Carter Family - Can The Circle Be Unbroken  Bill Monroe - Mule Skinner Blues  Hank Williams - Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul  Ray Charles - You Are My Sunshine Pine Ridge Boys - You Are My Sunshine Patsy Cline - Crazy  Lionel Richie - Stuck On You  Blano Brown - The Git Up  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Country music has had a huge year in 2023. Five country songs have topped Billboard's Hot 100, which hasn't happened since 1958, according to Billboard. But this has also happened not without some controversy. We've heard songs from the likes of Morgan Wallen,

who, after previously being shunned for his public use of the N-word, somehow recovered his career with a non-examble. number one hit called Last Night. Jason Aldine had tried that in a small town, a song and music video which features dog whistles for lynching. Breakout previously unknown artist Oliver Anthony music put out Richmond, North of Richmond, which had both nods to cue and non-war as well as welfare shaming

in lyrics largely about distrust of government. And then much more bent again, Luke Combs' country cover of the mega-90s hit song Fast Car made Tracy Chapman the first black woman with a number one country hit.

Finally, Zach Ryan and Casey Muff's Graves had a beautiful duet about an old relationship called I Remember Everything that also went to number one. Many of these songs have just been nominated for Grammys, including Last Night, Fast Car, and I Remember Everything. When this all went down, I was honestly quite confused. While country songs do make it to the top of the Hot 100, they don't usually in this quick succession. It felt like something had changed. But I finally feel like I have a sense of how country took over the chart. after reading this new book by Chris Melanphy.

Chris is a music and charts critic who writes the why is this song number one column for Slate? He's the host of the exceptional music podcast, Hip Parade, and the author of the new book Old Town Road for Duke's single series in which he tells the history of country music and its relationship with the charts through the case study of Lil Nas X's 2018 Old Town Road and 2019 remix with Billy Ray Cyrus.

So to catch you up on what happened this summer, we need to understand what happened back in 2018. We need to revisit the song Old Town Road with Chris Malanfi. Chris Malanfi, thank you so much for joining me on Switchdown Pop. Thank you, Charlie. In your book, you write that Old Town Road is singular, that it's one of one. Why is that? Well, it's quite literally unprecedented in the way it broke and the way it was formulated. It also is a one-of-one in the sense that Lil Nas-X as an R-Avest to country music is kind of singular.

There have been other black country stars, both before and after, Lil Nas X, but their devotion and commitment to the genre is quite different. I think we can now say with five years hindsight, the Lil Nas X after Old Town Road, other than a track or two here and there where he kept his cowboy hat on, he did not really want to tangle with Nashville again. Understandably, given what happened to him when he tangled with Nashville the first time. And in a sense, the fact that he recorded

and made his name with what is at base a country-derived record is itself a fluke because what Lil Nas-X wanted to do more than anything was record something that would become a meme. And by the way, you're not insulting Lil-Naz-X when you say this song is more a meme than a song. He wanted it to be funny.

He wanted it to go viral. That was his intent. If you know anything about Lil Nas X's history, as somebody who is a creature of the internet, he's kind of the ultimate zoomer artist. He teaches himself how the internet works by becoming a Nicki Minaj Stan, you know, and a tweet decker for Nikki Minaj.

And he sort of has this innate sense, and this actually continues in his non-country singles that follow Old Town Road, like Montero and Industry Baby, He has an innate understanding of what makes something go viral in the social media age. Once you understand that about him, there's really kind of nobody quite like him and no song, even in his own catalog, quite like Old Town Road. That's what I mean when I call it a one of one. Well, maybe we can use this as an opportunity to revisit the work briefly.

Remind me of the story of this song. So Montero Lamar Hill, born in 1999, just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, he basically starts to learn the ways of the internet as a teenager, around age 13. He starts surfing around Twitter and early sites like Vine, which are no longer in existence, and sort of develops an innate understanding for internet and social media culture. He also begins recording what was then known as SoundCloud rap. He started recording his own mixtape tracks and gave himself the name Lil Nas X around this time. And at first, his recorded output is pretty standard kind of emo rap. You know, when you say the phrase SoundCloud rap to people now,

they sort of associated with this rap that isn't exactly traditional rap. It has bars sometimes, but not always. It's almost more sing-songy than, you know, dropping 32 bars kind of vibe. and he's doing what sounds like very current SoundCloud rap for the mid-10s. And then one day he's shopping around, just exploring on the beat acquisition site, Beat Stars. And he discovers a beat posted by a Dutch teenager who goes by the name Young Kyo.

By the way, if you've ever listened to Old Town Road and you hear a weird sound at the beginning of the record, that is the audio branding of Young Kio. His producer tag, okay. It's his producer tag, exactly. Like, you know, this is a Missy Elliott exclusive. It's his equivalent of that. Got it. So, Young Kio has found a track from what is itself a very unusual 9-inch Nails album.

It's not a traditional 9-inch Nails album. It's an album that Trent Reznor released in the late aughts called Ghosts. It was a four-CD set, a four-album set. Mostly it was downloaded rather than purchased on CD. in which Trent Reznor was kind of encouraging the internet to screw around with his music. All of the tracks had generic titles like, you know, on disc one it was like 01, Ghosts 3, 01 Ghosts 4. He doesn't give them actual formal titles. Many, they're virtually all instrumental.

And on the fourth disc of this four-disc set, Ghosts, there's this very pretty sound. It's so gentle, it almost sounds like a Japanese Kyoto, but it is basically a banjo, plucked very gently and prettily. Do we know that it's a banjo? It sounds banjo-esque to me, but I'm not 100% convinced. I feel like I need to ask Trent Reznor. You might have to ask Trent Reznor. Everybody refers to it as a banjo, but I'm not sure that Trent has even cleared that up.

Okay. In any case, Young Keo doesn't do very much with this beat, actually. He speeds it up ever so slightly. The tempo doesn't shift much. He throws a bit of a beat underneath it, but it's a pretty job. mental trap. And he just posts it like that. It's kind of like the simplest beat.

It's almost like he curated it more than he mixed it. And immediately when Montero, Little Nazex, hears this, he has what he calls country thoughts. He thinks this could be really funny with country lyrics. And so that's one thing I point out about Old Town Road is that It's not an insult to call it a comedy record. He wanted it to be funny. And he said in several interviews,

I knew the line I got the horses in the back was going to catch on. And at the moment that Lil Nas X is recording this, it's the fall of 2018. He takes that beat to a local Atlanta studio that's got like a cheap hourly rate, like you can rent the studio for an hour. And he lays down his vocals atop this beat. And he intentionally makes it funny. and intentionally makes it catchy

in a sort of internet virality sort of way. And at that moment, a Chinese site called TikTok is just beginning to take off. It's just beginning to propel things to virality. The Vine era is already over of short video clips. Vine had made several songs in the mid-10s hits, including Hot Boy by Bobby Shmurda. And watch me,

all I do is cash out. And if you ain't up, get up on my trial piles. And Watch Me Whip, Watch Me Nenay by Salento. Now watch me whip. Now watch me na'nay. Okay. Now watch me whip. Watch me nae.

So like the concept of short videos turning things into hits in the hip hop world has already kind of taken off. And Lil Nas X is trying to tap into that in the TikTok era. But TikTok has not made a big hit now. This is crazy for us to think about in 2023 because TikTok is how many songs become hits now. But in 2018, it's still rising. and it's growing really fast. So Lil Nas X records this song.

He drops it in December 2018, so the very last month of the year. He is very clever at sock puppeting. So when he posts it in certain places, he'll like post it and then say, hey, what's that song that's got the line, I got the horses in the back? Like he's trying to pretend

he's asking people for his own song. He pulls all sorts of clever stunts like that to make it go viral. And it takes off pretty quickly. What's funny about it at that moment is that it's all Lil Nasex's handywork other than the beat from Yon Kyo on Beat Stars. And Trent Resner is maybe banjo.

And Trent Resner gets a songwriting credit on this song. It is 9-inch Nails only number one hit from a songwriting perspective, crazily enough. Of course, it's not a number one hit at the end of 2018. And one of the things Lil Nasak tweets into the universe as his song is starting to take off is, somebody please, help me get Billy Ray Cyrus on this.

Now, why would he have tweeted that in particular? Yeah, why Billy Ray Cyrus? Why Billy Ray Cyrus? Exactly. The hitmaker from the 90s who had a single, icky, breaky heart, and that's about it, and the father, of course, of Miley Cyrus and Noah Cyrus. Well, you just said the magic word. It's because of Miley Cyrus,

the Lil Nas X, a guy born in 1999, even knows who Billy Ray Cyrus is. Lil Nas X doesn't know much about country music. It's not like he says, somebody get me Kenny Chesney on this. It's not like he says somebody get me Morgan Wallen or Luke Combs on this. He says, somebody get me Billy Ray Cyrus on this.

Because in the aughts, as a kid, he had been watching the show Hannah Montana. With Miley Cyrus. Which starred Miley Cyrus and co-starred in a supporting role, her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, as Hannah's father. And so Billy Ray Cyrus is effectively the only major country star. He's the star of yesterday year.

He did score more hits in the 90s beyond Akey, Breaky Heart, but he's mostly famous for Ake Breaky Heart. Don't tell my heart. He's certainly passe by the Tens, not to insult him, but he is not at the center of country hit-making in the Tens, but Lil Nas X knows who he is. And so a couple months later, when there's a bit of a bidding war for Lil Nas X,

and he signs to Columbia, an executive at Columbia reaches out to Billy Ray Cyrus and says, listen, we just signed this artist, and he seems to want you on his record. You might want to listen to this. And Billy Ray Cyrus listens to it and says, damn it, that's original. And he's game to

join Lil Nas X for this unorthodox country record, because when he sort of kicked off the line dance fat in the 90s with achy, breaky heart, he felt like a bit of an outsider to Nashville, too, even though he is more of that world than Lil Nas X's. Right. You're making a

nice connection between Lil Nas X, who has a song on TikTok known for creating social dances back to an artist who was in the Nashville system in the 90s who wrote a song that was also part of social dances that just happened to be in gymnasiums instead of on social media. Exactly. But I want to know how does that happen that you jump from he puts out this intention on the internet and gets signed. He's sort of fishing for virality. How are people connecting with it in that first moment? In the first moment, starting in December, and there's even an online user

who claims to have been the patient zero for this. People on TikTok are really starting to connect to the song, and sure enough, just as Little Nazex predicted, the line, I got the horses in the back done in his most corn-pone drawl, is connecting with people. Basically, people are making their own Yee-Ha videos where they let the first few notes of Old Town Road play

and they're wearing ordinary clothes. and then with a jump in their videos, when he gets to the line, I got the horses in the back, they all jump and reappear in cowboy clothes, doing ho-down dances and that kind of thing. And this becomes the viral trend on TikTok. It's kind of like Lil Nas X needs TikTok and TikTok needs Lil Nas'X.

It was kind of the first major viral fad on TikTok. There had been plenty in the prior year while it existed, but this was the one that really, really took off and started to make waves in the mainstream. When Lil Nas X uploaded Old Town Road to the streaming services, you get to tag it on the genre or genres that you think it belongs to. So he tagged it as hip-hop, he tagged it as pop,

and he tagged it as country music. And when the song started to take off in March of 2019, enough that it could now appear on, Billboard's flagship charts, and meaning that it was now being shared enough on social media that did count for Billboard like YouTube. You know, YouTube has counted for the Billboard charts since 2013. It was definitely being streamed all across the internet. It has enough data to make Billboard's Hot 100. It makes the R&B hip-hop chart, and for one week, it appears on the country chart. It debuts on the hot country songs.

chart, Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, all the way up at number 19, which was remarkable for an artist who has never had any kind of country hit before. One week later, Billboard pulls Old Town Road off its Hot Country Songs chart. And by the way, if they hadn't pulled it, knowing what I know of how the charts work, and this is not me being a soothsayer, it's me literally looking at the data on the Hot 100. Old Town Road would have leapt into the top three on the Hot Country Songs chart if Billboard hadn't pulled it off. And they tried to do this sort of quietly at first, but several observers of the country charts,

including the guy who goes by the name Trigger, Kyle Coriano's, they are making hay out of the fact that this song was pulled. And country partisans like Trigger are actually in favor of the fact that it got pulled. As far as they're concerned, this song is insulting to Nashville, insulting to country music, and not a real country song. Oh, real country song.

That's the big question. Who gets to decide what is a real country song? Who gets to decide, exactly. And when Billboard is asked by Rolling Stone and other media outlets, what happened? Billboard has to put out a statement about why they pulled this song

from the country chart. And basically they say, and I'm going to try to remember exactly how they put this, but they said, this song we have determined does not contain enough elements of today's country music

to qualify for our hot country songs chart. And this is what really kicks off a firestorm in the media. Suddenly, everybody from the New Yorker to the New York Times to radio programs to Rolling Stone, everybody is weighing in on who the hell determines what officially is a country song. And by the way, what we have here is a young black man from Atlanta who may not know much about country music, but he is, you know, from the South and recorded what sounds to most people like a country song, why are you saying that he's not country music? Is it his race? Is it the fact that the song has trap beats? Because that shouldn't be disqualifying. There have been

Luke Bryan songs that have had trap beats. There have been Morgan Wallen songs that have had trap beats. Jason Aldeen songs with trap beats. That is not new. So is what you're saying that culturally somehow, this song is not country, because that's fishy. And this has been a struggle in the roughly century-long history. We're now in the 2020s. And this question of quote-unquote authenticity has bedeviled country music for most of its existence. You say in your book that authenticity, in big quotes, is an ever-present and unavoidable theme across country music history, that in reality, country music might present.

as today a white suburban and rural popular music, but in reality, it's this combination of black music, Hollywood Cowboys, and Space Age instruments. Can you break that down for me? You know, African-American instrumentation and songwriting is part of the roots of country music. Country music is now about a century old, right? Country music, as we understand,

it was basically pioneered in the 1920s. So it's now about 100 years old. And throughout the history of country music, this perception of traditionalism has been endemic to the music, but what has also been endemic to the music is black creators. For example, one of the first major Grand Ole Opry stars way back in the 1920s was DeFord Bailey, who was called the Opry's Harmonica Wizard,

basically the most significant black country star before World War II. And then several of the titans of country music, like the Carter family, they were advised by black creators. So, you know, will the Circle be Unbroken, for example, which was popularized by the Carter family, was formulated by A.P. Carter out of an old gospel tune that an African-American minister had already reworked and recorded.

And they were advised by a black slide guitarist named Leslie Riddle. When you think about Bill Monroe, the so-called father of bluegrass, and he is the father of bluegrass as a form. He was advised by an exceptional black player named Arnold Schultz, who basically took Bill Monroe around to clubs and let him watch and play. And that's how bluegrass was formed. If you look at Hank Williams' career, you know, Hank Williams is considered one of the godfathers of country music. He basically says, I learned all the music. training I ever had was from a guy named Rufus T. T. Tot Paine, who, you know, would roam the streets playing for handouts, and, you know, Hank Williams would tag along. So basically, country music has

had black creators at its root from the start. Never mind the fact that instruments like the banjo, the banjo is basically an African instrument. It's, you know, a drumhead with a neck added to it. It's African and it's American. Moreover, some of the things that are regarded as authentic in the history of country music, like the nudie suit, for example. Can you describe the nudie suit? Because I don't think everyone knows what the nudie suit is. You've seen a nudie suit if you've ever seen certain country stars from another era.

They're these flame-bedecked suits. They're very shiny. They come with jackets and slacks and lots of sewn-on patches that look like flames all over them. Yeah. Oh, right, right, right. And they are common in the history. history of country music. Well, the nudie suit, these flamboyant suits were created by a Ukrainian tailor named Nucha Colarenko or a nudie cone. You know, he was originally from Kiev, and somehow

he popularized his suits with country music performers like little Jimmy Dickens. So the nudie suit is, you know, not itself authentic. And by the way, Lil Nasex would later be photographed wearing a nudie suit. Even some of the instruments like pedal steel, which is kind of considered the archetypal instrument of country in the last half of the 20th century, that's rooted in Hawaiian music. A lot of the things that are used to sort of gatekeep country music and say, this is country, this is not country, this is authentic, that's not authentic, are revists to this music. They were not, you know, it's not like these things existed in some primordial time in American history. They were all grafted onto country music throughout its history.

And historically, there have been intersections between country music and all other kinds of genre. I mean, I certainly think about in your book, you talk about Ray Charles and his album, Modern Sounds and Country and Western music, which had a very similar kind of reaction originally that Little Nasuk's received. It was perceived as maybe not being country enough. Oh, you're on my sunshine. You make me happy when you're not. The skies are great. Modern Sounds and Country and Western music by Ray Charles was a smash album. It was the best-selling album of its year in 1962.

It topped the pop album chart for several months, about 14 weeks altogether. It sold very well. It generated hits on both the pop and R&B charts. But the reason Ray named it Modern Sounds in Country and Western music was that he was intentionally imitating the so-called Nashville sound. Crazy. I'm crazy for feeling so lonely. Which now sounds very plush to us.

It does not sound all that twangy compared to current country music or what we perceive as country music. Basically, Ray Charles and his team, he was recording country songs. Some of them are standards like, you are my sunshine. Or I can't stop loving you,

which had been a hit on country radio just a few years earlier. And he was using the plush Nashville sound for his productions. And country radio didn't play Ray Charles's songs at all. The album did not appear on the country album chart in Billboard. It didn't appear on the country singles chart, despite the fact that he put country in Western

right there in the title, and he was basically covering country songs. So there's a long history of exclusionary politics keeping certain artists out of country music. Attention Spotify. Has yeted a new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera, a fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, caramelized, and tonka-tostata.

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skullduggery of how charts function and that there was almost an inevitability to how this all went down. Yeah, and that has something to do with Billboard's chart policies. You know, I am often a great defender of billboards chart policies because people often complain,

well, the Hot 100 doesn't work the way it did in the Beatles Day or, you know, the album chart now check counts streaming, which is not the same as buying an album, yada, yada. I often say that, you know, Billboard is keeping up with the times, and they should keep up with the times. However, Billboard made a change to its genre charts

at the beginning of the 2010s, which I have long argued is their most wrong-headed methodology change. They basically turned their hot country songs, hot R&B hip-hop songs, and hot Latin songs, among other genre charts, into many hot 100s. The reason they did this is because they were trying to keep up with the digital era, where everybody is piling into the same digital services like iTunes and YouTube and Spotify to consume their music.

And it's hard to pull apart the audience for these specific genres the way they used to. Back when, for example, for its R&B chart, Billboard only used to count the sales for a so-called core black stores, stores that are either black-owned or in urban areas and cater primarily to a black clientele. That's how the R&B chart was compiled from about the 60s to the aughts. And of course, as regular traditional retail fell away, Billboard had to adjust its criteria. The problem was by making all of these genre charts mini-hot 100s, meaning if a record is the highest positioned record on the Hot 100, let's say it's number five, and Billboard considers at a country record, it automatically becomes the number one record on Hot Country songs that

week. They're not necessarily measuring what a specifically country audience is listening to. Same goes with R&B hip-hop, same goes with Latin. And by doing that and sort of billboard making a call, a judgment call as to what qualifies for that genre, they're creating a system where it's kind of all or nothing once they allow a song to be included in a chart like Hot Country songs. So Billboard had a really tough choice to make in 2019 with Little Nas X. In a way, their original sin was allowing it onto the chart in the first place for one week. I don't think this would have been nearly as controversial if they had quietly made that judgment call before the song even debuted, and it had never appeared on Hot Country Songs. The Firestorm happened when they pulled it off.

Their choice was, do we leave this song that is clearly outside of the Nashville system? Capital N, Capital S. It was not recorded with Nashville people. Nashville instrumentation, Nashville songwriters, none of that, right? It's outside of the Nashville system, or even the extended Nashville system, the Bakersfield, California sound, or anything affiliated with country music. Do we keep it on there? And then, because we have this Hot 100-based system where all of that data determines where it appears on hot country songs, within two weeks, and for months afterward, Old Town Road would have been the number one country song by a country mile, pardon the expression. Do we do that or do we yank it off because it isn't really a country song? And they chose the latter, which looked, to be blunt, racist,

because their system kind of didn't allow them to pick a lane in between. A comparison I often make, and I make it in a footnote in the book, is consider the 1984 hit by Lionel Ritchie Stuck on You. Stuck on you. Been a fool too long. I guess it's time for me to come on home. If you've ever heard Stuck on You, it for all the world sounds like an Alabama record from 1984.

It sounds like country music. And by the way, as we later find out, Lionel Ritchie recorded a whole album called Tuskegee, celebrating his country roots and pointing out that many of his songs could turn into country songs. But way back in 1984, when Lionel was at the absolute peak of his hitmaking, he recorded a song called Stuck on You

that because he was a pop hitmaker and because he was an R&B hitmaker, made both of those charts, But because it sounded for all the world like a country record, it was allowed onto Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart in 1984, and it peaked at number 24. And I would argue that that's about right. Lionel, a visitor to country music,

was recording a one-off song, a sizable country hit, not a big country hit. And it goes to number 24. That's about right. If Billboard's Hot 100-driven system had existed in 1984, stuck on you would have been the number one country song on the Hot Country chart for weeks and possibly months. And that would have misrepresented how big that was with the country audience.

It was sizable. It wasn't the biggest. And so taking it back to 2019 and the decision Billboard had to make, it's an all or nothing decision. Do we let this song stay on our Hot Country Songs chart? But then because of Hot 100 data, it's going to be number one for like six months, practically. Or do we yank it off because people are telling us that ain't a country record? And they chose the latter. You're saying about Lionel Ritchie's song, it only made it up the country charts a bit because country at the time only counted country radio airplay and didn't incorporate all the other information.

Country radio airplay and sales of country singles, yes. So there's this uncomfortable distinction when we talk about genre that genre can represent a musical intent that uses the language and the musical cliches of a certain style of sound. it can be an audience of listeners. It can be a musical format played at radio. And it can be a community of music making, the Nashville system. Are you making music in the place where country music is made? Of course. Not what country music is made there.

I mean, come on. Of course. Most of it is. And there is a community around it. And so genre is at the intersection of all of these different, it can be crass in a marketing term, but it can also be a very meaningful cultural signify. And so Billboard finds itself in this very uncomfortable position and a challenging position where there are not perfect calls to be made here about what goes in what chart. And it doesn't seem like there's clearly no perfect formula that one could use to determine this, especially when they're using such a vague term as genre.

One useful comparison for Old Town Road, because it literally comes out the same year, 2019. is a record by Blanco Brown called The Get Up. And Blanco Brown works within the Nashville system. And to be fair, his record is more country-quois country, even though it's kind of a line dance record. It's not country trap the way Old Town Road is. And Billboard decides this is a country record. It gets to number 44 on the country airplay charts.

So on radio stations, it's not a massive country hit, but it is big enough to just barely miss the top 40 on the country radio side. But because the Hot Country Songs chart counts all that data that piles into the Hot 100, the get-up was number one on Hot Country Songs. And again, once you decide that the get-up qualifies for Hot Country Songs, which by all means it should have been, all of that data piles in and it becomes the number one record. And I bring up Blocko Brown because he is himself Black. he's a black creator who worked within the Nashville system

and he was allowed onto that chart where Lil Nas X was not allowed onto that chart. These are the kinds of judgment calls the Billboard is having to make all the time and the problem with the system that's being driven by the Hot 100 is you're basically taking the big mass of pop fans everybody across the country,

including people who never listen to a country radio station, are not country fans and you're letting them determine what the big country records are in any given week. I'm arguing that in a world where the hot country songs chart worked properly and was actually measuring what the country audience was listening to, Lil Nas X would never have had a number one country record. I'm actually arguing that Lil Nas X should have been allowed on the hot country songs

chart, but he shouldn't have gone to number one. Because at no point with the core country audience was that the biggest country record in the country. It absolutely deserved to spend 19 weeks at number one at the Hot 100. But because the system worked the way it did with this all or nothing chart system, it wouldn't have only spent 19 weeks at number one on the Hot Country Songs chart. It probably would have spent more like 25 or 30 weeks at number one. Because if it's the biggest pop record that is allowed to count as country,

it's going to dominate the field. And that would have overstated how big a country record it was. That's the problem with the genre chart system. So in your mind, there is potentially another way of counting genre charts, not by making calls about musical characteristics which are always changing, but by looking at audiences that primarily consume a specific genre, whether it's country, Latin music, rock music, whatever, might have you. these different charts could find a way of accounting for audiences of listening, communities of listening, rather than being an all-or-nothing approach. Ideally, and I'll admit, I don't work for Billboard, and this would be incredibly difficult, but I have long argued that if Billboard, we have enough data from the likes of Spotify

to find out who's listening primarily to R&B and hip-hop, who's listening primarily to country. And then if you're tracking just those listeners, what is the occasional pop crossover record? Because crossover is what this is all about. This is the interesting part. If you're an R&B hip-hop listener, but for a few months in 2013, you're listening to Royals by Lord.

By the way, I'm picking that example because Royals was allowed on the R&B chart that year. That's interesting because then you're detecting crossover among a record that is not necessarily endemic to R&B hip-hop that, is embraced by the R&B hip-hop audience. Other than tracking Billboard's separate airplay charts, which is what people basically do now as a proxy for this,

there's not a great way to measure how a core genre audience regards any particular record or how records cross over to genres or cross out of genres. I would imagine that there's trepidation to do so in the concern in which genre ends up being a stand-in-for-race, something that Billboard doesn't want to get its hands in, which is also demonstrably false. Like, we know that listeners don't listen to only one genre. They might spread their listening around. It probably has some statistical connections to, like, I listen 40% to this and 60% to

that. And we know that people of all backgrounds listen to all different kinds of music in ways that go far beyond a stereotype. Nonetheless, the charts and the music industry has a unsavory, relationship to race. And so perhaps this system of why don't we just count how everyone's listening all together seems to be the simplest. And yet it creates this very uncomfortable position for these gatekeepers who now have this new power or, you know, just for the last decade to make this call about, well, what is this and what isn't that? And it sometimes leads to weird judgment calls. Like they determine, for example, that a Bruno Mars song might or might not be R&B, for example, or they determine that this post-Malone song is R&B hip-hop,

but this post-Malone song isn't. This is the uncomfortable position you're left in when you do the all-or-nothing genre chart system. Okay, so with this all-or-nothing system that we have today, what does it tell us about what happened this past summer, where country music just took over with songs of all kinds of messages that are seemingly discordant, some very unsavory in others, pleasant little duets.

Why in the world do we get Morgan Wall and Jason L.D. and Luke Holmes, Oliver Anthony Music, Zach Bryan and Casey Musgraves. How is it that they all have these huge moments in the summer of 2023? I mean, basically, this is kind of the genre chart system in reverse, because these records all top the Hot 100, which is the all-genre chart. And it has been argued that now that we're about 10, 11, 12 years into this all-or-nothing genre genre charts experiment that country artists, whether it's Luke Combs covering Tracy Chapman or Morgan Wallin, you know, basically using rap cadence and trap beats on his records,

are aiming more openly for a pop audience. They're not sticking to their core audience. Think about somebody like Zach Bryan, who is really hard to pigeonhole. And I say that with admiration, right? He's a little bit country, but he kind of resists that categorization. He's a little bit Rock. Like Casey Musgraves, who he's duetting with, yeah. Right. Casey Musgraves herself is somebody who has a kind of arm's length relationship to traditional country. Right. So a lot of these artists, if they're aiming for the pop audience, then they're going to do well on both charts. They're going to do well on the Hot 100, and they're going

to do well on Hot Country songs. It's kind of like we're now living in a post-oldown road world where we've seen how the crossover works in one direction, and now country artists are kind of trying the crossover in the other direction. And, you know, it's working for them. Country music has traditionally not been a strong streaming medium. Like country audiences were sort of the last major audience to buy into Spotify. They were still, you know, buying CDs longer than most audiences or relying primarily on the radio. The Morgan Wallen audience in particular is a streaming audience. It is a younger audience and it is an audience that consumes music the way we rap audiences do, for example. And this is now deliberate on the part of country artists who are

aiming for that kind of crossover, but sort of in reverse, like aim for the pop crowd, keep the country crowd, and you'll kind of command both charts. And we saw some of that this year. Couldn't you say that the problem of not having audience-based charts has also resulted in the more anomalous behavior on the Hot 100? Audiences are having perhaps outsized influence on the Hot 100 in ways that they haven't had before, right? We see albums like Zach Bryans that the album drops and basically all of its songs on the album chart on the Hot 100. Taylor Swift does the same thing.

Drake does the same thing. We have the case of Jason Aldeen, who's tried that in a small town, was used as a ploy for far-right politics. And people were going out purchasing and trying to boost this song as a demonstration. of their fealty to a group, the same thing that Stan groups do to their own favorite artists. So has the breakdown of the audience-based charts

also had maybe unforetold changes to the Hot 100? Yes, essentially, in the sense that now what were perceived as niche audiences in the past, if they band together and kind of do the kind of one-week campaign that BTS fans, for example, are famous for, if Jason Aldean fans, who were probably less Jason Al-Dine fans than right-wingers, want to band together and make try that in a small town,

a hit for one week. They can do that. It's kind of a form of consumer activism. And, you know, it has these interesting side effects where a record like the Oliver Anthony record or the Zach Bryan record can sort of command the field for a week or two. Actually, the Zach Bryan record is still in the top ten,

so the Zach Bryan record is shown remarkable legs. But Oliver Anthony was, you know, only in the top 10 for a few weeks. But music has kind of become a war of the fan bases weekend and week out. And this used to be limited to pop and R&B and hip-hop fans, and now it's encompassing country fans. And if there's one thing we know,

it's that country fan bases are as virulent and protective of the primacy of their genre as anybody else is. So we're seeing that now on the Hot 100. perhaps what we've seen then is a lesson from Lil Nas X. Lil Nas X figured out how to garner attention, game, social media sites, build a fan base, really ask people,

hey, do you know that lyric from my own song? Right. And effectively build a hit in that kind of way. And it seems like some of the songs that we see in the Top of the Hot 100 are not actually perhaps all that different from Lil Nas X in Old Town Road. Yeah, you know, I've been writing about number one hits for Slate for 10 years now.

And in a way, I feel like you can sort of divide the last 10 years in the charts into before Old Town Road and after Old Town Road. Old Town Road was almost like a proof of concept that you could, I don't want to say game the charts, but sort of work all the levers on the charts. Because Old Town Road was a legitimately popular song that was adopted across audiences. It was not just the biggest song in the country. It was sort of the biggest meme in the country, the biggest topic of conversation in the country. and it commanded the field. And a lot of songs have hit number one since then that have worked similar levers

to sort of command the cultural conversation. Like, I may not like the fact that for a week this summer, try that in a small town by Jason Aldeen was number one. But I would say, in its meager defense, there was definitely a week in July when that was the most talked about song in the country. You know, whatever your thoughts about the quality of the song or the politics of the song,

It was definitely the most obsessed over song for that week of July. So in that perverse sense, try that in a small town deserved its week at number one. However, I blanch as I say that, the same way that Old Town Road deserved its 19 weeks at number one, because for several months, that was the song that was commanding the cultural conversation. So, yeah, we're all kind of living in a world little Naznex helped create. Chris Malafi, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. said, your book, Old Town Road, opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about country

music, about the charts. Thank you so much for joining me, and I highly recommend that everybody go out and check it out. Thank you so much, Charlie. It was an honor to be here, and I appreciate it. This episode, Switched on Pop was produced by me and Rihanna Cruz, edited by Julie Myers, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb and community management by B. Ashokka, is our executive producer, a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Rulture. Following up on this whole conversation, I would love to hear what country music is playing in your ears. Hit us up on social media at Switched on Pop. And you can find more back episodes of our catalog at our website, Switchedonpop.com,

or we've got some fun merch. We'll be back again next week where I speak with the breakout artist, Noah Khan, who was just nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys for his extremely successful take on Folken Americana music. It's going to be a great conversation. I'll see you next Tuesday. And until then, thanks for listening.