Today, Explained - Achy Breaky Charts

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

“Old Town Road” officially became the most popular song in America today. But it’s also the most controversial. Vox’s Allegra Frank chronicles Lil Nas X’s challenges with the charts and Charlie Harding, co-host of the “Switched on Pop” podcast, attempts to figure out what counts as country. *An earlier version of our episode misstated the origins of “country trap.” Lil Nas X calls Young Thug a pioneer in the genre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we get to the show, the show is brought to you with support from Quip Electric Toothbrushes. Your first refill pack is free right now. When you buy an electric toothbrush at getquip.com slash explain, they start at just $25. That website, one more time, is getquip.com slash explained. Yeah, I'm going to take my horse to the old town road. I'm going to ride till I can't no more. Okay, so there's a song. It's called Old Town Road.

It's by a guy named Lil Nas X. No relation to Nasty Nas from NYC. Old Town Road hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 today. It is the most popular song in America, and it's also the most controversial. So Old Town Road is in the center of an interesting conversation now about who and what gets to count as country music. Allegra Frank is a culture editor for Vox. But as country continues to absorb other genres, like there's country rap, a lot of country music artists are collaborating with pop stars.

The traditionalists, the purists who think of country as the old town road, literally, they start to question who gets to be in it. Allegra, before we really get into the song, who is this guy? Who is Lil Nas X? He is a actually 20-year-old rapper. It's his birthday today. Today? Yeah, today, April 9th. It's his birthday.

So happy birthday, Lil Nas. Happy birthday, Lil Nas X. One more year and you can taste alcohol for the first time. Yes, and that will be very exciting, I think, for his career. He is from Atlanta. Technically, his birth name is Montero Hill, but he has been calling himself Lil Nas X for several years now. And last year, he joined SoundCloud, as many people do. and by the end of the year in December, he released a song called Old Town Road. He bought a beat that had this sort of country sounding instrumental to it. And he said he was living at home, feeling very lonely, feeling like a lonely cowboy.

And he decided to pair that feeling with this sort of twangy beat that he bought. So Old Town Road starts off very much as this, you know, deep-voiced ode to the simple life in the, you know, dirt road path with your horse. Yeah, I'm gonna take my horse to the old town road. I'm gonna ride. And then it breaks into what he calls country trap. The horse is in the bag. Horse stock is attached.

Hat is matted black. Got the booshes black to match. Riding on a horse. So he uploads the song to SoundCloud back in December. Why is it just making waves in like recent weeks and even months? He basically timed it well for this thing that's called the Yeehaw Agenda. The what? The Yeehaw Agenda? The Yeehaw Agenda. So this woman, Brie Malandro, she tweeted about how a lot of

Black artists are getting interested in sort of the country aesthetic. Okay. Black artists are getting interested in sort of the country aesthetic. And the way that Lil Nas X factored into that is while people were picking up on the good old cowboy cowgirl aesthetic, his song was circulating on Twitter. And he made it available for free on TikTok, which is this huge platform kind of akin to Vine, where people can lip sync to songs and record themselves doing dance moves. And people who already were kind of feeling this kind of ironic cowboy vibe turned Old Town Road into the Yeehaw Challenge. It became this new TikTok phenomenon where people would try and outdo each other dancing to Old Town Road. So the way the song starts is it's very classic country, and then the beat drops. And that's where all these videos get their comedy from.

It's like what happens when the beat drops, right? Exactly. So people are kind of just like standing around, and then they jump right timed to the beat dropping, and it cuts to them wearing cowboy outfits and doing like square dancing. Oh, yeah, bro. Dude, watch this horse flung them off, bro. Lil Nas X continues to argue on Twitter like, oh, I'm so happy to see all these people, you know, making memes and listening to the song. But I'm serious about it. Like just because it's it can be funny and I'm funny doesn't mean it's a parody. What happens after this song becomes such a huge meme on TikTok?

In mid-March, the Billboard charts come out. And the song had become so much of a viral hit that it actually appeared on the Billboard charts. It appeared on the Hot Rap Hip Hop Songs chart and the Hot Country Songs chart. And this is because a song like Old Town Road is getting streamed a ton on places like Spotify and YouTube and SoundCloud. And those streams now count a fair amount on Billboard, right? Yes, exactly. That was exciting for a lot of people. I mean, we don't often see Black artists on the country charts in general,

and we don't often see SoundCloud-born rap-adjacent songs charting so highly, especially ones that really are just circulated through memes and the internet. Okay, so what happens next? The song is starting to chart and it's rising on Billboard. Where does it go from there? Five staffers from Billboard released an article in the publication and the majority of them wrote it off as, oh, it's sort of a fluke hit, it's a joke.

The following week, it was gone from the country chart. It was on the Hot 100 and the rap chart, but Old Town Road was not on the country chart. Where was it on the Billboard charts when it got removed? So it was only on the chart for one week. So when it debuted, it was already at number 19. Which is to suggest that it would have kept climbing had they not removed it.

Exactly. How often does Billboard remove songs that are climbing up its charts? Very rarely. I mean, people were starting to report on, hey, Billboard has quietly stricken Old Town Road from the record. What did Billboard say? They said, while it incorporates references to country and cowboy imagery,

it does not embrace enough elements of today's country music to chart in its current version. How does Lil Nas respond to that? He said he was extremely disappointed. When I found out Billboard took it off the country charts, like before like it was even taken off the country charts, I was just happy to be on Billboard at all. But then it was like, I started to think, I was like,

after like listening to other songs that's actually on that chart, it's like, wait a minute. Something is not right, basically. This is the point in this story where this becomes about a very white music space and his song gets quietly removed by a very powerful, influential organization. How much of this is about race or how much does the conversation then shift to race? So Genius reached out and of course, Billboard said, oh, no, it has nothing to do with his race. It has everything to do with the song and the lack thereof of country elements in it. It immediately set off conversation, especially in the black Twitter community. Country has often been very much protected. There's a big gatekeeping sort of

vibe in country music that prevents Black artists from really penetrating the scene. There are some exceptions. Hootie. Hootie, yes, exactly. Darius Rucker, he's the big one of Hootie and the Blowfish fame. He sort of spawned off from that band into a solo career that has been very successful. But he has said, yes, I do receive hate mail from people who say, you don't belong here. You're not real country. you know, which essentially is people saying you don't look like us and you're not white. But he has been an exception in the genre. But Lil Nas X clearly subscribes to the if you can't beat him, join him school of thought, because late last week he drops a remix that totally changes the trajectory of this song again.

So Lil Nas X has a huge Twitter following and the news spread so far out that people like Achy Rechy Heart Sensation and Father of Miley, Billy Ray Cyrus, publicly tweeted at Lil Nas X saying, I think this is wrong and I'm a fan of your song and like your country, you're an outlaw just like me. Billy Ray Cyrus coming out so publicly with his support. Lil Nas X, of course, retweeted that. They talked on the DL and they announced that they actually went in the studio together to

remix the song. I'm like a Marlboro man, so I keep going back. Wish I could roll on back to that old town road. I wanna ride till I can't go. Yeah, I'm gonna take my horse. So what does that mean for the song? Is it going to get back on the country charts? So that's sort of the question now. The only difference is Billy Ray Cyrus really just singing the main hook of the song and then singing a few more verses.

It otherwise is the exact same song. But because there's a vaunted legend of country music, the question is, will Billboard consider this country now? Billboard has responded to that saying, we're investigating the matter and we're paying attention to see if we should reinstate Old Town Road onto the chart. I personally don't have a lot of hope because I think the optics of allowing a Billy Ray Cyrus featured version that is otherwise exactly the same are not great. But it's interesting to hear

Billboard say, we are thinking about this one more time. Allegra Frank covers culture at Vox. Our trip down the old town road ain't over yet. Next, we're going to try and figure out what even is country music anymore. Thank you. Desalmado tweeted at me and said my brother at G underscore Daval bought his quip at getquip.com slash explained and we were talking on the phone and I didn't notice he was brushing his teeth until he spit and ruined it all. I think what El Infame is trying to say

is that the quip is quiet. It also doesn't require a clunky charger and apparently it runs for three months on one charge. You can find out for yourself at getquip.com slash explained. The quip is backed by over 20,000 dental professionals. And right now you get your first refill pack for free. When you buy a Quip electric toothbrush, they start at just $25. That site one more time, getquip.com slash explained. Charlie Harding, you're one of the hosts of Vox's Switched on Pop podcast, as well as a

producer and songwriter yourself. A big part of the controversy over Old Town Road is about genre. How does one figure out the lines between genres, between country and pop and hip hop? When I think about genre, I typically think about three main components. There's a musical component, there's a commercial component, and there's a cultural component. Well, let's start with the music. What should we be thinking about when we think about this song and how it fits into the musical genre of country or hip-hop? I feel like the controversy right now is, is this thing actually country? And so we have to define, well, what is country music? And if we look at the sort of musical components, we can think about

what are the instruments that you use? What are the timbres, the twang, the sounds, and what are the lyrical components? So is Old Town Road a country song by those three metrics? Let's take them one by one. So instrumentation, country music is going to have a lot of acoustic instruments, but traditionally we're going to hear maybe some banjo, maybe some mandolin. And here, there's banjo. So instruments, check. Timbre, that vocal twang that we expect in country music,

it's in there. Like Lil Nas X has got a vocal twang, that real nasal sound. When, of course, Billy Ray Cyrus has done the track, you get that twang as well from someone who is a classic country artist hat down crosstown living like a rock star spend a lot of money on my even says guitar yeah totally exactly and then finally if we look at the lyrics this is just full of country music lyrical tropes you gotta be on a road. You got to have a cowboy hat, right? You got to be wearing Wrangler jeans in this case, right? You got to be kind of sad.

Yeah, totally. Lyrically, I think it has all of those essential components. When I hear that vocal twang and when I hear banjo, I through and through, I'm like, yeah, this is a country song. So what I'm hearing is, yes. Yeah. But how about the rest of it? How about that second metric you had, commercial? When we look at the history of where genre in pop music comes from, we'll see that there are some not so pretty histories. The short of it is that

what is now known as R&B, progenitor hip-hop, was at one point called race music. It was specifically for people that were of a specific race, whereas country music was called hillbilly music for people of another race. And basically, we had black and white music segregated along those lines with marketing definitions so that labels would produce music for a specific racial audience. It was that explicit, and we live with that history today. I guess that sort of leads us into this conversation about the culture. Absolutely. Lil Nas X posted this on SoundCloud. He actually, in the metadata, said it was a country song. So there's a question about who gets to be the gatekeeper of declaring

what genre you are. Really, I think we're just seeing some casual or not so casual racism about who is and what isn't country. I think that this gets much more complicated when we actually look at the sounds of contemporary country music, which doesn't conform to that original classification of you have to have banjos and a certain sound and a certain twang, because there's lots of contemporary music which is actually equally pulling from hip-hop sounds. Trap beats, 808s, all this and that. And this is from very conventional white country Nashville artists. That's right. Yeah. So the song that everyone's pointing to is Florida Georgia Line, meant to be with Bebe Rexxa. And when you go into the chorus, the thing is a trap song.

It's got an 808 beat. It's got stuttering hi-hats. The thing is a wild and successful crossover. So today actually it was like, I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if I just like went down the country charts and see if there were other songs that were doing this or it's like Beverexa, Florida Georgia Line,

this is like a one-off. And I just found over and over all sorts of songs which didn't conform to the musical categories of country music, right? So I found like Fillmore's Love That About You, which is another song, which is just like, it's got a straight ahead trap beat in it. I then went off and looked at like Dan and Shay, their song All To Myself, doesn't really feature any standard country music instrumentation and there's really no vocal twang to it. I'm jealous of the blue jeans that you're wearing

And the way they're holding you so tight And so when things on the country charts are bleeding into other generic qualities musically, it definitely feels like it's not appropriate to call out Lil Nas X for having a country sound, which includes trap beats and sort of saying, well, that's not country. So what you're saying is there's already hip hop all over the country charts right now. Yeah, I mean, hip hop is the dominant musical force everywhere, and it has wildly influenced country music, as have other genres. I hear EDM in country music. I hear pop in country music, as have other genres. I hear EDM in country music. I hear pop in country music.

This is not old school banjo mandolin, that kind of upright bass sound from decades past. It is contemporary popular music with subtle nuanced sounds that maybe make things sound country. And oftentimes it feels like it's more about gatekeeping than it is necessarily about the actual quality of sound but all the songs and artists you're talking about are white right and then this black teenager came along who's a creature of the internet and he sort of just exposed the whole world of hypocrisy absolutely Absolutely. And there is a history of country artists actually inviting Black artists to perform with them, right?

So, like, Louis Armstrong has performed with Jimmy Rogers, and they had a hit, Blue Yodel No. 9. The yodel-ee, the yodel-ee. Glenn Campbell invited Stevie Wonder to sing Blowing in the Wind. How many roads must a man walk down?

Willie Nelson worked with Snoop Dogg on a track called My Medicine. Get my money, buy my medicine, buy my medicine, buy my medicine. Yeah, you know I got the head of medicine. That prescription medicine, baby. There's all these examples of sort of like white artists bringing black artists into the country charts, which is accepted. I think there's also examples Sounds and Country Music is one of the most essential country albums of all time, in which he really is demonstrating the historical crossover of these musics. I mean, Sean, like, I played in a country band. I love country music. I just picked up the mandolin, and I played in a country band with my buddy Nate, who I do the show with. He was playing banjo. And I promise you, nobody

was concerned about whether or not we had like put in our time to become a country band. Whereas people are really concerned about Lil Nas X playing country music. I wonder why that is. You know, you hear so many stories about how streaming is killing the music industry, how Spotify is destroying album sales for artists. But is this Old Town Road story an example of how Spotify and SoundCloud and YouTube streams being considered in this sort of bigger picture of success in the music industry being an overall good thing because it's destroying some of these gatekeepers and some of these norms in the industry that were kind of garbage to begin with? I think that this is the essential question about who gets to be a gatekeeper and that

institutions like Billboard might seem uneasy by the fact that there are other folks deciding whether or not something is or is not a certain genre. I went on Spotify today, and I was scrolling through, just kind of like browsing in their search section, and the category country was next to the category focus, which was, I think, maybe even below the category podcasts. These are not mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive categories. There is extreme, there's a lot of overlap. And I think that today, people listen as much by mood as they do by genre, upending an entire way of thinking about the importance of these generic categories that pump up and chill are equally as important as country or hip hop in how people might approach going to

listening to their music. It is changing the way things chart, where they end up. And there are some uneasy cultural negotiation that needs to be done in order to decide who gets to claim what kind of music they're making. And in that regard, Lil Nas X is thus far the most unlikely hero of American culture in 2019. Absolutely. We have to also point out how amazing it is that this thing, which was a meme that was commentary on cowboy culture and Black identity that became an immediate overnight think piece, which a aging country star then remixes. Like, this thing is entirely of our moment. This is not old country music of a rural community.

This is the internet generation. Before we go, one last amazing thing about this song. It samples the song you're hearing right now. This song is called 34 Ghosts 4, and it is by Nine Inch Nails. Which is to say, Trent Reznor and his songwriting partner Atticus Ross share credit with Montero Hill aka Lil Nas X on Old Town Road. Which is to say, Lil Nas X and Nine Inch Nails have the number one song in America right now. And it's been remixed by Billy Ray Cyrus. What a world. Charlie Harding hosts Switched on Pop.

It's a very good podcast about popular music. And there are too few of those. It's also the good podcast about popular music, and there are too few of those. It's also the newest member of the Vox Media Podcast Network, so hit subscribe, sit back, and wait for the bangers to drop every Tuesday. Today Explained is also a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show's produced in association with Stitcher. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. My favorite country song is The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by the band. Irene Noguchi's Really Into Thank you. Jim Shapiro has a soft spot for the Sundance head version of Love Can Build a Bridge, specifically his performance on The Voice from 2016. Hannah Bolaños likes Rockstar by Nickelback because there's just no telling for taste, folks.

The mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder can't wait to climb the country charts himself. And Siona Petros, her favorite country song is Old Town Road by Lil Nas X. Can't nobody tell me nothing. You can't tell me nothing. Can't nobody tell me nothing. You can't tell me nothing. Let's do this like fill in the blank. This episode was brought to you by Quip Electric Toothbrushes. Nailed it. The Quip starts at just $25., nailed it. The Quip Start suggests $25.

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