Backlash after Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" removed from Billboard Hot Country chart

Like it wasn’t even top 40 off tiktok? There are probably 60 songs on the hot 100 right now a plurality if ilxors haven’t even heard

billy ray cyrus was more important than billboard

Billy Ray Cyrus doesn’t happen without billboard !!

Literally every media platform covered that story. It was like on local tv stations and shit

Billy Ray Cyrus doesn’t happen without billboard !!

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 2:38 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark

sure but what you describe -- a song so big that it keeps artists like drake and taylor swift from no 1 -- is solely bcuz of the decision to put billy ray cyrus on the remix

billboard doesn't even appear to be charting the original at this point

legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars

When it’s not a legitimate star the Billboard has a way of shutting that whole thing down

Like it wasn’t even top 40 off tiktok? There are probably 60 songs on the hot 100 right now a plurality if ilxors haven’t even heard

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 2:17 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

exactly how popular is this song among the kids? let's see if generation X and some older millennials have ever heard of it

my 4yo son has been singing it constantly. He went into school yesterday and sang it to his 30-ish teacher. She said she was singing that song at karaoke on Friday. This is total saturation, folks.

Conclusion: the song is crazy popular, you don't have to like it, and it may not get play in 2032, especially if the polar ice shelves melt and wreak havoc on coastal cities.

my eight year old just asked me "Have you heard of a song called 'Old Town Road' it's a very good song" they played it at their dance time during daycare

I feel like it will get play 20 years from now, like Baby Got Back or Push It

yeah I don't think it's going away

Reznor finally has a crossover for the pre-teens.

Would love it if the NIN "Ghosts" album becomes this sort of Violent Femmes-esque entry/talisman for this generation.

haven’t heard the ep yet but i want to say that i disagree with this from the p4k review. Old town road is obviously a good song. not so bad it’s good or so good it’s bad; just good. i don’t know what it means for the song to be ‘aware it’s a meme’; it only became a meme because it is very good. i wasn’t ‘in on the joke’ and i don’t really think there is or was a ‘joke’

― flopson, Sunday, June 23, 2019 9:51 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

??? its clearly a parody of country music from a guy who played a lot of red dead redemption i think its obvi that theres a joke element to it

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Monday, June 24, 2019 12:02 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that paragraph to me is simply describing the intense alienation that comes from a song you dislike becoming absurdly popular; I felt an even stronger dislike of "Fuck You" by Cee Lo which was also one of those songs that felt pretty intensely "popular" in both the charts & critically (& on ILX) in a way that felt "critic proof" (ie it was a success and lots of ppl liked it & its effective therefor it is good)

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Monday, June 24, 2019 12:03 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah my interpretation was that the author didn't like the song as music (wrong but fair) but instead of just coming out and saying that tried to over-intellectualize others' enjoyment to pretend that he understood its appeal

you refer to deej, right

I was meh on Old Town Road at first, now I love it, haven’t heard the EP but A. Pierre’s trashing of it was one of the most entertaining reviews I’ve read in a while. The only weak/lazy writing in the whole piece is the passage cited above.

Old Town Road >>>>>>> Fuck You

Old Town Road="fuck you"

exactly how popular is this song among the kids? let's see if generation X and some older millennials have ever heard of it

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 9:18 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my 4yo son has been singing it constantly. He went into school yesterday and sang it to his 30-ish teacher. She said she was singing that song at karaoke on Friday. This is total saturation, folks.

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 9:43 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Conclusion: the song is crazy popular, you don't have to like it, and it may not get play in 2032, especially if the polar ice shelves melt and wreak havoc on coastal cities.

― recriminations from the nitpicking woke (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 9:47 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

are you guys incapable of reading? we're talking about how popular it was BEFORE the billboard snafu

it was a random tiktok song like tons of others that chart & no one here talks about

The Billboard thing happens, which isn't what catapults it

the RESPONSE to the Billboard thing is what catapults it. It becomes a major news story so awareness of it completely saturates

"Bottoms Up (We Was A the Club)" was in like the same area as this at the time & now it's completely forgotten

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YwAaNFJwRA

Old Town Road >>>>>>> Fuck You

― flopson, Tuesday, June 25, 2019 10:31 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm though i've also been always allergic to Fuck You (and Crazy)

egitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars
legitimate stars

― Loud guitars shit all over "Bette Davis Eyes" (NYCNative), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 2:13 AM (twelve hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When it’s not a legitimate star the Billboard has a way of shutting that whole thing down

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 7:49 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

u can tell its a deej pile on when ppl start purposefully misreading things that are not hard to understand...obviously i like plenty of one hit wonders & dont think "legitimate star" is a real thing but there's also obviously a clear difference between IE Drake & Lil Nas X at the current moment in terms of their nature to stardom, stop being willfully stupid

Old Town Road >>>>>>> Fuck You

― flopson, Tuesday, June 25, 2019 10:31 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm though i've also been always allergic to Fuck You (and Crazy)

― omar little, Tuesday, June 25, 2019 2:18 PM (fifty-three seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i wonder if I meant "Crazy" instead of "Fuck You"? I think I did. "Crazy" was more acclaimed. "Fuck You" was probably slightly more divisive

But "Crazy" Definitely got the exact same "You lost, this song is popular and good and arguing about it means you're wrong" treatment at the time

Deej, I don't think anyone disputes that the Billboard fuckery literally occurred right before the song exploded, but I think everyone but you agrees that correlation is not causation

old town road is better than anything chief keef ever released

laughing at these lames like yee haw haw haw

"Bottoms Up (We Was A the Club)" was in like the same area as this at the time & now it's completely forgotten

I will NEVER forget the BoyBoy Westcoast

Deej, I don't think anyone disputes that the Billboard fuckery literally occurred right before the song exploded, but I think everyone but you agrees that correlation is not causation

― space invaders are smokin penises!!!! (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 2:20 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

everyone does not agree with that!

both things can be true--the song very well may have faded away had Billboard not f'ed up AND many of the people who were exposed it to it and liked it after it's profile was raised don't know or care much about the Billboard thing

i never implied that everyone who likes it cares about the billboard thing ... just that something becoming insanely popular can absolutely come about from extra contextual shit like that ... the charts are not some organic reward system of song quality

Crazy and Fuck You are both really nothing tracks for me, the first one i find p annoying and the second one i've heard a lot and yet can barely remember a single thing about it.

awareness of the song exploded bc of the billboard thing, but i don't think its popular bc people somehow dont like the song or something

Damn, this is exactly why the Red Scare podcast is more popular than NPR's Fresh Air this week!

if you guys didnt have ppl here hating on this song you'd probably like the song less. i feel like this song almost needs an antagonist to feel this strongly about

Damn, this is exactly why the Red Scare podcast is more popular than NPR's Fresh Air this week!

― space invaders are smokin penises!!!! (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 2:29 PM (twenty-eight seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just bc one is better made than the other doesn't mean the fact that one is on a major platform with brand recognition doesn't also effect its level of popularity

More data: my just about 12-year old described the song exactly the same way as my older daughter - "it's good, it's funny" - but then added "it's a meme song." So I asked her, but is it a good song or good because of the memes? She admitted it's catchy, but what she liked most about it was that it was really simple and repetitive, so it was easy to learn dances to it. She knew about it from TikTok and that was about it, but her friend in the car was very well aware of the Billboard controversy.

old town road is better than anything chief keef ever released

― VAR me to the end of yawn (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 3:21 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Better rapping.

are you guys incapable of reading? we're talking about how popular it was BEFORE the billboard snafu

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Who cares, and why are you rude about it?

the family seal iirc

old town road is better than anything chief keef ever released
― VAR me to the end of yawn (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 3:21 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Better rapping.

― Mazzy Tsar (PBKR), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 1:44 PM (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark

more in the pocket certainly

anybody who thinks the billboard snafu didn't contribute somewhat to the song's increasing popularity is kidding themselves, I mean y'all know how bad it pains me to say "deej otm" but the massive outpouring of press coverage from people excited to wax lyrical with their theories about "subverting country music" et al meant people who wouldn't have heard about the song otherwise did hear about & checked it out

those people loved it because it's a fuckin jam no doubt, and under-12 kids love the shit out of it automatically, so when this song got into the hands of moms & dads it was destined for total cultural saturation. but those moms and dads heard it because some mainstream outlets were writing about it

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if there's anything I know about working moms and dads, it's the incredibly common experience of hearing about something, remembering it for the duration of the work day, putting their kids to bed, finally getting some alone time with the internet around 10pm and then using that time to stream a viral rap song they heard about

lol this is exactly how I heard it the first time

Yeah you know nothing about working parents

anybody who thinks the billboard snafu didn't contribute somewhat to the song's increasing popularity is kidding themselves

this is the actual position that no one has argued itt!

I don't think anyone disputes that the Billboard fuckery literally occurred right before the song exploded

actually yes, i will cop to being the one who disputes that particular narrative. the song was already exploding before the billboard snafu, and no number of posts saying it's fucking stupid or moving the goalposts is going to change the plain facts pointing clearly to that conclusion!

"old town road" was already #3 on spotify (up from #11 the prior week) and #5 on youtube w/ its red dead redemption clip alone (up from #20), comfortably the top streaming gainer on the entire hot 100, at the time leight's article was published -- like, by that time it was already clear it was least going to be a "juju on that beat" or "watch me (whip/nae nae)". like... at the very least! it was not just chilling, stabilized outside the top 40 ('not even top 40 off tiktok' -- i laughed) until the story broke and the remix happened... there has been literally no point between its chart debut and its peak when it has not had significant momentum. it jumped from #15 to #1 on the hot 100 before the billy ray cyrus remix had even come out. i would add that the remix is what really took the story from the pages of scattered music sites and twitter #discourse to your local evening news and its own dedicated ilm thread (i was literally apologizing about being the only person posting about the song in this thread as the developments unfolded).

again, there's no denying that the billboard fiasco lit a whole new flame under the song. but the initial contention that the song broke because of and after that story's emergence, and had not already broken thru as a tiktok phenom, is blatantly false.

on another note, the moment i knew it had connected cross-generationally was when i saw a big crowd of drunk ppl screaming along to it at a bar

I knew it had connected when Whiney and deej popped up here.