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

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.

lol

I hope it’s number one all summer!

If it’s Number One next week it becomes one of only *12* songs to log 13 weeks at Number One

literally every 6-year-old kid in my son's kindergarten class is obsessed with this song and the teachers are all sick of it. i love the idea that this happened even a tiny little bit because of something Billboard did.

“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.“

15,000 years later mankind catches up with the voice of this child

Why does man start memes?

Taken at our writing center:

https://i.imgur.com/F9RausL.jpg

officially into “who let the dogs out” territory now

I like "Rodeo" as a sequel to "Old Town Road," but I wish Cardi would cut the swears for what is essentially children's music

― space invaders are smokin penises!!!! (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, June 24, 2019 5:10 PM (two days ago)

This is really true.

dont think "legitimate star is a real thing "

massive outpouring of press coverage from people excited to wax lyrical with their theories about "subverting country music"

I think that the song appeared on Billboard charts because it started blowing up and a song blowing up is not contingent on a chart to catalog that rise. Songs that are blowing up sometimes do stall and die, but in other cases they continue to rise and while there are a lot of factors as to what that might happen, I have never thought that internet think-pieces about the validity of Billboard chart designations were the culprit.

But hey, there's a first time for everything. I just wish the internet was around when Fishbone got fucked over by Soundscan (which ironically showed the commercial validity of country music; link for young'uns who don't remember this.)

Oh my god you guys have fucking brain damage

“Kids I know like this song therefore it becoming page news across the country had no or negligible effect on its rise” = “if I like a song it becomes impossible for me to acknowledge that it didn’t attain its position on the charts through the purity of the people’s love”

This is pop Stan logic

*front page news

This was the point that I made which people initially took issue with, which is not the same as saying "no one would listen to this if billboard hadn't happened:

also tbf my first exposure to this song was on tiktok & as ive said before if the song had first broken through those memes instead of billboard being dumb the popular response to this song would have been different imo

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Monday, June 24, 2019 5:07 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, it was charting, much like cotton eyed joe, whip/nae nae, and the macarena, none of which I remember being specific ILX cause celebres. .. how many of you have actually *seen* the memes that were on tiktok driving its popularity at this point?

the narrative attached to it via the Billboard snafu is absolutely part of the story of what's driven its success; that it gets blanket algorithmic press attention is 100% a result of the story of its rise being about Billboard & not teens drinking "yeehaw juice" on tiktok. the latter drove the numbers but the former is what drove it to where it stands today, to a cultural behemoth that ilxors argue someone disliking is somehow being disingenuous

So internet think-pieces suddenly help songs blow up? That's a novel thought.

"internet thinkpieces" do you think regular people somehow stopped consuming news in 2011?

Oh. Well, you sure showed me how I misunderstood things.

― Loud guitars shit all over "Bette Davis Eyes" (NYCNative), Wednesday, June 26, 2019 9:43 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i showed how you're incapable of reading me in good faith when you disagree w me sure

literally every 6-year-old kid in my son's kindergarten class is obsessed with this song and the teachers are all sick of it. i love the idea that this happened even a tiny little bit because of something Billboard did.

― alpine static, Wednesday, June 26, 2019 1:03 AM (eleven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love that you're arguing with a strawman

"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.

― dyl, Tuesday, June 25, 2019 9:46 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how many people on ILX can honestly tell me they've heard Sech's Otro Trago, the current #7 song on the Spotify charts? Are the kids dancing to that one in kindergartens too? Do you know? Are you posting anecdotally about it in your music critic facebook threads? What about DDG's "Hold Up," currently in the YouTube top ten? Do you think this will be the next song to dominate the Hot 100 for 13 weeks?

Do you guys know who DDG is? Have you heard the name before?

sorry i have to go to the dentist today so im being extra testy & had some free time

at any rate its fine that people like this song, i dont think there's anything wrong for the pitchfork piece to argue that ppl are alienated by its popularity which seems to make liking it or disliking it beside the point (I don't even dislike it to the extent ppl probably think, as usual im more annoyed by how ppl respond to it than the the song itself), if anything i feel like ive been cornered into "hating" the song bc I skeptical of the story we're telling ourselves abt it

lmao you don't say

p sure alpine wasn't arguing with anyone

it seemed like he's saying, "i love the idea" as a reference to an idea that was being articulated on this thread but maybe he was just loving an idea from thin air

happy bday brad

hey i could be wrong, that post can be read in a lot of ways. and thank you deej!

I wasn't really trying to argue, but it's also entirely possible I sounded like I was arguing against a strawman. If so, sorry. Regardless, I can't go back and read carefully (sorry) to get totally oriented in this discussion.

But I will say that I don't really buy that the Billboard thing contributed in any truly meaningful way to this song's ubiquity. If it did, it's a *tiny* percentage of how big the song is now. The song was well on its way, imo.

Was the Billboard thing really front page news across the country? I mean, it generated an ILM thread and it was on my Twitter feed, but I honestly believe that of the, say, 500 ppl I know IRL who know/love this song, I would guess that 1 or 2 of them (at most) know about the Billboard controversy.

I don't know why I even jumped in, really. I just know that the song has taken over my kid's school in such a way that when that video came out a few weeks ago of LNX doing the song for a gym full of kids, my true first reax was "Most people don't realize how lit elementary schools are these days."

The teachers, helpers, after-school attendants, etc., all play pop music all the time. My kids know all this shit way before me, and they're both under 10.

i was first acquainted with this song from an ~8 year old in the park doing wheelies on his bike going, "you can't tell me nothing". Little young for Kanye, I thought to myself

Again, my 12-year-old daughter's 12-year-old friend knew about the Billboard controversy. In enough depth and with enough sophistication to recognize that the reason he was probably kicked off the country charts was because he was black.

elementary is lit
junior high is woke

xpost that's awesome. good for her. i could be way off, idk

i don't think anyone has mentioned that the tiktok memes around this song were HILARIOUS and basically the same as for harlem shuffle except that instead of everybody suddenly wilding out on the drop it was kids suddenly attired in cowboy gear for the verse, in a delicious reflection of the song's dual identity as urban and rural. it really was amazing and endlessly repeatable. and also feels a million years ago now. but the song itself, bridgeless, under 3 minutes ("a great pop song should be 2:50!!" - p townshend), is somehow sturdy enough to sustain it, to hold up to all those replays. it's impressive. of course a bit of coverage by the intelligentsia helps, all coverage helps.

I think people are conflating ubiquity among adults and ubiquity among kids, and it is resulting in a lot of talking past one another

in other words, if you want to know whether any given viral/tiktok/streaming sensation has traction among the kids, then ask a kid whether he's heard of them and not a 30-year-old