Because Lil Nas X had tagged the song on digital services as country, “Old Town Road” was allowed onto Hot Country Songs for a single week-it made a notably high debut at No. Here’s a recap of Billboard’s head-shaking head-fake. In an era when folks still insist on calling Post Malone a rapper, X/Hill’s descriptor “country trap” is actually pretty apt. Meanwhile, notwithstanding its thumping beat, “Road” is about as much a “rap” song as Drake’s “Hotline Bling” was: Hill sings through the whole thing. 1 hit as a songwriter.) The charm of the song is its self-awareness, its pastiche-the lyrics sound like a first draft from a kid writing a cowboy ditty for a cultural studies class, dutifully checking off references to a horse, a cowboy hat, and cowboy boots, not to mention that old town road. (You can’t make this stuff up, folks: This is now Trent Reznor’s first No. “Road” landed in December-a song Hill built on producer YoungKio’s sample of “ 34 Ghosts IV,” an unusually twangy, but typically somber, 2008 instrumental track by Nine Inch Nails. The origin story for “Old Town Road” is “ Panda”-esque, with a sprinkling of “ Bodak Yellow.” Lil Nas X, a onetime enlistee in Nicki Minaj’s fan army (something he denies) who built up a sizable online following, began issuing music on (where else?) SoundCloud about a year ago. 1 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart, thanks to the thousands of digital sales and millions of streams it was piling up. When I checked with Billboard in early 2015, asking if it would retroactively allow “Uptown Funk” onto the chart, now that it was breaking on urban radio-in fact, by April 2015, the song actually ranked fifth at R&B/hip-hop stations-it affirmed it would not, saying it still considered the song “a pop hit that is crossing over to R&B radio.” Again, I could see why it was reluctant to grandfather it in: If it had reclassified “Uptown Funk” as R&B at that late date, it would have, bizarrely, debuted at No. This run by “Funk” would have preemptively beaten future record-setter “ One Dance” by Drake, an 18-week topper in 2016, and it would have beaten both “ The Honeydripper” by Joe Liggins and “ Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” by Louis Jordan, each of which spent 18 weeks on top in the 1940s, when this chart was called-I kid you not- Race Records.
To be exact-based on my understanding of Billboard’s genre-charts methodology-had Ronson and Mars been allowed on that chart, “Funk” would have commanded it for 19 weeks, December 2014 through April 2015, an all-time R&B chart record. 1 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart for a ridiculous period of time. Basically, “Uptown Funk” would have been No. Thinking like a chart analyst, however, I got why Billboard was making this category call-even if the reason seemed a bit cynical. Send me updates about Slate special offers.
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