Loading summary
Transcript93 lines
- [00:00]
A
You're listening ad free on Amazon Music.
- [00:04]
B
Hey everybody. This is Chris Melanfy, host of Hit Parade, Slate's podcast of pop chart history. Welcome to the Bridge. This is a special episode of the Bridge celebrating the release of my new book, Old Town Road. We're making this show available to all Hit Parade listeners and ad free for Slate plus members. This discussion of my book was recorded live on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at Housing Works bookstore in New York City. I was joined by Dan Charnas, author of the New York Times bestseller Dilla Time, the Life and Afterlife of J. Dilla, and the acclaimed the Big Payback, the History of the Business of Hip Hop. My thanks to Hit Parade listeners who came to Housing Works that evening.
- [00:54]
A
Dan and I were joined by a.
- [00:56]
B
Few dozen audience members for this lively discussion. Enjoy.
- [01:01]
A
Thank you all for coming tonight. It's a pleasure to see you all here. And my deepest thanks to this man right here, Dan Charnas, great author in his own right. And I'm just so honored to have you here.
- [01:14]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [01:15]
A
I was going to read a little bit from the book, but if you have any requests or initial thoughts or anything.
- [01:22]
C
I do. I have a lot of initial thoughts.
- [01:25]
A
Lay it on me.
- [01:26]
C
I just want to tell you just a little story to illustrate how I feel about this book. So my day job is I teach history and writing to undergraduates at Tisch at the Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music. And this freshman history course that I teach is all about argument making arguments for historical figures. So we're looking at 150 years of history. We pick 150 different terms, figures, companies, whatever, and they have to make an argument for why they belong. And then their final project is they have to write a paper about a figure of their choice and make an argument and put that argument in context. Why is this person important? And in coaching their papers, I keep holding this book up like, look at how this is. This is an argument about Lil Nas X. But look what he does. He has an entire chapter where he goes through every single meme and context. Kind of like a wave that Lil Nas X rides up to having a hit. And it's brilliant and you should read. And now they want to. I have two requests for this book. Nice now, nice.
- [02:43]
A
That's what we want, more books. That's good.
- [02:46]
C
You know, as an author, I know how hard it is to express, especially writing about music, right? To express why something is important, why we're passionate about something. In my case, let's say it's the hip hop business or Dilla or whatever. It's. It's hard to do, but you do it so masterfully because there's just many levels of context. And so you're going to hear some of that right now.
- [03:12]
A
All right, without further ado, I appreciate those kind words. I'm going to read. I'm going to start by reading the introduction to the book because it's a nice summary of the book and it kind of sets out why this book exists. And I guess before I plunge in, I'll say that this is book three in the Singles series, which is a new ish series from Duke University Press. One of the people I'm looking at in the audience right now is Emily Lordy, who thinks three years ago, called me and said, joshua Clover and I, the curators of this series, were thinking, you might like to write a book about Old Town Road. Would you do it? And I think I spent the first 30 seconds thinking, how am I going to politely tell her I don't have time to write a book? And then after 30 seconds I thought, no, I have to write this book because this book allows me to talk about all the stuff I talk about on Hit Parade, all the stuff I talk about in my why Is the song number 1? Series. It allows me to talk about genre, the charts, pop history, everything. So without further ado, let me read the introduction the last day of the school year at Lander elementary in Mayfield Heights, Ohio was Wednesday, May 29, 2019. Five days earlier, the fifth graders had taken part in the school's annual talent show, capping off the day with a school wide performance of the number one song in America. When video of that adorable performance got back to the artist behind the original song, he decided to visit Mayfield Heights and surprised the kids just before summer with an in person performance of his hit Live in their Gymnasium. The performer, a southern black 20 year old born Montero Lamar Hill, arrived in his now standard uniform of cowboy hat, boots and fringe jacket. Hill adjusted his outfit and was escorted by the school principal into the gym and the kids lost their damn minds as the young man who had dubbed himself Lil Nas X began singing Old Town Road in the gym's makeshift stage. The Lander elementary kids practically screamed the lyrics back at him, including the titter worthy line about bull ridin and boobies. Minutes before stepping out on stage into this frenzied reception, the 20 year old told the camera, quote, I'm finna do the biggest show of my life. Unquote. He was only half kidding as recently as four months earlier, Hill hadn't even been signed to a recording contract. Rapid rises to fame were becoming more commonplace in the post YouTube post Spotify, early TikTok era of Internet fueled music virality. But even by those standards, Hill's trajectory seemed meteoric. As the young man himself told Rolling Stone just one month before his Lander elementary performance quote, time's been going pretty fast. Old Town Road was a singular phenomenon, a one of one. New York Times journalist Jasmine Hughes aptly calls it, quote, an international anthem of defiance, tenacity and travel plans. Unquote. Few songs have experienced its rapid and broad cultural penetration. Within months of its creation, it connected with grade schoolers and grandparents, blue staters and red staters, the very online and the defiantly analogous. It was heard in more than 40 countries around the world. It was consumed by millions of fans of pop, R and B, rap, dance, rock and yes, also country music. Some driven merely by curiosity, most because it's just a very catchy song. In at least one key statistical sense, no song has done what Old Town Road did as of this writing, it remains the longest lasting number one hit of all time on America's flagship pop chart, the Billboard Hot 100. Its 19 weeks at number one was more than twice as long as the Beatles biggest hit and more than the biggest hits by Michael Jackson and Madonna combined. And consider those superstars historic number ones, which were, respectively hey Jude at nine weeks in 1968, Billie Jean at seven weeks in 1983 and take a bow at seven weeks in 1995 were deployed years into each hitmaker's career. Old Town Road was Lil Nas X's first ever charting single chart. Historians like the author of this book make hay out of comparisons like these, with the tacit understanding that the music business of 1968 and that of 2019 were very different. While the Hot 100's underlying formula has remained broadly the same over its 65 years of existence, the chart behaves very differently today than it once did. So yes, explaining how Lil Nas X pulled off his historic chart feat with Old Town Road means dissecting the chart as much as dissecting the song, not unlike the home run record of Babe Ruth's day versus Barry Bonds's, we must reckon with the rules of the sport and the performance enhancers that warp those rules as we weigh the players feats. Nonetheless, Old Town Road earned its climactic chart record. The song is an apotheosis, the culmination of a series of populist trends that had been building toward Lil Nas X's moment. Trends in genre, in technology, in consumption, in identity. On his signature hit, Lil Nas X, whom I'll reference as Nas, his preferred nickname, simultaneously lionized and satirized genre tropes. In so doing, he troubled the very idea of genre, whether it is necessary or even relevant. Nas's smash is a country song built out of an alternative rock sample, a hip hop song in which nobody really raps, a comical song that somehow transcends novelty. It achieved all of this organically, using profoundly inorganic technologies. To the then 20 year old hills generation, these technologies have become so commonplace that they are now the lingua franca of musical creation. It took advantage of changes in our pop metabolism, how memes form movements, a virality that is now reified by the hit parade. Old Town Road even qualifies as a queer anthem, and not only because Montero Hill picked Pride Month 2019 right in the middle of his epic chart topping run to Come out of the Closet. In sum, Old Town Road summarizes the musical past while pointing the way toward our cultural future. But you may be asking, is it a great song? I'd argue that Old Town Road is an excellent pop song, sturdy, witty, inspired. But it's an even more amazing pop artifact. While listening to it, you can't help but think about its backstory. Even if it's your first time hearing it, this only enhances its charms. Many great songs in pop history, at their core, revel in their own existence. From Like a Rolling Stone and Stayin Alive to Smells Like Teen Spirit and Get your Freak on, they are at a root level about themselves. The self consciousness of Old Town Road is one of many things that makes it great. Charts too are reflexive and self reinforcing. They are feedback loops that reflect popularity. Back at an industry eager to make things more popular, to turn once cool cool things into commonplace things that are then replaced by the next cool thing. What makes charts exciting? The reason I focus on them in my writing, my podcast and my scholarship is that the industry rarely knows with any certainty what cool is. Truly unique songs are pop moments that reset our understanding of where cool lies. Old Town Road was one of those. A pop moment that channeled decades of Americana and and the bleeding edge of cool. All of which led up to those kids screaming at Lil Nas X about bull riding and boobies in the Lander elementary gym. Thank you.
- [11:21]
C
I love your writing style.
- [11:23]
A
Thank you. That's very flattering coming from you.
- [11:25]
C
But anyway, listen, every crew has sort of a different member with Different Starship Enterprise would be one. There are certain folks who you turn to for the science, for the weights and measures. I feel like in our sort of cohort, you're the weights and measures guy. You're the person who pays attention to the numbers and helps us understand what they mean. So for me, I'm just curious as to how the charts really became your beat, because you've been working on this beat for quite some time, and it's. The work is admirable. I just. I would like to know how it started.
- [12:06]
A
Okay, well, I see a couple of my cousins sitting in the front row. They will remember that I was sort of obsessed with the charts as a teenager. So this goes way back. And, you know, when I started writing about music in high school, in the 80s, in college, in the 90s, loving the charts was sort of this hobby that dare not speak its name. It was a little uncool and really nerdy. I'm not saying it became that much cooler now, but it was really uncool then. And I would sneak in chart references into things I wrote. But, you know, when I was reviewing records in the 90s for CMJ, chart references were not coin of the realm. What started to change? I often say that for my beat to work, certain things had to be invented. Blogging had to be invented, and podcasting had to be invented. So when blogs became a thing in the 21st century and then sort of aggregated blogs, you know, professional blogging, like, you know, the Gawker Empire, I started writing for a music blog that was part of Gawker called Idolater. And I hung out and I commented a lot. And eventually they said to me, you seem to know what you're talking about. Would you like to, you know, write a little something for us? And I wrote some guest posts. I did a guest editor day. And they particularly liked when I wrote about the charts, because I'd been following the charts for, gosh, at that point, over 20 years. And finally I said to them, if I wrote about the charts regularly, like on a weekly basis, but I wrote it with a little bit of snark, but a little bit of analysis, explaining, okay, this song's number one, and you may love it, you may hate it, but here's why it's number one, would you pay me for that? And they said, yeah, we'd pay you for that. We'd pay you for that weekly. And so I started writing a column called one hundred and Single. I followed Maura Johnston. Shout out to Maura Johnston if she's listening to this to the Village Voice. I did it for a couple more years with the Village Voice. I eventually found my way to Slate. Slate gave me the keys to something that they had tried. I'm looking at another person in the audience right now with Jody Rosen. I think they originally called it Top of the Pops, but when they gave it to me, we retitled it why is this song number one? I've been writing why is this song number one for 10 years? It'll be 10 years in December, by the way. And basically I've now spent 10 years chronicling. You know, the key word in that phrase is why. It's a work of criticism, but it's also a work of analysis. It's like there have been number one hits. I've loved number one hits. I've hated, really hated that song Rude by Magic. I had to write about that awful song. But whether I loved or hated the song, I could explain why the song was number one. And eventually, after I'd done why is the Song Number One? For three or four years, I pitched Slate about doing a podcast called Hit Parade. And what's great about Hit Parade, I've often said that this podcast comes closest to capturing the weird pulses of my brain because you get to not only do the same explaining you do in the written word, but you get to play clips and sort of say, see, it's this part of the song. Not, you know, when you hear that bass line in Chic's Good Times that wound up in Rapper's Delight, we're going to play you the baseline of Good Times, and then we're going to play you Rapper's Delight, that kind of thing. And so, yeah, it's been almost seven years for about six and a half years for Hit Parade and just shy of 10 years for why is the song number one so long? Answer to your question, but that's no, no, I wound up in this.
- [15:19]
C
But do you feel that after all of this analysis that you have a bit of a predictive muscle? Do you know the things that make a good hit? Are you able to identify it?
- [15:32]
A
I often say predictions are a mugs game. I get it wrong as often as I get it right. I called something wrong just this week. I'll confess that new Beatles song, whether you love it or hate it, I thought, oh my God, that much attention. Surely this Beatles song will debut at number one. It debuted at number seven. So I am not writing about the Beatles now and then for why is this song number one?
- [15:52]
C
Yeah, but it's you're only six off.
- [15:54]
A
So.
- [15:54]
C
So that's.
- [15:55]
A
I know. I know I've cheated before. When Running up that Hill by Kate Bush went back into the top 10, we cheated. And I wrote about that. But I don't cheat very often, so I call it wrong all the time. I have had moments where I have an instinct and something sounds like a hit to me, and then there are moments where I'm utterly mystified. When Drake's God's Plan debuted at number one in early 2018, I said, this is number one because Drake is Drake. This is. This is a meandering song. It's barely got a chorus. And then it spent 11 weeks at number one and was the number one song of 2018. And I'll admit it kind of grew on me. But, you know, the first time I heard it, I thought, this is a hit because of fame. It's not a hit because of the song. And, you know, that is part of why songs go to number one.
- [16:38]
C
This is the neighborhood that you. You dwell in. You dwell in the neighborhood of hits. And I've known one other person in my life who grew up just, just obsessed with charts, and that was my first boss in the music business, Corey Robbins.
- [16:53]
A
Oh, nice.
- [16:54]
C
Who was the co founder of, of Profile Records with Steve Platnicky. So Profile signed Run DMC and Rob Bass and special seminal germinal hip hop label. And I worked my way up to finally being offered an A and R job at the age of 22, 23. And he says to me as he gives me the job, he says, you can't know what's going to be a hit. You can only know what you love. So just sign what you love. And then I had an intervening career in which I had absolute. I signed lots of things I loved and had absolutely no hits. And so cut to 20 years later, we're having dinner somewhere in Tribeca, and I said, corey, there's something I've been meaning to ask you all these years. You said to me a long time ago that I should sign what I love, you know, because you can't know what's going to be a hit. But you had hits, hit after hit after hit, and I didn't. What's the difference? What am I doing wrong? He said, well, that's easy. I love hits.
- [18:01]
A
If I loved hits the way Corey loves hits, and I work for a label, I would be in a whole different echelon in my career.
- [18:08]
C
So that was my question. Like, do you, like, you're in this Neighborhood. Do you like the neighborhood?
- [18:13]
A
I do like the neighborhood. I think I've been asked this question, like, I mean, bluntly, nobody comes right out and says, look, you're a middle aged man, you're in your 50s, and you seem to like current pop music. Is that real or is it just because you're obsessed with the charts? No, I actually like current pop music. Like when I got to write about Taylor Swift's Cruel Summer a few weeks ago, this four year old record that got re promoted this year and went to number one, I'm like, cruel Summer is a legitimately great song. You know, it went to number one for a reason. And I got to talk about, I did a whole paragraph breaking down the song and talking about exactly what makes it a good song. By the way, it's that bridge, among other things, that bridge that she's very protective of because she demanded a writing credit from Olivia Rodrigo. But we won't get into that. So, yeah, I actually enjoy current pop. I like keeping up. And I also don't find current pop, I think alienating because my theory is that even if music constantly morphs and evolves, our attraction to catchy things is eternal. Our love of melody, our love of a great beat, our love of a great turn of phrase is eternal.
- [19:18]
C
So what did this song do for you when it came out? And then why was this the song that you chose to expound upon?
- [19:30]
A
Okay, to go back to the Emily Lordy story. I didn't choose it, it chose me. And here's why. In 2019, when it was riding roughshod, pun intended, over the charts and setting all these records. I wrote about it for Slate more than once. I wrote about it when it first went to number one. I wrote about it when it broke Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men's record for most weeks at number one. That record was held by One Sweet Day for 23 years that had spent 16 weeks at number one. When Lil Nas X got to 17 weeks at number one, I did so much press about this song. And so when Emily came to me in 2020 and said, would you like to write about this song? It's like it chose me. But did I like the song? Yeah, I find the song, as I said in that intro, witty, inspired and funny. And by the way, funny is important. Funny is not an insult. Like there are people who said, like, old Town Road. Is this a novelty hit? Yeah, it's a novelty hit. And Lil Nas X designed it that way. He, he knew the line, I got the horses in the back would be funny and make the song go viral. He was intending for that to happen. He was doing his best corn pone accent because he thought, this is going to be funny, this is going to go viral. And I, I sort of admired its pluck, you know, as much as anything.
- [20:43]
C
Yeah, well, that was the. One of the early revelations for me in reading the book was how much planning, thought and marketing went into just the creation of the song.
- [20:57]
A
And it's marketing that Montero, Lil Nas X did himself. He's kind of a genius. And people often ask what is Lil Nas X's genre? And is he hip hop, is he countries, he pop? I often say his genre is Internet because the kid sort of understands innately what is going to make something go viral. And by the way, to flash ahead, not only is Lil Nas X far from a one hit wonder, he's had multiple number one hits in different genres. And, you know, songs like Montero, Call Me by youy Name or Industry Baby or that's what I Want, which all sound different from each other, just have kind of captured the zeitgeist. He's got a scene skill for that, you know, and what you talk about there in that question, like the planning and the premeditation was all his and you got to kind of, you know, give it up for that.
- [21:48]
C
Yeah. If you could break down for us the elements in the song that just make it work, like the mechanics of the song, what, what would you spotlight?
- [21:58]
A
I mean, with the caveat that I am not a musicologist and I don't want to overstep my bounds. I would say that the Nine Inch Nails sample, but is in theory a banjo that is a very enveloping hook. It kind of has a minor key envelopment of sound crossed with something funny on top. The original version recorded just by Lil Nas X by himself was 1 minute, 53 seconds long. And it gets its point across very efficiently. It's a very efficient song. I got the horses in the back Bull riding in boobies wrangle around my booty the lines are funny, the melody is catchy and, and the beat is good. And then when you add in Billy Ray Cyrus for the remix, which balloons the song from 153 to. I think the final timing is 237. It's still one of the shorter number one songs we've had recently. The Billy Ray Cyrus verse Hat Down Crosstown Living Like a Rock Star is one of the catchiest things about it. And it takes what already kind of had country bones in the first place and makes it more country. But the country nature of the song was kind of there from the jump. Like Lil Nas X had an ear for that kind of innately, despite the fact that by his own admission, he didn't know very much about country music. The only reason he asked Billy Ray Cyrus to be on his record, by the way, was not because he was such a country fan and he particularly liked Achy Breaky Heart. It was because Billy Ray Cyrus is the father of Miley Cyrus, who had a TV show in the aughts when Montero was a kid called Hannah Montana. And Billy Ray Cyrus was on that TV show and this was literally the only country star he knew. So when he tweets into the universe the same week that he puts the song out into the world, hey, somebody get me Billy Ray Cyrus on this. That's the only country person he knew. He didn't say, get me Morgan Wallen on this, get me Luke Combs on this, get me Kenny Chesney on this. No, he just kind of puts a wish into the universe and miraculously it comes true.
- [23:57]
C
I alluded to it before. There's this masterful chapter just before you get in. So you have these two chapters that I think that are, as I recall, are back to back. One is the timeline of how this becomes a hit, and you date the entries, right? But before that, there is this incredible survey of memes and how those memes perfectly aligned, or maybe Lil Nas X aligned himself perfectly to take advantage of those little meme waves that this song is gonna end up riding. And it's just a masterful work of research and synthesis. How the did you do this? You're not an Internet native person, you're a chart native person, right? But you had a compendium of basically all the memes that helped this song become. How did you do that?
- [24:52]
A
I mean, research and an accretion of the stuff I'd been writing about for the column. But what's also interesting about Old Town Road in particular, and I had to research some of this when I was first writing about it in 2019, is that it was this interesting confluence of cultural memes as well as TikTok. It wasn't just TikTok. It was that, you know, a video game called red Dead Redemption 2, which is Western theme, had just come out and people were trading all these western memes because of RDR2. It was because there was a conversation that sprouted organically on the Internet in late 2018 about the so called Yeehaw Agenda. Yeehaw Agenda. Lil Nas X had nothing to do with fomenting this, but he, his timing was perfect because people wanted to push the Yeehaw agenda. And. And frankly, it was not just a story about cowboys. It was a story about cowboys and race. That was why the Yee Haw agenda took off. Because black artists were sharing pictures of black people in cowboy gear and talking about how this is an under discussed movement and they were trying to foment a story about that. And Lil Nas X was perfectly timed for that. So there were just so many interesting strands and threads to this that made it viral in that way.
- [26:07]
C
But you threaded it.
- [26:12]
A
We'll have more in a moment.
- [26:20]
C
All right, so I'm gonna take you back to Profile records now. Shoot. 1989, 1990. And my job every day is to call the panel of stores that report to this new thing called the Billboard rap chart. And I have the east coast, my colleague John has the west coast. And it's mom and pop record stores, one stops. And my job is to call them and ask them how they'll be reporting the new Run DMC record, the new Rob Bass, the new Dana Dane, whatever.
- [26:53]
A
Sounds shady, doesn't it?
- [26:54]
C
And sometimes it's kind of like, how's it doing? I don't know, it's kind of low. And then my next question is, do you need anything? Anything you need. Right. And what I would end up giving them sometimes are these things called cleans, which were the. Usually when we sent sample records to record stores, they would be drilled through and marked with for promotional use only. And those would go out to radio stations and record stores. And cleans did not have that. They were clean. They were wrapped in cellophane. And it's just as good as getting.
- [27:29]
A
It's amazing how this sounds like a drug deal, but go on.
- [27:33]
C
This is whence I come.
- [27:34]
A
Yeah.
- [27:35]
C
And then sometime in 1990, early 1991, we got wind. I think somebody came by and was kind of busting my chops and said, oh, you're going to lose your job soon. Because Billboards, you know, they're changing their reporting structure. And what they were doing is instead of having manual reporting, like folks basically like me calling record stores and asking a person how they're ranking things. And sometimes they would rank them a little higher if I sent something good.
- [28:03]
A
Right.
- [28:04]
C
Fudging it. And of course me at this small little indie label was nothing compared to what, you know, the stakes and snow tires that Columbia Records were.
- [28:12]
A
You did not have that budget no.
- [28:14]
C
But we heard that Billboard was now going to be getting barcode data from record stores. Hence I would not need to call record stores anymore. They would just automatically get the data. And it completely changed. Then a year later it. The same change happened with radio where instead of getting the program director to fudge where the, the songs are on the chart, they had the digital fingerprint of, they had listening stations that could get the digital fingerprint. Just like a, you know, the early, like you said in the book, the early.
- [28:50]
A
It's like an early version of Shazam.
- [28:51]
C
Early version of Shazam. And one of the things you do in the book that kind of blew my mind is describe how the charts work when there are no places that sell records, when those places are all virtual, and what it does to the system. And we can talk about that system later on, but what it does to the system that existed and how the charts work now. So the question, this is all set up for the question.
- [29:21]
A
Sure.
- [29:21]
C
How do the charts work? Work now?
- [29:25]
A
Oh, how much time do you have? So I love in particular that you were working for a primarily rap oriented label at the time. Because one thing that, what he's describing, of course, that sound scan moment, literally at Billboard, they talk about history in terms of pre soundscan and post soundscan. It's like the BC ad moment of chart following. It's like when everything was fudgeable versus when everything was relatively accurate. And of course, if there are ways that record companies can fudge things, they will still fudge them. It's not as if the industry became pure as the driven snow. But it is harder to fudge things up the charts than it was prior to 1991. And what I love about the fact that you were working for a rap label was that rap in particular, within a month of SoundScan coming online, NWA has a number one album like that is impossible to imagine prior to accurate counting. And then the hot 100 gets converted thanks to the airplay you're talking about. It was called BDS or Broadcast Data Systems. And it completely upended our understanding of how records rise and fall on the charts. In the day of the Beatles, for example, it was believed that a record rose up the charts, crested and rose back down in a period of about a dozen to maybe 15 weeks. And so a single would rise and fall, rise and fall. A supreme single, a Beatles single, a Rolling Stone single, a four top single. What we learned after we had accurate data was that isn't really, it certainly isn't the way albums behave. First of all, Albums behave more like movies. They debut at their highest position, right? Picture A Marvel Movie doesn't open at number six in the box office and then rise to number one. It opens at number one at the box office. Albums open the same way. Most albums, when they open, there are a scant few that rise to a higher position. But the vast majority of albums open at their highest position. And what we learned about songs was that things could break much faster and debut much higher on the Hot 100, but then they would hang on much, much longer. So longevity records were beaten rapidly, like within the first year of SoundScan coming online. First, Boyz II Men, with a song called End of the Road, beat the most weeks at number one record. Then just a few months later, Whitney Houston beat it again with I Will Always Love youe. Then the record we talked about before, the Mariah and Boyz II Men record, once we date, beat the record again because suddenly we had better data. And we realized when people love a record, they hang onto it a really long time. So that's how the charts work after SoundScan. Now, remember, for all of its history, the Hot 100 has existed since 1958. It has always measured at least two. Two things, sales of songs and radio airplay. And it's a. It's an average, a blend of those two things. What now complicates things is that there's a third factor, and that third factor is now bigger than the other two combined, and that's streaming. Streaming is kind of like a blend of both, like buying a song. You get to pick the song, but more like radio. Once you play it, you don't keep it. And if you want to play it again, you got to hit play on it again. And we're counting that. That, it turns out, changes the metabolism yet again, because we realize it's easier for songs to debut at number one, and it's easier for them to hold on for a very long time, because we have streaming data. The record for most weeks in Hot 100 history, like most weeks on the whole chart, has been reset several times in the last few years. First, Blinding Lights by the Weekends reset that record a couple years ago. Then this record by Glass Animals called Heat Waves beat the Blinding Lights record all because now we know just how much when you love a record, you and by you, I'm talking about all of you, but the public in general, we now know how much you are actually playing it. And this is why it's so well suited for Christmas music in particular, not just Mariah's Record but Rockin around the Christmas Tree by Brenda Lee and it's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year by Andy Williams. These records Whams Last Christmas. These records now come back to the chart every year because in the old system, the system didn't move fast enough for us to track a Christmas record that you're only going to play for a very brief time for about four or five weeks. Now we know that for that four to six week period we are playing the hell out of Christmas records. And we have much better data about that. So it does mean, and I point this out in the intro that I read to you guys before, that you're kind of comparing apples and kumquats when you're comparing the chart records of the Beatles day to the chart records of Lil Nas X's day. Because it's just easier for things to hold on longer. But what we have now is actually better data. So like when people groan about the current system like, ugh, Drake debuting at number one with another hit again, like, yes, but understand we now know that that Drake record is really, really popular with his audience in a way we didn't understand it before. And we're no longer expecting somebody to do what you did 35 years ago and phone somebody up and said, what are you going to do with the Drake record this week when Billboard calls? What are you going to tell him? That doesn't happen anymore. So that's how it changes.
- [34:24]
C
But we have these other charts too. So you've described sort of how the Hot 100 works. But we have the country charts and we have the legacy black chart, which is now called, I think, the R and B Hip Hop chart.
- [34:39]
A
Yes.
- [34:40]
C
So is it really a genre chart?
- [34:42]
A
Right.
- [34:43]
C
So how do those charts work now that we're not calling out to mom and Pops, if there even are many more mom and Pops.
- [34:52]
A
Well, and it really hurt on the R B hip hop side because, yeah, the loss of all retail, you know, almost all music retail, you know, you've still got a small handful of record stores, but you know, the mom and Pops, the black record stores that used to feed into the R B chart are by and large long gone. Billboard is now trying to keep up with that by pulling in all this digital data. One thing I kind of take to take task in the book as I talk about how Billboard defines its genres now. And I basically argue that the single greatest controversy that surrounded Lil Nas X's Old Town Road to bring it back to that had to do with how they formulate their Genre charts. Basically, Billboard's genre charts for the last 11 years have just been mini hot one hundreds. Because Billboard, because everybody's going to the same digital services to consume their music. Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music. It's harder now to prize apart the audiences. So Billboard in 2012 basically just threw in the towel and said, you know what, this is just going to be the same data set that we're using for the Hot 100. We're just going to take the Hot 100 and we're going to shrink it down to the songs that qualify. And I think that's a very fraught system. I call it an accordion chart. Basically, you, the lay user can make the R and B chart this week, take the Hot 100, cross out everything that doesn't look like an R and B record, and then like squeezing an accordion, squeeze together all the records that are left. That's the R and B chart.
- [36:14]
C
And who decides who qualifies?
- [36:16]
A
I mean, Billboard effectively does. And they claim, let me be fair to them, that they consult with the label. Are you promoting this to R and B radio? Are you promoting this to country radio? It's not as if, you know, some God in the sky at Billboard is determining single handedly, but effectively Billboard is having to make a judgment call, which is how you get into problems. Like what happened to Old Town Road? Old Town Road, for those who don't remember, was allowed onto the country chart, Hot country songs for one week because when Lil Nas X uploaded it to streaming services, he tagged it as pop, he tagged it as hip hop, and he tagged it as country. And when all this data started, when it started blowing up on streaming services and all this data came in Billboard, because all the hot country songs chart is, is a mini hot 100. They allowed it to debut on hot country songs at number 19. And then what I call the Nashville industrial complex kind of came in and said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, this is not a country record. And Billboard was left with a very tough decision because if you have an all or nothing chart system where all you're doing is taking the Hot 100 data and shrinking it down and saying, this is your country chart, what was going to happen was within two weeks Lil Nas X was going to scale up the charts and he would have had the number one country record for months, which I think it deserved to be on the country chart, but that would have overstated its popularity with a core country audience. So the choices where you leave it there and it shoots to number one and it probably would have Been the number one country record for like five or six months, or you do. What Billboard actually did was they pulled it from the country chart, and that set off a firestorm. Wait a minute. Why? Who's deciding that this is a country record and why? Is it because he didn't work in the Nashville system? Is it because he's black? You know, is it because he's a black artist who didn't work in the Nashville system? Like the way Darius Rucker, formerly of Hootie and the Blowfish, is now a country star because he worked within the Nashville system? It raised all these thorny questions about how genre is defined. And I'm not sure that the system is any better now than it was four years ago when all this dust was kicked up by Lil Nas X's song being removed from the country chart.
- [38:18]
C
One of the impressions I got from reading the book is that you feel that the controversy over him being pulled from the country chart actually contributed to his success.
- [38:29]
A
It did. Because I quote a DJ who basically says, we thought this was gonna be a little TikTok fad that we were just starting to play. And then it got all these headlines, cuz Billboard pulled it from its country chart and now everybody knows. And we're playing it 72 times a week. Like, quite literally, people were now rooting for Lil Nas X and it snowballed. And Billy Ray Cyrus coming on the remix is part of that dare. It's basically Billy Ray saying, all right, I got a cowboy hat. I'm from country music, I'm from Nashville. If I sing on this record, is it now country enough for you? And spoiler alert, Billboard never put it back on the country chart. But it was an interesting intersectional question. It's like, what do you call a country hit? Is it racial? Is it cultural? Is it. Because it's not of Nashville. What defines a country record? Is it trap beats? Because that's. That can't be the reason. Because Morgan Wallen uses trap beats. Luke Combs uses trap beats. You know, Luke Bryan uses trap beats. Right. So, yeah.
- [39:30]
C
So rewinding this whole chart business all the way back right there. In the beginning, there was one chart. One. One chart in Billboard. And then they created, I think in 46 or 48, something called the Harlem Hit Parade.
- [39:42]
A
Yep.
- [39:43]
C
Which was mimicking a structure in the record business that was already there where if there were black artists, they would put Columbia Records, they would put them on a. Literally a different. Would have a different color label.
- [39:56]
A
Right.
- [39:56]
C
And the term then was race music or Race Records, right?
- [40:00]
A
Yep.
- [40:01]
C
Then a third chart emerged, which I think started as the hillbilly chart, maybe.
- [40:06]
A
I mean, they called it hillbilly music. To Billboard's credit, they never used the hillbilly term. But they were calling them folk records for a while. Remember, this is the 40s before the whole folk movement takes off. So they're calling them folk. Folk records for a while. And then the term country and western catches on. And thankfully, they got away from both kinds of music.
- [40:24]
C
Country.
- [40:25]
A
All kinds of music. Country and western, yes. And eventually they drop the and western. I don't think that happens until the 60s. And similarly, the race records appellation, thank Heaven, goes away in favor of if. If there's one thing that what's his name from Atlantic Records, Jerry Wexler contributed to society that we are all thankful for. It's huge. Coined the phrase rhythm and blues. So they. The term R and B was finally appended to that chart in the 1950s, and it was no longer either Harlem Hit Parade or Race Records. But, yeah. So, I mean, just defining the terms of these musics and how we would measure them was itself very fraught. And I talk about that in the book.
- [41:04]
C
Yeah, I know that there is something called culture, and I know that there's something called ethnicity, and I know that there are subcultures. But I also know that the business tends to enforce or reinforce divisions that aren't there. Like when we think about the first hillbilly records or, you know, Jimmy Rogers debuting his first 12 records were all Blue Yodels. He's playing with Louis Armstrong and Lil Harden on one of them. The earliest hillbilly records are blues records.
- [41:35]
A
Right.
- [41:36]
C
And yet there's this divide. So to set up for my question, do we still need this architecture?
- [41:45]
A
This is a question I get versions of. And in fact, it was a question that was kicked up by the country chart controversy of 2019 when Old Town Road got yanked from it. Do we need genre anymore? I mean, Carrie Battan, for example, in the New Yorker basically called for the abolition of genre. This is racist. It's racially defined. Why do we still have this? My counter to that is I think that the audience still wants these genres to exist, whatever fraught reasons the genres were created. If you told a country fan, we're going to do away with country music tomorrow, and it's just going to be all pop and you're going to listen to everything, they would probably say, no, you're not. If you told a black radio listener, oh, it's all just going to be, you know, one mishmash of stuff. We're not going to divide things, I think a lot of people would say, but I like that genre. I know when I tune in to WBLS this is what it sounds like. So my argument in the book is not so much the genre should be abolished, it's that it needs to be defined by the audience because the boundaries of these genres are ever changing. The Eagles were a rock band in the 70s, but now they're sort of grandfathered into country music. Credence Clearwater Revival sound a whole lot like country music to people and they even tried to promote Credence Clearwater Revival to country stations a decade after the band broke up. And yet in the 60s and 70s they were fundamentally a rock band. We claimed that we couldn't have any rap production on anything country until suddenly a whole bunch of artists like Jason Aldean, Morgan Wallen, Luke Bryan started using trap beats on country records, Florida Georgia Line and now we consider that completely normal. The audience ultimately determines what they will and won't accept. And you kind of have to let the audience decide what is country, what is hip hop. And that should be the guiding light because I, I still see genre as somehow useful, but only if it's not being applied in a top down manner. That's where the trouble comes in my opinion.
- [43:38]
C
I but listen, I, I that resonates for me because you know, as somebody who again who teaches 18, 19, 20 year olds they will invent a genre in the in within five minutes time, espresso core, what's you know, and they'll all like so they're inventing and disposing with these labels all the time. One surprising thing about reading this book is how important radio still seems to be. At least in your your telling of what makes success. Am I reading that wrong?
- [44:13]
A
You're not. I Weirdly this is another thing I am almost small c conservative about. I feel like radio still plays a useful role. And we know what we hate about radio, right? It's over researched, they play the same records over and over again, etc. However, what that radio research reveals is the song that will make us not flip the station. It's what I call passive fandom. To me, the reason why the Hot 100 has existed for 65 years and has been so successful is it is a good measure of a balance between active fandom and passive fandom. Active fandom is and this dates all the way back to Elvis's day and the Beatles day when somebody needs to Buy that new Beatles single, that new Elvis single, or to pick a modern example, that new BTS single in the first week. That's active fandom. You're indexing the rabid fan. Passive fandom is suddenly that record by. I wrote about this actually quite recently when Olivia Rodrigo's Vampire went back to number one. And I was basically saying like this song debuted at number one because all of the Olivia Rodrigo stans had to stream it and buy it in its first week. And then it kind of passed on to their parents basically. And now, you know, a 35 year old mom is not going to flip the station when she hears Vampire. Like, oh, I like this Olivia Rodrigo song. That's passive fandom. She's not actively clicking on that on Spotify or downloading it. But it's useful to know what is in the air, what is in the ambiance. The song of the summer competition, which we all obsess over and some years it's more interesting than others. To be perfectly frank, what is song of the summer? Well, it's that song you can't escape every summer. Okay, but what does you can't escape mean? It means it's playing in the drugstore. When you walk in the drugstore, it's playing at the beach out of a boombox. When you get to the beach, it's pumping out of a car radio driving past you on the street. That's passive fandom. And so radio, radio still has a role to play even as terrestrial radio ratings are plummeting and Spotify playlists are gradually taking the place of radio. I feel that somehow, however Billboard formulates its charts, it's still going to be useful to balance out a mix of what I call active fandom and passive fandom. Whatever that passive fandom takes the form of later if it's, you know, maybe they. Wait. So Spotify playlists in a different way than they weight individual tracks or something. But I feel that that's a useful thing to measure. We'll be right back.
- [46:44]
C
One of the things you do so lovely in this book is to talk about that sort of queer imagery that he puts into his visuals, into his messaging and into his music. Can you talk a little bit about that dimension of the success of this song?
- [47:03]
A
Montero, I'm going to use his first name because I'm not talking about his rap Persona right now. Was struggling even into the 2010s. This kid comes of age in the Obama era. You know, in the era where, you know, gay marriage is legalized and God knows we're all now fighting for it not to go back the other way. So he's, in theory, coming up at a time when there's never been greater acceptance of LGBTQ people, LGBTQ artists. But he is very anxious about revealing himself. And one of the things I talk about in the book is that through the early 2010s, most artists, gay artists, or LGBTQ artists who top the charts do so closeted. It's kind of a shocking history. But everybody.
- [47:49]
C
You go through that history in such, like, incredible detail, right?
- [47:54]
A
Whether, like, we now take it for granted that Elton John is out of the closet. Elton John went through a torturous phase of being in the closet. He gave an interview to rolling stone in 1976 in which he revealed just that he was bisexual and his sales tailed off for about three years. George Michael was basically in the closet for most of his career. George Michael, by the way, did not come out until 1998, like, long after he'd had most of his hits. Michael Stipe of REM did not come out until pretty deep into REM's career. You have to be remarkably secure. Freddie Mercury of Queen was hiding both his homosexuality and his AIDS diagnosis until literally days before he died. So there is. And, you know, we can take it all the way back to Little Richard, and, you know, that is a deep and fraught history beautifully chronicled in the recent documentary about Little Richard. So for Montero, what he comes up in is a period where somebody like Frank Ocean sort of tiptoes out of the closet as a member of the, you know, R and B and hip hop community. And Montero sees that Frank Ocean doesn't seem to be suffering too much when he revealed that about himself. And he's still having number one albums. That's encouraging. The one of the people I talked about in the book is Adam Lambert, the former American Idol competitor who scored a number one album in 2012. And when I wrote about that in 2012 as a chart columnist, I pointed out that as best as I could tell, he was the only gay artist to have a number one album while fully out of the closet. That's how rare it was so young. Montero is observing this, and he's kind of weighing this. I quote an interview he gives with Gayle King in the book where he admits, like, I was praying for years that this was a phase or that, you know, that it would go away. That's a quote. And then when the song is in something like its 12th week at number one out of 19 weeks, and it's literally the last day of Pride month. So you can imagine what a torturous decision this was. It's June 30th. In the last few hours of June 30th, he decides what the hell. And he comes out of the closet. He is the only artist to come out while having the number one song in America. That is yet another thing that makes Old Town Road historic. I mean, whatever you say about the song, you can't take that away from it.
- [50:08]
C
And it certainly didn't keep him from having staying power. He's now succeeded beyond this one song.
- [50:16]
A
He succeeded beyond this one song. And one thing I love about Lil Nas X is when he came out, he came all the way out like he is not shy at all. He is owning his Persona, his identity, his sexuality and good for him and, and he's still scoring hits. One of the things I point out in the epilogue of the book is that whatever you think about Lil Nas X, he is no one hit wonder. He has had multiple hits that have been on the radio for months on end. Like Industry Baby was the top streamed hit of 2021 and it was. It sat on Billboard's radio songs chart for something like 40 weeks. Again, picture that. Radio stations have determined they can play Industry baby or that's what I want or Montero call me by your name in power rotation and they have no burn. And nobody's watching a music video when they're listening to that on the radio. Nobody's following a meme, nobody's looking at a TikTok. It's just I like this song. And again, that's that thing you were asking me about before with the part radio plays. It's useful as passive fandom. It's a litmus test. We have determined that people do not flip the station when we play Industry Baby by Lil Nas X, that's a hit.
- [51:21]
C
So what do you feel are the takeaways for us as an industry right from Old Town Road or the lessons that people like me who teach about the music business, who've worked in the music business? What do you think we can and should learn from this?
- [51:40]
A
This is a bit glib, but I would say one lesson, if you want to put it that way, is trust the audience, you know, follow where the audience goes. And it's funny because you were talking about your, your anecdote about, you know, well, I just like hits, you know, there's the famous line that William Goldman, the Hollywood screenwriter wrote about Hollywood, which applies just as much to the music industry. Nobody knows anything. It's, it's the most pithy quote I quoted all the time. And he was talking about Hollywood, how, you know, Marvel movies seem to be successful. Let's keep pumping out Marvel movies until they aren't, you know, and you can try to copy a formula, but like, something will work until it doesn't. The music business is the same way. You can try to jump on a bandwagon, but you need to trust the artist and you need to trust the audience. The audience will tell you what a hit is. And yeah, that is the most synthetic in the synthesis sense way I can put it.
- [52:37]
C
All right, well, thank you all for coming and participating. Thank you for writing such a great. It really is like just a powerful little book. I wish I could write something that was this thin and that powerful. So mazel tov.
- [52:56]
A
Thank you. Thank you very much, Dan. That means a lot coming from me.
- [53:02]
B
Thanks for listening to this special episode of Hit the Bridge. My deepest thanks to Dan Charnas and to Housing Works Bookstore for for making this event possible. We also thank our Slate plus members for making these special episodes possible and non plus listeners. We'll be back next week with part two of our regular monthly episode. This episode of Hit Parade. The Bridge was produced by Kevin Bendis.
- [53:29]
A
And I'm Chris Melanfy. Keep on marching on the one.