A Conversation about "Old Town Road" and the Country Charts with Chris Molanphy
David talks Beyonce, Billboard and more with the critic and chart expert
Chris Molanphy combines savvy pop criticism with chart and industry analysis—an approach that has made him one of the indispensable music writers of our moment. He writes a regular column for Slate called “Why Is This Song No. 1?” while his chart-history focused “Hit Parade” program, also through Slate, is one of the great pop-music podcasts on the planet. Last November, he published his first book, Old Town Road, about the Lil Nas X hit and part of Duke University Press’ “Singles” series. (You can get the book through Duke University Press, and you can keep track of everything else Chris is up to here.)
I’m just so pleased that Chris found a moment in his crazy writing and recording schedule to answer a few questions inspired by reading his book.
David Cantwell: Chris, maybe the real indispensability of Old Town Road, at least for me, were your pocket histories on the extra-musical parts of the story: How we moved from CDs to MP3s to streaming—and then how our still fairly recent shift to an internet-and-digital world were essential to the success of Lil Nas X’s hit. I honestly can’t recall a book-length work of popular criticism that so effectively foregrounds delivery systems and their snowballing transformations of how we listen. Now, I know this is your brand. You’ve been the Chart-Expert Guy who explains why what’s most popular becomes most popular for a good while now. But I kept wondering as I read, how did you first come upon this focus in your criticism to begin with? Was there an “Aha!” moment somewhere back there that sent you down this path?
Chris Molanphy: It grew out of my chart fandom, which dates to my teenage years, almost to childhood—I started listening to American Top 40 on the radio regularly at age 12 and bought my first copy of Billboard at a newsstand about a month after my 14th birthday. But when I became a published critic in the ’90s, chart fandom was pretty uncool. When I wrote for the alternative-music bible CMJ, I sneaked chart references into the occasional review, but I instinctively understood such allusions were a firing offense—not by my editors necessarily, but by the audience.
What I like to say is that, for my chart beat to make sense, some things had to be invented: specifically blogging, later podcasting. These mediums could aggregate audiences that might be considered “niche” but were actually pretty sizable, and they dovetailed with the rise of poptimism in the mid-’00s. When I started commenting and eventually guest-posting at the music blog Idolator (part of the then–Gawker empire), I noticed that my chart-related posts drew an audience.
To come back to your original question, I guess you could say my “Aha!” moment came around 2007, when I launched the Idolator column “100 & Single.” Which was this: Most music critics didn’t understand how the charts worked and wrote about them only glancingly, in passing; and music-business journalists (at Billboard itself, or Variety, or wherever) didn’t write like critics and were hesitant to inject their writing with criticism, voice or personality. It occurred to me that if I could write like a critic but dissect the charts like a music-bizzer, that would be an original niche. And it proved to be just that…
DC: I want to pick your brain a little bit about this Beyonce moment that country music is having right now. Her “Texas Hold ‘Em” debuted atop the Hot Country Singles Chart, but at least musically, Beyonce’s playing a bit of catch up as far as dance-floor-bound black country music goes. Blanco Brown’s “The Git-Up,” for example, made some inroads at country radio that “Old Town Road,” thanks to Billboard changing the record’s chart designation, never had the chance to enjoy. And black country artists including Tanner Adell and Reyna Roberts have released great country dance records though, at least so far, they’ve gone nowhere airplay wise. What’s your educated guess here, Chris? Does Beyonce break the logjam at country radio, pulling these black country-dance acts, or others like them, along with her? Or… Will similarly dance-minded black country acts follow Bey to success on the pop side? Or… Will we be needing a country spin-off chart for the Yee Haw stuff? Or… and this is my fear… When Beyonce moves on to her next project, will everything just go back to the way it’s been? What do you think?
CM: Predictions are a mug’s game, and I have never claimed to be a seer—I get things wrong in my “Why Is This Song No. 1?” column all the time. Also, I don’t want to inject my progressive values into a trend-spotting exercise that—given the average radio programmer’s prerogatives—is, at root, fundamentally conservative. As I write this, Beyoncé’s song is in its fifth week at radio, and it’s already hit a No. 34 ceiling (perhaps momentary? let’s hope) on the Country Airplay chart. However, if history is any guide, things do change, marginally, at country radio after a rupture like “Old Town Road” or “Texas Hold ’Em.” One of the points I made in my book’s epilogue was that “Lil Nas X died at Country radio so others might live.” Besides “The Git-Up,” which clearly charted better in “Road’s” wake, consider a record like Kane Brown’s 2021 hit “Memory” featuring Blackbear; it scored little country airplay but was allowed onto Hot Country Songs anyway, where it peaked at No. 9. Similarly, even if Beyoncé’s single never cracks the Top 30 at country radio, I have to imagine the next Tanner Adell (hell, maybe Tanner herself) who comes to country programmers with a dancefloor banger—and, unlike Bey, is clearly fully committed to the format for more than one LP—will get something akin to the Charley Pride–in-1971 treatment, rather than the Mickey Guyton–in-2015 treatment. Call me a foolish optimist.
DC: One of the most helpful takeaways for me in your book was just a better understanding that Billboard is now the one largely on the hook for gatekeeping genre chart categorizations. Previously it had been consumers at Black retail making the call or listeners at country radio, but nowadays Billboard, using what you’ve cleverly dubbed an “accordion-style methodology,” is the final say on whether “Old Town Road” or, say, “Texas Hold ‘Em,” is counted as country or not for chart purposes. Could you talk just a little bit about how that works—or, perhaps better put, how it doesn’t work?
CM: I recently broke this down in my Slate piece on “Texas Hold ’Em” in fairly granular detail. Here’s a recap: The Hot R&B/Hiip-Hop Songs and Hot Country Songs charts now use the same data set as the all-genre Hot 100. Essentially, each chart is the same set of songs, in the same order, minus the songs Billboard has decided don’t qualify for that genre. So, for example, let’s say in a given week on the Hot 100, there are songs Billboard has labeled country at Nos. 6, 8, and 15 and every other song in the pop Top 20 is considered not country. Those three songs then automatically become Nos. 1, 2 and 3 on Hot Country Songs—in my metaphor, squeezing the accordion—even if the songs getting played on country radio that week look very different. That’s troubling enough, because you’re allowing the great mass of pop fans, not a core country audience, to determine the top songs on America’s flagship Hot Country chart. But it also distorts the record books, as songs that cross over with a pop audience tend to be the only country tracks they are exposed to for months. When pop moonlighter Bebe Rexha’s collaboration with Florida Georgia Line, “Meant to Be,” was (not wrongly) allowed to appear on Hot Country Songs, its pop-level data meant it spent a positively absurd 50 weeks at No. 1, an all-time “record” (scare quotes mine). Now, “Meant to Be” is a fine record and all, but…the all-time country chart record, with a fortnight shy of a year at No. 1? That just doesn’t pass a basic credibility test. Which is what I, and Billboard for that matter, ultimately want these charts to be: credible.
DC: Seems like we need a Marshall Plan for dealing with charts in the streaming age. A Molanphy Plan! If you somehow magically possessed the power to fix the modern country charts, Chris, how would you want to see Billboard’s Hot Country Songs Chart work?
CM: The secret, I think, is recreating the country cohort at the streaming level: identifying a group of listeners who primarily listen to “consensus country,” then tracking what this cohort listens to in all its breadth. That would, I’d wager, restore true crossover to the Hot Country chart. Let’s say, for instance, the pool of listeners who primarily consume Morgan Wallen on Spotify showed measurable interest in Noah Kahan or Maggie Rogers; those artists might begin to cross country and might even court a country fanbase. If that sounds farfetched, consider what Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock pulled off a generation ago—with middling success, but we didn’t have streaming data back then. If, as Bubba Sparxxx and Colt Ford were claiming a decade ago, their generation was “Bangin’ OutKast and a little George Strait,” let’s put some numbers around that and find out just how deep that affinity goes.
DC: This is all so helpful, Chris. Thank you so much for taking time to answer our questions!
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