He counts Johnny Cash and Outkast amongst artists, and you can really tell listening to this guy’s songs, because he is country-rap to his core. Looking back, it seems like this is a guy who was born at just the right time to get famous, because his musical influences are definitely Southern, but the kind of Southern that doesn’t limit itself to just country. And… having listened to this guy’s discography, that’s definitely true. So has Billboard finally rectified their error? Let’s take a look-see.īlanco Brown said in an interview that he credits “Old Town Road” with his success, that a big part of why the record labels gave this song a chance is because they wanted to score the next big viral hit. Enter Blanco Brown, who, with his hit “The Git Up”, has become the current #1 on the Billboard country charts.
And now, with the arrival of yet another country-rap hopeful on the scene, it seems like their salvation has finally arrived. The question still seems to persist in the country-rap sphere probably since they’re the only two genres left that still retain distinctive traits, and even then, probably not for much longer if the primordial musical soup keeps expanding the way it does.Īt the very least, Billboard has been looking to escape dealing with the race question for the longest time.
But in the internet age, when music is more accessible than ever, is there really a need to classify music? Who the hell even listens to only one genre anymore? Certainly, the pop charts have been moving into the direction of mono-genre for the longest time, what with every Top 40 hit sounding more and more similar than the last. The concept of genre was necessary at a time when we had limited means of consuming music and had to make wiser consumer choices. The question has only gotten trickier now, in our day and age when genre matters less than ever before. For example, why is Rihanna classified as RnB and Lady Gaga classified as pop despite there being little discernible difference between their music, at least sonically? The few attempts to do so resulted in widespread backlash (disco) or demonization (blues, rock, hip-hop).Īnd it’s a divide that definitely continues to this day, if a bit more subtly. When they fought to be the faces of their own music, black artists were increasingly forced into the broad, vague, all-encompassing label of “soul” or “RnB”, which ended up being pigeonholing extremely diverse artists into a musical ghetto from which they were rarely able to cross over. Marketing decisions made in the 40s and 50s resulted in the exclusion of blacks from genres that they helped found. After all, there’s a reason you don’t typically find many black artists outside the “urban contemporary” format. This is a discussion that’s spanned decades of music history, way before Lil Nas X. The inevitable question thus became-was “Old Town Road”’s exclusion racially-motivated? But the fact that those very same charts have, at various points, included songs like “ The Fighter”, “ Meant to Be” and “ Burnin’ It Down”, songs which you would have to stretch the definition of country music considerably to consider them eligible, made Billboard’s exclusion of “Old Town Road” extremely suspicious. So ordinarily, no one would have objected to its exclusion from the Billboard country charts. Because, speaking honestly here, if we were still going by traditional metrics, “Old Town Road” isn’t a country song it’s a rap song that happens to include country elements. The main point of contention that informed the discourse was how Billboard defined country music.
It was a bloody battle, and outrage erupted on all corners of the music-listening internet.
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What started out as a novelty joke song by some TikTok-toting teenager with editing software and way too much free time went on to conquer the world, opening up endless discussions about the relationship between race and genre in music, cultural appropriation and diffusion, the validity of meme-based music as a force in its own right, and the increasing presence of Generation Z as a potent consumer demographic. It was little more than a couple of months ago that the music-listening public went nuts over the raging brushfire of controversy that was “ Old Town Road”. “I’m a little bit country / And I’m a little bit rock and roll / I’m a little bit of Memphis and Nashville / With a little bit of Motown in my soul”
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