ined it and the way it was promoted and marketed
more closely, and decided it lacked “enough ele-
ments of today’s country music” (see story, below).
“There’s definitely a problem where you can say
this song is hip-hop, but you can’t say it’s country,”
says Lil Nas X today. He points to Bebe Rexha and
Florida Georgia Line’s “Meant to Be,” which spent
50 weeks at the top of Hot Country Songs, and
which, like “Old Town Road,” has trap drums. “It’s
kind of like saying that one of these genres has
more respect. Take from that what you will.”
On April 9, Lil Nas X’s birthday, he got the
news that “Old Town Road” had hit No. 1 on the
Hot 100. “How did I celebrate?” Lil Nas X asks
today. “I’d just became famous and rich, you
know? That’s a celebration in itself. I didn’t really
do anything else.” There wasn’t much time for
anything else, anyway — he was already in Los
Angeles working on what would become his 7 EP.
“When a meteoric track is going that quickly, it’s
critical to get other music out so you can have a
foundation,” says Mallory. “So it doesn’t become a
one-hit thing.”
Lil Nas X’s first real studio session was with
Daytrip, the production duo of Denzel Baptiste
and David Biral, who worked on “Mo Bamba” with
Sheck Wes and “Legends” with Juice WRLD. “We
had a bunch of things prepared, more country-
inspired, just in case that was really what he want-
ed to do,” says Baptiste. “But he didn’t. He put some
of those aside and was like, ‘Play me your weirdest
stuff.’ ” Lil Nas X asked to hear the “Panini” beat
perhaps 30 times before he began rearranging it
with Baptiste and Biral, taking out the first chorus
to start with the verse, adding a prechorus, taking
out the bridge. “Even though he didn’t know all the
terminology, he knew exactly what he wanted,” says
Biral. “He came in like a veteran.”
“There was a very real strategy here in terms of
making sure that we had more music in the mar-
ketplace to showcase Nas as the artist we knew he
was before everyone moved on,” says Leber. Seven
or eight years ago — when Gotye hit with “Some-
body That I Used to Know” and Carly Rae Jepsen
with “Call Me Maybe” — “you worked your single
into the ground,” he explains. “You didn’t want to
cannibalize; you let it finish and you moved on.”
Streaming has changed all that: It’s hard to call
Lil Nas X a one-hit wonder when two of the other
tracks on 7 have already charted on the Hot 100
(“Panini” peaked at No. 16 and “Rodeo” at No. 22).
But the multifaceted artist Lil Nas X has intended
to be from the start — the one who turned down the
country trap beats, chasing something weirder — is
still emerging from the long shadow of “Old Town
Road.” “It’s a really hard thing to pull an artist
through a song this big,” says Mallory. “Sometimes
the song gets bigger than the artist. In this case, he
is pulling himself through it.” Columbia hopes the
“Panini” video, followed by a remix with DaBaby,
will drive the song back up the Hot 100. An Ellen
DeGeneres Show performance and interview — on
Sept. 23, when Oprah Winfrey is also a guest — will
help introduce Lil Nas X to the moms of all those
kids who drove his success on TikTok. For upcom-
ing shows, “I think out of the gate we’ll probably do
underplays,” says Leber. “But we have a different
idea on how to do club shows. We want to create an
environment where you come in, you can hang out
for a while, there’s things to do and the artist takes
the stage.”
As for Lil Nas X, he’s sorting it out as best he can
from within the whirlwind. He bought an apart-
ment in Los Angeles in June, but he’s not there
much and hasn’t even had time to buy furniture
(“I’m still sleeping on my air mattress”). It’s small
for the two dogs he has now, so he thinks about a
house, maybe in Atlanta. Buy land — that’s advice
Billy Ray Cyrus gave him. Cyrus also shared this
wise counsel: When everything is moving too fast
around you, just stand still. Sometimes Lil Nas X
thinks he might need a vacation, but he worries
about stepping away.
“I’m not as paranoid as I was before, but I’m
still thinking if you miss too much you’re gone,” he
says. “You step away from the public eye for too
long, they don’t care no more. And whenever I do
step away from the internet or the music too long,
it’s like I have to slowly get back into myself to
get back into the groove.” What groove? “Content.
Making good content.”
BEHIND THAT CHARTS CALL
W
HEN LIL NAS X
self-released “Old
Town Road” on
Dec. 3, 2018, he
marked it as a
country song in the
track metadata that streaming
services use. “It’s a country trap
song,” he now says firmly. “But
once you take a look at it, I feel
like it leans more toward coun-
try. Of course it’s easier to get
seen [as a rap song], but I didn’t
expect to see it on any chart.
It’s not like my music was selling
prior to it coming out.”
Billboard uses the genre tags
provided by content creators
as guidelines, and the charts
team initially tracked “Old Town
Road” as it had been listed. In
March, as the song began to
gain velocity on the charts —
aided by escalating video views
from TikTok — Billboard’s team
examined the song more closely.
“The charts team reviews titles
each week as they’re released,
as they gain in popularity and
start to populate our various
sales and streaming data feeds,
which we receive from Nielsen
Music,” says Silvio Pietroluongo,
Billboard’s senior vp charts and
data development, who adds
that even in the streaming era,
genre- specific charts remain
“reflective of how the music
industry markets and promotes
music, as well as how fans
consume and gravitate” to it.
(Digital services may not offer
genre charts, but genre-driven
playlists like Spotify’s Rap Caviar
have unquestionable power.)
Pietroluongo calls Billboard’s
genre charts “an [organizational]
tool to help the industry and
consumer slice through data,”
adding that his team deter-
mines genre after looking at an
artist’s chart history, listening to
the song, looking at streaming
services and examining how and
where the label is promoting and
marketing the song.
In March, after signing
Lil Nas X, Columbia did not ini-
tially promote “Old Town Road”
as a country song, and ultimately
the charts team decided to
remove it from the Hot Country
Songs chart dated March 19.
“We did reach out to Sony in
Nashville to see if they were
involved with the project, which
they were not at the time,” says
Pietroluongo. Removing “Old
Town Road” from Hot Country
Songs was, he says, purely an in-
ternal decision. Lil Nas X recalls
that, at the time, he was happy
just to still be on the Billboard
Hot 100. But he still points out
that Florida George Line and
Bebe Rexha’s “Meant to Be”
made the country charts, and
“there’s trap drums on that.”
Pietroluongo allows that
country music has shifted
recently to more “beat- heavy
tracks” (pointing to Sam Hunt
and Thomas Rhett), but notes
that “Meant to Be” was “actively
worked by the label to country
radio and eventually hit No. 1
on the Country Airplay chart.”
That, along with FGL’s long-
established presence on the
country charts, got “Meant to
Be” country classification. Blanco
Brown’s “The Git Up” — another
trap-flavored track — was pro-
moted to country radio by Nash-
ville-based Broken Bow, and
Brown had a history of recording
country music, thus Billboard
tracked it on the country charts.
“Old Town Road” may well
redefine the world around it.
Pietroluongo points to “Uptown
Funk!” as another “borderline
song” that opened doors — a
throwback funk track from Mark
Ronson and Bruno Mars, it con-
nected at top 40 radio before
crossing over to R&B stations.
It was not tracked on the Hot
R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, but
its success meant that R&B radio
subsequently embraced Mars’
classic- sounding 24K Magic
tracks — “That’s What I Like” hit
No. 1 on both the Hot 100 and
Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.
“We made the decision we
felt was consistent,” Pietro-
luongo says now of “Old Town
Road.” “We understand that
everyone hears music differ-
ently, so we understand how
people can look at that and
think differently.” —J.L.
Watch Lil Nas X pick who he’d want to remix the top 10 songs of all time at billboard.com/videos. SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 • WWW.BILLBOARD.COM 127