Lil Nas X Played the Chart Game and Won

Lil Nas X’s triumphant journey from enduring Billboard’s questionable country music snub to becoming the record holder for longest run atop the Hot 100 singles chart is one of the most important music stories of 2019. Whether you like it or not, nothing about the accomplishments of “Old Town Road” over these past 17 weeks is undeserved or illegitimate. And along that timeline a number of key moments—not the least of which being the young artist's coming out on Twitter—have kept him in the headlines and at the forefront of listeners' minds, driving the song's week-to-week success. By all rights, celebrations are in order.

In reaching this Billboard landmark, “Old Town Road” replaces two songs that previously held the top ranking, Mariah Carey’s “One Sweet Day” with Boys II Men from 1995 and Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” from 2017. Nearly two-and-a-half decades old, the former got to the milestone first at a time when downloading a song on the Internet required a saint’s patience and a dial-up modem. Conversely, the latter—a Latin pop single that reached smash status when it went bilingual with Justin Bieber—unwittingly made it possible for Lil Nas X to outdo it.

“Despacito” first emerged in January of 2017, performed purely in Spanish and without the presence of the Canadian superstar. Fonsi and Yankee rode the reggaetón-informed production onto the Hot 100 in February, debuting very respectably at No. 88 and rising to No. 44 in April. That same month, they dropped the Bieber-aided version, which got it to the top in mere weeks. This is a function of Billboard’s chart methodology, which permits combining performance of a song’s remix with that of the original in determining a ranking. Audio/video streams, paid digital downloads, and radio airplay of both accumulating week after week, with each one appealing to a powerful Venn diagram of seemingly disparate U.S.-based audiences.

After sixteen straight weeks at the top, what ultimately toppled “Despacito” was the return of Taylor Swift. Strategically timed or agnostically scheduled, the September release of her Reputation lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” effectively disrupted Fonsi, Yankee, and Bieber’s epic run before it could surpass the record then-held by “One Sweet Day.” Nearly two years later, not even Swift herself could stop “Old Town Road,” a single that benefited from exploiting Billboard’s permissive remix rules to its logical extremity, thus correcting the fundamental flaw that led to “Despacito” missing the mark.

Lil Nas X and his team assuredly took a lesson from the música urbana scene, where collaborations and remixes generally drive the hits. A glance at Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, a Spanish-language parallel to the all-genre Hot 100, bears that out, with multiple placements for the likes of Bad Bunny, J Balvin, Ozuna, and others in a lead or featured artist capacity. That standard practice in urbano, however, is far less common in the English-language music space. Part of this comes from the logistics needed to make these team-ups happen, a barrier that is lessened for Latin artists due to the normalization and quid-pro-quo of remixes and collabs. That many of these urbano acts are signed to the same Latin divisions of the same few major record labels certainly doesn’t hurt either.

Seeing how Lil Nas X transitioned from Tik Tok fave to Columbia Records signee, innovative and unconventional thinking naturally characterizes his moves. Crucial to his charting achievement, the multiple sequentially released remixes of “Old Town Road” came at opportune moments in 2019. As positive public sentiment negated Billboard’s misguided attempt to deplatform the popular novelty single, he found a kindred spirit in Billy Ray Cyrus, who’d had a similar moment with 1992’s top ten hit “Achy Breaky Heart.” Together, they became a dynamic duo to cheer on, symbolized by two majestic steeds on the cover art.

Their unlikely yet logical union ensured “Old Town Road” wouldn’t depart the Hot 100’s top spot all that quickly. The week ending April 11, the first week in which both the original and the remix existed publicly, they claimed the top two spots domestically at Spotify, for a combined streaming total of more than 35 million plays. For context, that was 21 million more than the third most played song on the platform in the U.S. that week, Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy.” For the next several weeks, neither left the Spotify domestic top ten.

A Diplo remix released later that month wasn’t as impactful as Cyrus’ version, though it did present the option that more versions could come. Social media speculation built excitement around the prospects, something that suited Lil Nas X’s comfortable Twitter presence. (A music video as mini-movie drop in May didn’t hurt either.) To keep the momentum going, Columbia released an EP in June entitled 7, which featured the first two versions alongside some buzzworthy new songs. Thirteen weeks into its reign over the Hot 100, the next remix arrived, with Young Thug and twelve-year-old yodeler Mason Ramsey included. It was as if the fever dream memes had come alive, the absurdist combo adding further fuel to maintain the song's position. Even with the new entrants, Billboard still deemed this new version in line with its criteria for combined performance consideration, and apparently did so again barely two weeks later when RM of Korean group BTS came through with a “Seoul Town Road” take, sans Cyrus.

Knowing all this, one could reasonably argue that “Despacito” would have successfully made it to a seventeenth week on the Hot 100 at No. 1 had its creators or stakeholders anticipated the threat Swift’s return posed to its supremacy and responded with remixes. Stunt casting has done wonders for “Old Town Road,” which likely would not have made it this far for this long otherwise. Rumors swirl over the next iteration to come, with names like Dolly Parton potentially on the table.

It would not have taken much for “Despacito” to tack another quick verse, perhaps from a Latin music star or another English speaker with prominence in the pop or hip-hop world. Plenty of acts in the latter category, including Camila Cabello and Jaden Smith , were clamoring for so-called Spanish remixes of their own at the time precisely because of what Fonsi and Yankee had achieved with Bieber in tow. Turnabout is fair play, the proverb goes, but in the case of “Despacito” the forethought just wasn’t there.

What remains to be seen, then, is if Billboard will see how this milestone threatens to undermine its chart legitimacy going forward. The kid played the game fair and square, not bending the rules but following them to their fullest. “Old Town Road” now appears likely to prompt a trend of compound remixes with English-languge artists, many of whom mistook “Despacito” as a fluke or otherwise underestimated the Latin remix standard’s potential applications.

We can’t be more than a few months away from a big artist with a sizable and weaponizable fanbase pulling the same lever Lil Nas X did. After snagging Justin Bieber for a “Bad Guy” remixearlier this month, who could blame Billie Eilish if she dropped another remix next month with Swae Lee or Lizzo or Camila Cabello, all of whom currently join her in the Hot 100’s top ten? For that matter, the same goes for Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran or Drake. Lil Nas X broke the Internet by breaking Billboard records with an “Old Town Road” game plan that's enviable, but replicable. Unless the chart administrators reconsider their lenient remix eligibility criteria, by this time next year we could see his win demolished.