Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Ride ’til I Can’t No More Edition Part 2
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2023
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
When it crash-landed on the charts in 2019, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” felt new and old at the same time: a savvy, TikTok-fueled viral hit that summarized a century of cross-cultural collisions between R&B, rap and country. It was also unexpectedly huge—a record 19 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100—and controversial, as Billboard magazine pulled the song from its Hot Country Songs chart, prompting a reckoning on race and the very definition of country music.
“Old Town Road” wasn’t just a reckoning—it was a culmination. As a hard-to-categorize hit, it called back to cross-genre experiments by everyone from Ray Charles and the Rappin’ Duke to Bubba Sparxxx and even Jason Aldean. As a viral smash, its antecedents date back to “The Twist,” right through “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” and “Harlem Shake.”
In honor of his new book Old Town Road (now in bookstores!) join Chris Molanphy as he walks through the many predecessors to “Old Town Road” and explains why can’t nobody tell Lil Nas X nothin’.
Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:16.2 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits |
| 0:23.3 | from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's |
| 0:29.1 | Why is the song number one series. On our last episode, an audio companion to my new book, Old Town |
| 0:37.2 | Road, I offered some history on Lil Nas X's |
| 0:41.6 | record-setting hit. Not only in 2019, when the song Old Town Road set an all-time Hot 100 record, |
| 0:50.9 | but also the decades prior to Old Town Road, when everyone from Ray Charles and |
| 0:58.2 | the Rap and Duke to Bubba Sparks and Jason Aldeen were mixing country music with R&B and |
| 1:06.0 | rap. We're now into the 21st century, when a new generation of viral hitmakers are about to |
| 1:14.4 | reboot how the charts function. |
| 1:17.8 | In January 2006, 13 years before Old Town Road, the top of the Hot 100 was briefly overtaken by a quartet from the Bankhead Projects, |
| 1:31.2 | the same Atlanta housing development where then-six-year-old Montero Hill was living. |
| 1:38.3 | They did it with a quirky track that's arguably the simplest Hot 100 number one song ever. They top the chart for |
| 1:47.7 | one week and would never hit the top 40 again. I talked briefly about D4L's Laffy Taffy |
| 2:08.8 | three years ago in our post-Christmas hits episode of Hit Parade. |
| 2:14.7 | The song by D4L exploded in popularity during the holiday season of 2005. |
| 2:22.9 | It blew up so fast, in fact, that just after Christmas, the first week of January 2006, |
| 2:31.2 | Laffy Taffy ejected a song by the mighty Mariah Carey from the number one spot. |
| 2:38.1 | Her smash Don't Forget About Us. |
| 2:54.5 | How exactly did D4L's skeletal hit dethrone the goddess of Pop and B? |
| 2:59.8 | In a word, technology. |
| 3:02.8 | And I got more droop. |
... |
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