Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits

from Coast to Coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of

slates Why Is the Song Number One series. On our last episode, an audio companion to

my new book Old Town Road, I offered some history on Lil Naus X's record

setting hit, not only in 2019 when the song Old Town Road set an all-time Hot 100 record,

but also the decades prior to Old Town Road, when everyone from Ray Charles and The Rappin Duke to Bubba Sparks and Jason Aldine

were mixing country music with R&B and rap. We're now into the 21st century when a new generation of viral

hitmakers are about to reboot how the charts function. 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, the same

Atlanta housing development where then six-year-old Montero Hill was living. They did it with a quirky

track that's arguably the simplest Hot 100 number one song ever. They topped the chart for one week and would never hit the

top 40 again. I talked briefly about D4L's laughy-taffy three years ago in our post-Christmas-Hits episode of

Hit Parade. The song by D4L exploded in popularity during the holiday season of 2005.

It blew up so fast in fact that just after Christmas the first week of January 2006

Laffy Taffy ejected a song by the mighty Mariah Carrie from the number one spot, her Smash don't forget about us. How exactly did D4L's skeletal hit dethron the goddess of pop?

How exactly did D4L's skeletal hit dethron the goddess of pop and B. In a word technology. The 2005 holiday season was the first in which Apple's iTunes

I know it's the summertime but your laughing time got me

for get loose.

The 2005 holiday season was the first in which Apple's iTunes Music Store

counted for Billboard's charts. That same year, Apple's iPod was at a peak of

gifting popularity. A lot of teenagers woke up on

Christmas morning 2005 with a new gadget to fill with songs and iTunes gift cards in their stockings. They needed software

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