Through its treatment of Lil NAS X’s smash song Old Town Road, BILLBOARD is showing the world that the disenfranchisement of Black artists in music is alive & well.

Billboard is all too happy to point out that the hit song “OLD TOWN ROAD” is breaking records both old and new as it spends its second week as the Number 1 song in the country. What some were apparently not happy with was the genre the song originally and many say the correctly debuted under, COUNTRY.

After spending a week THANOSing the Country charts Billboard decided to remove the song from its country category and move it over to the Rap charts. Since then Country stars such as Billy Ray Cyrus, Keith Urban, Jimmie Allen have all jumped up to support it as a bonafide country song. Billy Ray so adamant that he actually jumped on the remix of the song to sing the hook and give the song more country credibility in billboards eyes. The fans have spoken, before being removed Old Town Road rocketed past all other country songs and has received more radio play than any song since Drakes “In my Feelings”. So what happened?

The Brothers Osborne sounded off on a red carpet to Billboard that they didn’t believe Old Town Road had merit as a legitimate and traditional country song. When asked by a Billboard rep what do they think constitutes country they responded cryptically:

[“Certainly not that. You know, I DON’T KNOW WHAT COUNTRY MUSIC IS, it’s not for me to say. For me, if music makes someone feel good, then that’s really the whole point of it. However I don’t like that there’s this controversy around (Old Town Road). John and I, we’ve had success at radio but we still struggle at radio all the time. So to complain about that to me is just like, Dude, come on. Get in line.” – Lead Singer T.J. Osborne

“There are tons of girls just waiting for the moment, waiting in line, writing the right songs, showing up everyday to the writing room, sometimes doing two, three or four writes a day. They’ve been in Nashville for over 10 years…then this dude puts out a song with kind of quasi country lyrics? Something about a horse, boobies and some shit? Let’s turn the focus away from that.”- Guitarist John Osborne]

Basically in a nutshell people like the country group Brothers Osborne want the the music industry to work for them and take the focus off of the natural ability and talent of other artists who haven’t spent enough time in Nashville. This is historically how black artists have been sidelined while white artists have reaped the benefits of a genre and music industry that exists largely on their past, present and future work. There is no line in music, popularity is determined by the masses and the masses have spoken.

There should be a huge uproar and push back by everyone who supports music. Lil NAS X’s song Old Town Road isn’t suffering by a long shot but if it is the best Country song of the year it should be recognized and charted as such. 15-20 years from now the stats will show that black artists had little to no representation of participation in country music. At the end of the day it seems that the aim of Billboard is to appease racist views and prevent inclusion. Thereby protecting good ol’ boys music.