Music is such a subjective art form that we don’t have too many metrics for what makes “good music”—beyond having Eddie Vedder on vocals at least—so it stands to reason that one of the things we can trust is the objective rankings of Billboard’s Hot 100 list. After all, if Billboard determines that something is successful enough to warrant a “Hot” label, then it must be good on some level, right? And if we accept that, then the longer something retains that “Hot” label, the better it must be. So, with all of that established, we can say semi-definitively that Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” is now the best song of all time, because it just broke the record for most consecutive weeks at the top of the Hot 100 chart.
As Billboard announced today, “Old Town Road” has just hit its 17th week at the top of the Hot 100 chart, breaking the 16-week record held by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” from 1995 and Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” from 2017, and it shows no sign of stopping there. As Billboard explains, the new “Seoul Town Road” remix with BTS just dropped last week, at the cutoff for Billboard’s tracking, so its full Hot 100 impact won’t be reflected until this current week.
If you somehow haven’t heard the song yet, there’s no point in trying to avoid it now. Check out the video below. It’s not bad.