Zeros

When Charts Change the Story: Hip-Hop's Billboard Absence For the first time since 1990, there isn't a single hip-hop song in the Billboard Hot 100's top 40 . The headline sounds dramatic, almost unprecedented— and it is, by the numbers . But before we start writing think pieces about hip-hop's cultural decline, we should probably ask what actually happened here. The culprit isn't a sudden shift in taste. It's a rule change. Kendrick Lamar and SZA's   Luther had spent 46 weeks on the chart, including 13 weeks at number one . In its final appearance, it sat at number 38—still firmly in the top 40. Then it simply vanished. Not because people stopped listening, but because Billboard's new recurrent rule removed it. Songs that have been charting for extended periods and fall below a certain position are now automatically dropped from the top 40. This raises an obvious question that the reporting hasn't addressed : if these rules had always...