(To be fair, Billboard‘s Country chart has a weird recurrent rule where songs that fall below the Top 10 and are more than a couple months old are instantly removed from the chart, lest the slow-ass Country chart get clogged with old records. So the Chicks’ song didn’t actually fall 72 spots in a week — it fell at least eight spots, and then Billboard automatically removed it. Still, the song was near its peak of airplay, and it’s mind-blowing that airplay for a former No. 1 would drop off so rapidly, especially at a slow-moving format like country.)

I bring up the Chicks counterexample for a couple of reasons:

1. Al’s right that it’s going to be hard to judge the damage to Brown because he’s between promotional cycles. I’m not sure the conditions would ever exist again for something like what happened to the Chicks to recur — an act at its absolute peak of popularity, and very reliant on a single radio format, and mid-album-cycle, instantly shunned.

2. Laughable and shameful as this now seems, there was unusual agreement among country radio constituents (programmers and listeners) over the shun-worthiness of the Chicks. As horrible as the allegations against Brown are, pockets of sympathy — both from those who presume innocence and, yeah, from those (pigs) who don’t this feel horribleness rises above a lovers’ quarrel — likely mean the case against Brown won’t be so clear-cut. Which is unjust, if the allegations turn out to be 100% true, but there you go.

This is all pretty interesting because for all the pop music scandals we’ve had in recent years, this is one of the first where an airplay ban or boycott has even been a question. Some bad boy rapper or rock star gets busted with drugs or guns and it just feeds into their image. Even when Lil Wayne got busted and he lost some sponsorships, radio didn’t budge from playing him constantly. R. Kelly’s stock dipped for a few months after his scandal broke, then he was more popular than ever. But this is like the perfect storm of illusion-shattering pop idol dismantling: a teen dream assaults an equally popular female star? Christ.

Did any stations stop playing Jacko in the immediate aftermath of the initial child molestation scandal in ’93? Wikipedia says Dangerous actually rose up the charts after that happened!