(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.