It was only two months ago that PDs were still taking stock of Jason Aldean’s just-released version of “Dirt Road Anthem.” Coming on the heels of a mini-tempest over Sugarland’s reggae/rap break in “Stuck Like Glue,” Radio-Info’s Phyllis Stark asked “Should Country Stars Rap?” and found both PDs who were supportive, many of whom didn’t really see the song as rap anyway, and some who were nervous.

At this writing, “Dirt Road Anthem” has just gone 8-6 on the Nielsen BDS Country chart—a rapid rise even for a successful artist. It also has the greatest spin gain of any song in the top 10. "We truly don't have any flak out there," says Broken Bow Records senior VP Jon Loba. And now the question is not whether Country will accept “Dirt Road Anthem” but whether Top 40 will eventually acknowledge it.

In reality, the barrier for Country Rap really fell 10 years ago with Toby Keith’s “I Wanna Talk About Me,” a song which became a hit not long after Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me” became a Top 40 smash with surprising adult appeal (despite some edgy language) and helped create “mom rap” as a genre on the pop side. And if your response to reading this is that the Toby Keith song wasn’t really rap, well, that’s what they say at Top 40 every time a Hip-Hop record surprises people by being accepted. In either format, it seems, “rap” is what the audience can’t get used to.

By the early ’00s, of course, both formats were welcoming a new generation of 25+ listeners who had been teenagers during Hip-Hop’s late ’80s/early ’90s breakthrough. A few years after that, CHR would explode and while the prevailing thinking was that the rise of Country was a reaction to Hip-Hop, I held at the time that CHR’s problem for some people was probably that it had freaked out and pulled all the rap—thus sending some younger listeners in search of excitement from Country or elsewhere. I stopped writing that one for a while, but I feel a little more vindicated in it now.

Besides, Country audiences were already used to the trappings of Hip-Hop. Whether it was the Lost Trailers’ “Holler Back” or Eric Church’s “Homeboy,” which came out shortly before “Dirt Road Anthem,” there were always songs about how great it was to be down home, but which got their excitement from appropriating Hip-Hop slang anyway. And by the way, R&B artist Steve Arrington used the title “Homeboy” pretty much the same way in 1986.

The issue isn’t exactly settled in Country. The format still has to figure out how to unify a coalition of 30-something females and 50-something males, who are working through the presence of Taylor Swift as well. And allowing an artist to stretch occasionally is not the same as welcoming a Country rapper; indie-label Country artist Colt Ford, the original “Dirt Road Anthem” artist, still struggles for acceptance.

For “Dirt Road Anthem,” the next issue is Top 40 acceptance. With Ludacris’ guest appearance on the CMT awards having helped bring the song to Top 40 PDs’ attention, the song could probably test for some CHRs today. At the very least, it would be Rehab’s “Sitting at a Bar,” a similarly genre-bending song that became a smash almost everywhere it was played. But Aldean & Kelly Clarkson’s “Don’t You Wanna Stay” is now a top 15 AC and Hot AC record, and continuing to grow at Mainstream Top 40, so it will be a while before CHR, which took nine months to acknowledge another Country smash in “If I Die Young” and is now making up for lost time, has to decide.

Meanwhile, the next sonic battlefront in Country won’t be Hip-Hop elements. Like references to the Rolling Stones, Kiss or James Taylor in the early ’90s, they’re part of the landscape now. The next question is when there’ll be a Country record that appropriates the 125 b.p.m. techno-flavored “Turbo-Pop” of today’s CHR charts. And if it’s crazy to think that there’ll be a Country song like Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” or Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” soon, consider that the sound has been copied by none other than Coldplay this summer.

Your thoughts on Country Rap or Jason Aldean at Top 40 are welcome.