On March 23, the proprietor of the blog SavingCountryMusic.com—Kyle Coroneos, who writes under the pen name “Trigger”—published an op-ed titled “Billboard Must Remove Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ From Country Chart.” A week prior, the catchy viral hit—a cartoony fusion of exaggerated twang and trap beats that has been in my head approximately 102 percent of the time since I first heard it—had debuted at no. 19 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, surrounded by tracks from reigning country stars like Luke Bryan, Kelsea Ballerini, and Florida Georgia Line. According to Trigger, though, “Old Town Road” was “basically a 1:53 joke.” He went on, incensed that the viral ditty was taking valuable chart space from “actual songs, country or otherwise”:
Including Wild West signifiers or references to horses in no way qualifies a rap song with a trap beat as country. Furthermore, Lil Nas X is not professing to be a country artist. He’s not signed to a country label, and has no affiliation to the country industry whatsoever. Lil Nas X has no ties to the greater Nashville music campus in any capacity.
At least that last part is true. Lil Nas X is the stage name of 19-year-old Montero Lamar Hill (he turns 20 tomorrow; “having the best birthday month of my life,” he tweeted yesterday), a black Atlantan musician/internet personality who has been uploading music to SoundCloud for the past year or so. Hill first gained an internet following via the since-banned Twitter account @NasMaraj, on which he posted dubiously sourced memes and, as a prominent member of one of music’s most notorious fan armies, Nicki Minaj–related ephemera. According to his Wikipedia page—which in this kind of story seems as reliable a source as any—it was only “with the encouragement of his followers” that he “began making music.” Nas’s early work, which is to say the songs he made eight and 10 months ago, mostly comprises lo-fi, free-spirited songs that namecheck video games and have been tagged variously as #trap, #hip-hop & rap, and #pop. Uploaded to little fanfare four months ago, “Old Town Road (I Got the Horses in the Back)” is the first of his songs tagged #country.
Billboard did indeed pull “Old Town Road” from the country charts the week of March 23: “While ‘Old Town Road’ incorporates references to country and cowboy imagery,” a representative told Rolling Stone, “it does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” Another source—“an insider with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity”—said that its previous inclusion on the Hot Country Songs chart had been “a mistake.” That’s how heated this whole thing had suddenly become: An insider with knowledge of the matter spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity. But if Billboard and the Saving Country Music ilk wanted to stop “Old Town Road” in its tracks, they could not have picked a worse tactic than pulling it from the charts, which only drew more attention to the whole debacle. Amid justifiable cries of racism, “Old Town Road” suddenly became a digital cause célèbre. Brian Kelley from Florida Georgia Line has posted about the song on his Instagram stories (“Big mood [key emoji]”), Justin Bieber shouted it out, and, most consequentially, Billy Ray Cyrus voiced his support. “Been watching everything going on with OTR,” he tweeted directly at Nas on April 3. “When I got thrown off the charts, Waylon Jennings said to me ‘Take this as a compliment’ means you’re doing something great! Only Outlaws are outlawed. Welcome to the club!”
The very next day, unto us a gift was born: An “Old Town Road” remix featuring the Achy Breaky One himself. Although we live in an increasingly surreal world—one in which, say, Aunt Becky from Full House might go to jail—this was the point at which the tale of “Old Town Road” had become absurd enough to draw the world’s undivided attention. The Texas Tech basketball team sang it while celebrating in their locker room last week; just a few days later it had reached whatever the level of ubiquity something reaches when Mark Ruffalo tweets about it. Suffice it to say there is a new sheriff in town, and his name is Lil Nas X.
Even stranger: The remix is somehow … good? Billy Ray Cyrus brings an admirable level of conviction to what some people might have dismissed as a novelty single. His soulfully croaked “yeeeaaaahhh” blows across the intro like a tumbleweed, and later in the song he drops heaters like “Baby’s got a habit, diamond rings and Fendi sports bras.” Hilariously, the powers that be at Billboard have now been backed into a corner from which they will have to declare a song that contains Cyrus crooning his achy-breaky heart out “not country.” But it doesn’t even matter anymore; Lil Nas X has won this showdown. “Old Town Road” has transcended the genre charts altogether and become a bona fide pop smash. Over the past few weeks it has leap-frogged up the Hot 100, from no. 51 to 32 to 15. Next week, it will likely dethrone Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” and become the no. 1 song in America.
The industry consternation over “Old Town Road” has something to do with the outdated conventions of genre, and it certainly has to do with race—the #OTR phenomenon has brought renewed attention to the continued segregation of the Billboard charts and the cringe-inducing fact that Billboard’s R&B chart has previously gone by names like “Race Records” or “Hot Black Singles.” But the “Old Town Road” controversy and the anxiety it’s provoked in some music-industry traditionalists has also been fueled by an underlying generation gap between so-called “digital natives” and defenders of the old guard. (In his op-ed, Trigger decried the fact that “Old Town Road” did not even have an official music video, just a homemade clip “set randomly to scenes from the Wild West video game Red Dead Redemption 2 like your teenage son may do to one of his favorite songs.”) Lil Nas X is not a product of any particular music scene so much as he is a child of the internet. As New York’s Brian Feldman put it, “The ascendance of Lil Nas X on the back of ‘Old Town Road’ feels very DIY, a web-native breakout hit happening entirely outside of the record-label and radio-DJ gatekeeping systems.” Whether you appreciate “Old Town Road” or not isn’t just a simple question of whether you think the song is “good” or not. There’s a different calculus: Whether or not you think memes are funny, musical genres are sacrosanct, and the internet is an agent of opportunistic good or one of chaotic evil.
Although it was uploaded to SoundCloud in December, “Old Town Road” didn’t take off until it hit the popular video app TikTok, a kind of Vine replacement that lets users easily experiment with in-camera editing effects. “Old Town Road” spawned the #YeehawChallenge: Over that opening lick, a person stands before the camera in plain clothes and then, with a sudden hop—like the jump cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey when filmic magic upgrades an ape’s bone to a spaceship—they land back to earth in cowboy attire. An even simpler version of the meme is flourishing too, in photos (like, say, these of Chris Paul) depicting people before and [dons cowboy hat] after listening to “Old Town Road.” The notion that “goin’ country” is a surface-level performance, an identity that can be worn or removed as easily as a hat, might be offensive to those invested in the notion that there is such a thing as “authentic” country music or fans. But the message of the yeehaw memes also calls to mind the hook of a 2009 Blake Shelton and Trace Adkins song (that is, for the record, infinitely sillier than “Old Town Road”), “We all got a hillbilly bone down deep inside.”
The boundaries between country music and genres like pop and hip-hop have been blurring for years. Of late, artists like Florida Georgia Line, Sam Hunt, and even the twangy warble of Post Malone have blended styles. Last year, the record for longest-running no. 1 single on the Hot Country Songs chart was shattered by “Meant to Be,” a ubiquitous smash duet between Florida Georgia Line and the pop singer Bebe Rexha, who hails from that country mecca Brooklyn, New York. (After the song spent an astounding 34 weeks atop the country chart, Rexha said, “I’d never think a New York City girl like me who grew up writing pop music would stumble into the country world.”) Still, the true kindred spirits of “Old Town Road” aren’t country songs or even necessarily rap songs so much as they are other recent hits that rode viral “challenges” to the top of the charts: Drake’s “In My Feelings,” Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles,” and, most closely, Baauer’s 2012 hit “Harlem Shake”—which debuted at no. 1 on the Hot 100 the week after Billboard added YouTube streams to its chart calculations. Lil Nas X’s story has a tinge of Cardi B to it, too—another self-made internet phenom who built a devoted digital audience first and then decided she would try her hand at becoming a rapper. Whether or not Nas is a country artist or even a cowboy, he has proved himself to be a frontiersman, forging ahead on terrain uncharted by the music industry.
As I write this, I’m sure that at least one musicologist is beginning a yearslong PhD thesis titled “Lean All in My Bladder: Toward a Praxis-Based Understanding of ‘Old Town Road.’” The think pieces will be thunk, record labels will scramble clumsily to find the next Lil Nas X, and brands will workshop faux off-the-cuff first-person tweets about the horses they got in the back. So it goes. But what’s great about “Old Town Road” is that every one of those responses (and perhaps even this article itself!) is missing the point by taking it all way too seriously. “Old Town Road” is a meme, and nothing kills a meme faster than thinking too hard about it. “Old Town Road” is in some ways an outgrowth of the “yeehaw agenda,” the term coined by Bri Malandro to describe the recent black reclamation of cowboy imagery. “It was 1,000 percent supposed to be fun,” she said last month of the tweet thread that has since spawned lengthy art-historical deep dives into the erasure of black people from cowboy culture. “I get where those articles are going,” Malandro continued, “but to be honest, for me it’s literally just about the aesthetic. I think nowadays people like to make everything into a think piece or some really deep historical conversation but that’s not why I started saying that at all. It was just me having fun and going up for the looks, specifically by really fly black girls and boys in cowboy hats.”
I have started to suspect—’scuse me, I have started to reckon—that “Old Town Road” is some kind of cosmic litmus test to determine whether we can still enjoy things or whether the jaded pessimism of the internet age has completely eroded our capacity to experience simple and unproblematic joy. A 19-year-old Nicki Minaj stan accidentally made the most popular country song on the planet by sampling a Nine Inch Nails instrumental and then Billy Ray Cyrus barnstormed onto the remix and told him that Waylon Jennings would have liked it. If you can’t muster so much as a smile over that, then I really don’t know what to tell you, pardner.
So by all means, allow “Old Town Road” to spawn conversations about the arbitrary nature of genre, the foundational racial bias of popular music, and the bizarre fact that a member of the Cyrus family is once again standing at the crossroads of country and hip-hop culture (only somehow much more respectfully this time?). But also … enjoy it. Gather your loved ones, saddle up your horse, and let us all salute the weird wonder of “Old Town Road” as it streaks like a comet through the pop cultural firmament. Give in to the sublime ridiculousness of the whole thing. And in that spirit, I personally would like to honor “Old Town Road” in the truest sense I know: I’m going to shut up about it, press play, and ride off toward the horizon.
