![]() In late March, “Old Town Road” appeared on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart before it was removed for being deemed insufficiently country, causing a furor. So when an artist like Lil Nas X - who is black, and raps, and is from Atlanta, with no ties to the country music business - lays claim to rural aesthetics, even in a way that’s partly tongue in cheek, it causes real disruption. For decades, Nashville has essentially framed and marketed the rural experience as white - despite and in defiance of the deep black roots of country music. Pop, more than ever, is an identity playground.īut the particular alchemy of “Old Town Road” also taps something deeper: more than two decades of dialogue between country music and hip-hop, genres that have been slowly but consistently finding common heritage, swapping structural elements and taking comfort in each other’s sounds.īut the industry’s gatekeepers are less interested in this mutability. It’s also a neat distillation of how genre is currently lived in American pop music: fluidly, with styles and ideas up for grabs by creators and easily slipped on and off by listeners, with varying degrees of sincerity. 1 song in the country, capping a startling ascent that demonstrates what can happen when viral engineering meets lightning-rod controversy meets the pop uncanny. But in the way that the internet can rapidly make and remake something, morphing meaning in real time, Lil Nas X’s track became something different almost every few days on its path from SoundCloud obscurity to pop ubiquity: a savvy troll, a manipulator of streaming algorithms, a meme theme, a battering ram to genre barriers, a trigger of music-biz discord, a David suffering at the hands of Goliath, a sociocultural rallying point, and eventually, a site of cross-cultural kumbaya.Īnd now, it’s likely to be one of the most emblematic songs of the year: On April 8, “Old Town Road” became the No. ![]() ![]() It began as a Hail Mary pass by a college dropout hoping music might save him from having to go back to school. Over the last few weeks, “Old Town Road” - a strutting and lightheartedly comedic country-rap tune by the previously unknown 20-year-old rapper Lil Nas X - has lived an improbable number of lives. ![]()
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