#LilNasXs #OldTownRoad #CountryMusic #BillboardCharts #Rapper
Atlanta rapper Lil Nas X is the country-trap star who never was. His viral hit, “Old Town Road,” was removed last week from Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, after just one week there. But it remains on the Hot 100 chart and the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.
First came ire from Nashville types—“‘Old Town Road’ is no more country than the Beastie Boys’ ‘High Plains Drifter,’” wrote Saving Country Music on March 23—before Billboard put its boot down. “Upon further review, it was determined that ‘Old Town Road’ by Lil Nas X does not currently merit inclusion on Billboard’s country charts,” Billboard said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “When determining genres, a few factors are examined, but first and foremost is musical composition. While ‘Old Town Road’ incorporates references to country and cowboy imagery, it does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.”
The aftermath of this decision has prompted fierce debate about what is and isn’t country, bringing up longstanding questions about where black artists are allowed to exist on the charts. Black country stars like Darius Rucker, Kane Brown, and Jimmie Allen may be thriving, but the whitewashing of the genre is well documented. Just last year, Rucker and Brown became the first pair of minorities to follow each other with No. 1 country songs in the 28-year history of the Billboard Country Airplay chart.
After Billboard made its statement about “Old Town Road,” a rep for the company added that Lil Nas X’s race played no part in their decision—a fraught comment for those familiar with the charts’ history of tacit segregation. Billboard’s R&B Songs chart, known in certains eras as Race Records or Hot Black Singles, was built on a racist industry politic: the idea that black music was made for and by black people, and white music was made for and by white people. Many black artists who don’t make R&B are still relegated to that box, while white artists have the freedom to roam freely in historically black genres. Top 40 radio has kept popular black rappers at bay, despite admitting their white counterparts. As the borders that once defined genres continue to dissolve, what are the rules and who gets to make them?
Of course, Lil Nas X never expected to become a lightning rod for long-overdue conversations about chart mechanics and musicology when he channeled his inner Toby Keith. He released a goofy, fun country-trap hybrid song and marketed it as country, at the very least, to capitalize on the current Yeehaw Agenda, but also because the song’s country overtones were obvious. The timeline of his sudden rise shows how the internet is moving music faster than the charts can map it.
Lil Nas X first appeared on SoundCloud in May 2018 with a rough but functional paint-by-numbers trap demo. Two months later, he released his first mixtape, NASARTI, a compilation of bass-heavy trap flexers with beats like Sonic the Hedgehog. By this point, in mid-July, there still wasn’t anything even remotely like “Old Town Road” in his catalog.
In what can only be described as a left turn, Lil Nas X donned his first cowboy hat in early December when he released “Old Town Road” to YouTube, SoundCloud, and iTunes; it was the first song he tagged #country on the latter two platforms. On release day, he tweeted a video of a man in a cowboy hat, dancing at a rodeo, with his own song dubbed in and the caption, “country music is evolving.” The closest thing “Old Town Road” has to a video is a visualizer set to screen-grabs from the hit video game “Red Dead Redemption 2.” In the third-person shoot-’em-up, the player journeys across a fictionalized Old West with a gang of outlaws, trying to outrun industrialization on horseback.
Following the same instincts that led him to make “Old Town Road” the unofficial “Red Dead” theme song, Lil Nas X also released in December a 55-second, Western-themed supercut clip for the song, including a scene from the Hannah Montana movie where Miley Cyrus embraces her country roots. A few days later, Bleacher Reportwas in on the joke, flipping a jockey clip from X’s supercut into a meme. The fun eventually made its way to TikTok, as most viral things do these days, and the short-form video app eventually propelled “Old Town Road” up three different charts. TikTok encourages users to add audio to its database and create shareable videos using those snippets of sound; since @nicemichael uploaded“Old Town Road” on February 23, the song has been used approximately 117,000 times across videos that have amassed over 6 million views. “I promoted the song as a meme for months until it caught on to TikTok and it became way bigger,” X told Time. “When TikTok hit it, almost every day since that, the streams have been up.” One meme in particular stuck with users: When Lil Nas X dips into his faux country twang for the first hook, the person in the shot transforms into the country-fied version of themselves, all spurs and square dancing.
With “Old Town Road” trending online throughout the first months of 2019, the song garnered an endorsement from Brian Kelley of Florida Georgia Line, the country duo known, at times controversially, for its hybrid hits. Through a lot of meme savvy and a little radio airplay (on Radio Disney Country, of all places), Lil Nas X wound up charting higher among country songs than rap songs. (This likely can be attributed to the fact that hip-hop, now America’s most popular genre, has stiffer competition on the charts.) With streaming plays and social media guiding his way, Lil Nas X bypassed country radio’s clique-ish gatekeepers. As the song built steam (including a Justin Bieber co-sign), he signed with Columbia.
As hip-hop continues to push the limits of its sound, X is far from the only rapper to experiment with country themes, but he was the one who figured out how to package them just earnestly enough for a mass audience. Click the #country tag on SoundCloud and you’ll see any number of rap songs identified that way facetiously, as a last rebellion against categorization. Artists like sad frosty and lil boomaren’t even pretending to actually make country rap. But “Old Town Road” isn’t labeled country as a gag—there are clear traces of country in its DNA. As Lil Nas X put it, “The song is country trap. It’s not one, it’s not the other. It’s both.”
The Yeehaw Agenda’s hip-hop roots can be traced back to the literal “Yee Haw” that first sent tremors through SoundCloud: Young Thug’s, seconds into Beautiful Thugger Girls. Though Nappy Roots’ 2002 single “Po’ Folks” could safely be deemed rap’s first real take on country and Bubba Sparxxx attempted a crossover with 2013’s “Country Folks” featuring Colt Ford and Danny Boone, 2017’s Thug moment felt like a changeover, prompting similar conversations about what country can be. Around the same time as Thug’s rootsy “singing album” came genuine, if not exactly faithful, attempts to work country into the rap canvas, on songs like Mir Fontane’s “Down By the River,” mysticphonk’s “haunt u” with Lil Peep, and Lil Tracy and Lil Uzi Vert’s “Like a Farmer.”
None of these songs have charted on the rap and country charts, however. It’s not impossible to do both, as “Old Town Road” briefly showed, but who’s able to pull it off is telling. Country-rap stalwart Colt Ford’s albums consistently appear on rap and country charts simultaneously. If his rap-heavy hit with Jason Aldean, “Drivin’ Around Song,” can be a country song, why can’t “Old Town Road”? Which “elements of today’s country music” in particular are required to pass the Billboard smell test? It can have bars but not an 808 bass? Can only country stars flirting with rap tropes make country rap, but not the other way around? It isn’t just that the rules are unclear, it’s that they seem entirely made up—which they are. Billboard’s chart policies are decided by humans and subject to change at any time.
Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” is, at the very least, country pastiche, maybe not entirely serious in its imitation, but certainly faithful. It positions itself as country, and in so doing plays with the genre’s signifiers to such a degree that it’s registering to many as country. “For those stations that tend to be more traditional country, it might be a little left of center,” Phil Guerini, Radio Disney Network GM, told Rolling Stone. “But you see the type of reaction the audience is having to the song. That’s informed by their perception of this song’s country relevance.” When listeners can recognize a rap song’s country bonafides, the least that gatekeepers can do is not block its crossover.
by Sheldon Pearce
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