Lil Nas X ft. Billy Ray Cyrus - Old Town Road

April 4, 2019 - Columbia

In yet another capitalization of his internet buzz, Lil Nas X in tandem with Billy Ray Cyrus has released a remix of ‘Old Town Road’ with a star-studded short film accompaniment. The song began as an expression somewhere between an ironic cultural moment and the 19-year-old Lil Nas X’s real anxieties about dropping out of college to pursue his Twitter meme page. Irony, once a cold undercutting of culture according to one deceased and well-regarded author, seems now more than ever a liberating force. Linguists and folk with nothing better to do than cling to primitive etymologies may say this is a misuse of “irony,” but the fact is the cultural moment has set an amorphous definition, and it’s a functional one occupying many otherwise void liminalities. Anyway, for many (as can be seen on the TikTok app) this particular brand of irony is an opportunity to play-act and have the unprofessionality of the acting be regarded as a legitimate quality, inducting it into irony.

All that aside, and without getting too wrapped up (for the sake of this review) in Billdboard’s likely racist if not just agoraphobic decision to segregate ‘Old Town Road’ from the Country Genre’s portion, Lil Nas X’s one and only track has highlighted a meeting ground of trap and country that has mostly gone ignored, even when approached by the likes of Beyoncé. The video is campy as hell, parodying and magnifying the current Old Guard of the southern and western cultures of America—especially in its prelude to the song itself. Billy Ray Cyrus and Lil Nas X appear first, riding their horses, Lil Nas whipping out a bag presumably full of gold. Chris Rock, Haha Davis, and Rico Nasty are playing lawmen in hot pursuit until they stop in their tracks—Chris Rock’s unnamed character (likely the sheriff) says, “When you see a black man going that fast, you just gotta let him fly.”

Shortly after, Billy and Lil Nas stop at a small cottage where Billy says they’ll be safe. In the cottage is an old white man and a young white woman who with low-momentum lilts, “Daddy.” Outside the cottage, Lil Nas says, “Last time I was here, they weren’t too welcoming to outsiders.” There’s a brief shootout, Lil Nas flees through a tunnel and ends up in 2019 instead of somewhere near either end of the Gold Rush and the song begins. The remainder is a straightforward music video worth the watch, but the opening does the most to indicate LIl Nas is leaning into the reception of ‘Old Town Road.’

The song itself is of pretty simple structure, which lends to its impact. At once mocking and embodying hip-hop culture’s glorification of the whip, ‘Old Town Road’ makes its stand in the subtext that these folks been in their Porsches and on their porches too long, and now they don’t know shit, in the cowboy’s eyes. “I been in the valley, you ain’t been up off that porch.” The song does exactly what any fantasy hopes to do, culturally: it makes use of its own false normality to attend to the abnormality of the real world. By the end of the song, there is a feeling of inferiority left in those of us who are not men and women of the land—the horseless. But that doesn’t stop anyone from dancing, as feelings of inferiority often do.⛰️