“Old Town Road” just keeps on giving.
“Old Town Road” just keeps on giving.
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The Music Issue
Lil Nas X Is the King of the Crossover
ByWesley MorrisMarch 11, 2020
“Old Town Road” just keeps on giving.
Lil Nas X Is the King of the Crossover
“Old Town Road” just keeps on giving. ByWesley Morris
Is there any getting over this song? Isn’t there some new town road we should be strolling down? The charts say we’ve moved on to “The Box” and “Roxanne” and “Hot Girl Bummer.” I heard a different story at a Christone (Kingfish) Ingram concert last month. Ingram is a strong rockin’ blues musician — a traditionalist, basically, who can set fires with his guitar — and I expected him to stick to the traditional script. But Ingram is also 21, just a few months older than Lil Nas X. What does he care about scripts?
He just started connecting a little bit of then to little bits of now. The connection made that night in his ferocious, flabbergasting instrumental dismount was between Prince and “Old Town Road.” He didn’t give it the novelty treatment, two bars then onto the next; he stayed there and made love to that song as if it had been around for half a century, as if he were conceived to it. Suddenly, it was “Hotel California,” “Stairway to Heaven.” Meaty, serious, canonical.
“Old Town Road”is the longest-running chart-topper ever. It spent 19 weeks up there. A whole summer! And since then, it has traveled from a TikTokking trap-country ditty (“Ridin’ on a tractor/Lean all in my bladder”) to an inescapable agent of multiculti cohesion. You’ll recall that, despite the plink of banjo (from a Nine Inch Nails sample, by the way), country radio didn’t want to play it and Billboard banned it from its country singles chart. The spurning spawned a remix with Billy Ray Cyrus. The new song’s popularity transcended the airplay scandal that compelled it. Nobody hears rejection now. “Old Town Road” has come to symbolize rebellion against parochialism and consensus in fraying times. It’s a major whodathunkit of social media virality, a classic “started from the bottom now my whole team here” phenomenon. And every time I see a team sway and twang with it, I get a little misty.
So obviously I was a mess at this year’s Grammys,when Lil Nas X performed with a Lazy Susan-load of other musicians.To make room for them, the song had to do some growing. The original version was 1 minute 53 seconds; Cyrus adds only 44 seconds more. After 10,000 listens, I swore it didn’t have any more give in it. But the minute the number opened — Lil Nas reclined on a living-room sofa, wearing one of his trademark shimmering country-western getups, strumming a mandolin — my face lit up. It’s still giving.
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He got up and performed the first verse, and then walked through the door of the rotating, dioramic set — part Michel Gondry music video; part high school musical — and: It was BTS! Off they went: this black American whiz kid and these seven South Korean superstars TikTokked together. Except their verse was new, and their chorus was now “Seoul Town Road.” Then Lil Nas went through another door where he did Young Thug’s verse from a third remix. Then he opened one more door, and there was the producer and DJ Diplo, who made the song’s second remix, banjoing with the 13-year-old country-singing yodeler Mason Ramsey. Then, out strutted Cyrus. And the room went nuts.
All along, Lil Nas X had been insisting upon the song’s elasticity, that it can be anything and go anywhere. Here we are, still stretching this thing to infinity.
Wesley Morrisis a staff writer for the magazine, a critic at large for The New York Times and co-host of the podcast“Still Processing.”In 2019, he won the Roger Ebert Award from the African-American Film Critics Association.Arielle Bobb-Willisis a photographer from New York who was recently featured in Aperture’s “The New Black Vanguard.” This is her first assignment for the magazine.
Stylist: Hodo Musa. Hair: Britney Thomas. Makeup and manicurist: Christina Guerra.
Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.
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