The debate over whether or not Atlanta rapper Lil Nas X’s viral hit “Old Town Road” is a “country song” is actually not a new story: It’s yet another instance of white fear about black musical encroachment into a protected music industry center.
Combining slow-picked banjo sounds with the trademark trap ticks of the Atlanta-born hip-hop style, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” generated a bevy of hand-wringing among country music’s establishment when it hit the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart this past week. Cheekily promoted as a country song on SoundCloud and other new-age distribution platforms by the 19-year-old artist, “Old Town Road” rose to prominence due to a combination of algorithmic savvy and Internet virality at the height of the yeehaw agenda meme moment, plus an Instagram post from Justin Bieber, whose comment—“this shit bangs”—alerted 106 million followers to the track. Within days, the song was everywhere, even inspiring an extended commercial-break dance challenge at the arena of Nas X’s hometown Atlanta Hawks.
But within a few days, the song had disappeared from the country chart. “[U]pon further review, it was determined that ‘Old Town Road’ by Lil Nas X does not currently merit inclusion on Billboard‘s country charts,” the esteemed publication and analytics group told 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 question many publications have asked—“Can ‘Old Town Road’ be country?”—is a worthwhile one to be certain, but it misses a more pointed issue facing black music in a moment when the streaming ecosystem seems to be rendering genre boundaries obsolete. I ask instead, “What are country’s white powerbrokers so afraid of? Why would a song’s position on an industry chart matter enough to create controversy in the first place?”
The answer—I’d argue—is both a product and emblematic of broader cultural issues where white identity decides it is under attack, threatened by outsider raced masses seeking a move toward the cultural center. White victimhood is the lingua franca of the “American carnage” rhetoric of the current presidential administration. It tells white Americans that their manifest destiny, the dominion they enjoy at the presumed center of the nation’s cultural ecosystem, is a position that is under attack rather than one that has the capacity to grow and hold a multiplicity of sounds and peoples. It tells them that giving any ground will be a slippery slope to their own obsolescence.
Recall, for instance, two years ago when pre-GRAMMY controversy swirled after it was revealed Beyoncé Knowles had submitted songs for consideration in Best Rock Performance and a country category (likely Best Country Song or Best Country Solo Performance). “Daddy Lessons,” the country song, was rejected for consideration at the committee level, meaning it could not appear on the nominee shortlists. Knowles was invited with relatively open arms to perform “Daddy Lessons” with the Dixie Chicks at the 2016 CMA Awards (the song was not nominated for any CMAs), which was marked as a sign of progress for the awards. But The New York Times reported on backlash from country fans. “Neither are country, and Beyoncé could not be bothered to put some clothes on for the occasion,” one Facebook commenter quoted in the Times wrote (Coscarelli 2016). The article suggested a common sentiment that Knowles “[wasn’t] even what country represents.”
We should thoughtfully read this moment within this broader context, where Knowles’s seemingly harmless submission activated a broad sentiment against her candidacy, suggesting that she was an ambitious boundary crosser and that crossing over would represent taking up valuable space in the zero-sum game of culture. Rather than allow her a fair shake at the listeners’ table at the GRAMMYs, defensiveness and fear—the same fear that I’d argue has, at least up until this past year, kept rap music relegated to the nominees list and not the winners circle in the GRAMMY General Field.
In a viral Twitter thread, music industry veteran Shane Morris further contextualized country’s historical discomfort with race, which he traced to Ray Charles’s #1 seller Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music in 1962, two years before Billboard’s list launched. Like the GRAMMYs, the list drew delineations—making clear who was country and who was not. A black artist wouldn’t top it until 2008.
In the current moment Multiculturalism—effectively cultural desegregation that could be representative in the musical cultures of the nation—is challenged by rhetorics of white nostalgia, pushing against forces that would “transform” America further. Criminologist Mike King calls the new white identity politics—whereby black representation and white precarity have fueled a massive new wave of racial resentment—“aggrieved whiteness” in the face of a new presumption that whites are “a structurally oppressed group.”
Whiteness launches its defense from the center, as Sarah Ahmed argues. “The alignment of race and space is crucial to how they materialize as givens, as if each ‘extends’ the other,” she writes. “In other words, while ‘the other side of the world’ is associated with ‘racial otherness,’ racial others become associated with ‘the other side of the world.’ They come to embody distance. This embodiment of distance is what makes whiteness ‘proximate’ as the ‘starting point’ for orientation.”
This makes Lil Nas X an interloper—an outsider—whose fun, viral hit came to represent something far more insidious to the country music establishment. The case of “Old Town Road” is creating worthwhile debate about what country music can look and sound like in 2018, but without a proper articulation of the racial, historical, and conceptual resonance of the case against him, the real stakes are elided.
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