'Old Town Road' and the racial politics of genre
One of the fundamental issues in the country chart controversy was the racial politics of genre. Although 'Old Town Road' was deemed not to 'embrace enough elements of today's country music' to remain on the chart, one journalist contended that:
Billboard's decision did, however, embrace enough elements of yesterday's racism to draw everyone's attention, so in a delightful act of retaliation, Lil Nas X recruited the 57-year-old country star Billy Ray Cyrus to sing on an 'Old Town Road' remix, and now a frivolous ditty about hats and horsies is prompting a broad, meaningful discussion about how racial segregation is baked into the entire idea of genre. (Richards Reference Richards 2019)
While, as I will discuss below, this is not how the collaboration actually came about, what matters here is that Billboard's genre determination was understood as part of a larger system of racism in music. Both the reclassification and what one journalist termed 'the song's conspicuous absence from most major country radio playlists' were 'sharply criticized as unfair and even racist, prompting a debate about genre and race in Nashville' (Sisario Reference Sisario 2019). Given mainstream American resistance to discussing racism as a systemic problem rather than an individual prejudice, it is remarkable that such an understanding would surface in a journalistic account at all, let alone enough of them to be a consistent theme in the corpus of press data. The resistance to considering a song with hip-hop elements to be country may have been particularly salient for cultural commentators given the fact that there had been a number of hit songs including elements of both country and hip-hop in recent years, like Jason Aldean's 'Dirt Road Anthem', featuring Ludacris (2011), and Florida Georgia Line's 'Cruise', featuring Nelly (2013) – the latter of which had topped the country singles chart. Perhaps even more remarkable, the popular conversation even at times understood this kind of exclusion to be part of a pattern, putting it into the context of 'country music's history of ignoring artists such as Ray Charles' (Graham Reference Graham 2019).
The genre controversy around 'Old Town Road' demonstrates that crossing racialised genre boundaries typically goes only one way. White people typically have little trouble moving into Black-coded genres. As David Hesmondhalgh argues, when white artists like the Rolling Stones or Eric Clapton copy blues sounds or Moby samples blues recordings, it is seen as something like homage (Hesmondhalgh Reference Hesmondhalgh 2006). As Amanda Nell Edgar notes, musical boundaries work by 'stretching to accommodate movement and exploitative colonization by those in power, while snapping punitively back in place for those framed as interlopers' (Edgar Reference Edgar 2014, p. 168). Even without particularly respectful intent, as one journalist pointed out, 2009 song 'I'm on a Boat' by comedy group The Lonely Island was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, the contrast of which with 'Old Town Road' 'should remind us that white people are often welcomed into black spaces while black people are more frequently forbidden from entering white spaces' (Richards Reference Richards 2019). The journalist calls attention to the fact that three white men could make their way into the Black-coded genre of rap with a novelty record, but a Black man's 'frivolous ditty about hats and horsies' is not nearly so welcome in white-coded country.
Lil Nas X's removal from the country charts is also reminiscent of the backlash to Black artists sampling white artists' records. In a particularly colourful example, the court decision about Biz Markie's sample of Gilbert O'Sullivan's 'Alone Again (Naturally)' (1972) in his 'Alone again' (1991) 'simply quoted the Old Testament ("thou shalt not steal")' (Brennan Center for Justice 2005, p. 10), taking the position that reusing a piece of someone else's music was only and inevitably theft, not a valid kind of music creation. Accordingly, in the long tradition of treating Black people as inherently criminal, the judge interpreted Markie's sample not as a tort but a crime and 'even went so far as to recommend that the defendants be prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement, a more serious charge that carries its own fines and possibility of prison sentencing in addition to any damages awarded the plaintiff' (Demers Reference Demers 2006, p. 93). Black artists engaging with white people's music are thus treated as suspect, at the same time that moving in the other direction is accepted and even rewarded.
'Old Town Road' thus reflects a wider pattern in which white people have access to all areas of culture, but artists of colour – in this case Black artists – are told to stay in their lane. The problem is 'the nonreciprocal nature of the appropriation' (Greene Reference Greene 2008, p. 374). This is what is often called cultural appropriation, in which some culturally Other object or practice that was formerly treated as strange, deviant, primitive, savage, etc., comes to be seen by the dominant group as desirably exotic. This shift, which 'inverts the hierarchy that views nonwhite cultures as "bad" and white cultures as "good," remains dualistic. It is also, of course, the continuance of white racial domination that holds in place the status of whiteness as normative masquerading as "generic" – unadorned, basic, essential' (Frankenberg Reference Frankenberg 1993, p. 205). Thus, as white people come to desire the exotic object or practice, as bell hooks describes in her famous essay 'Eating the Other', they might 'see their willingness to openly name their desire for the Other as affirmation of cultural plurality', but that is not really what is happening (hooks Reference hooks, Durham and Kellner 2006, p. 368). Instead, appropriators engage in a form of 'consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other's history through a process of decontextualization' (hooks Reference hooks, Durham and Kellner 2006, p. 373). That is, the cultural object or practice is taken out of context and the source artist or culture doesn't benefit, thus not supporting pluralism, diversity, or inclusivity at all. Overall, cultural appropriation wants the culture but never the people it comes from, which is how people of colour's content can be both devalued and lucratively extracted. Thus, white artists borrowing or stealing from non-white artists in blues, hip hop, world music, etc., is usually seen as reasonable, but non-white artists may not legitimately borrow the other direction by sampling or making country songs.
If the racialised-as-white space of country was inhospitable to Lil Nas X on his own, the presence of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus on the song's remixes changed the genre calculation. As we have already begun to see, the way Cyrus came to be involved was narrated in multiple ways in the press coverage. The idea for the collaboration long predated the chart controversy, as Lil Nas X in fact suggested it on Twitter the day after he released the song in December 2018, tweeting 'twitter please help me get billy ray cyrus on this' (@LilNasX 2018). While at first the record label wanted a contemporary country star rather than one most popular in the 1990s, they eventually realised that 'it made more sense to amplify the narrative Lil Nas X had already created online – one that caught fire in March when Billboard took "Old Town Road" off of the Hot Country Songs chart, where it had cracked the top 20'; as one record executive noted, 'it created a sense of him as an underdog, so people were rooting for him' (Levy Reference Levy 2019). The official story, then, is that Cyrus's addition specifically highlighted Lil Nas X's divergence from the norm in a way that using more standard promotional techniques would not have; deviating from what was expected in this deliberate way can be seen as part of the queer nature of 'Old Town Road'.
Although the interest in Cyrus long predated the removal of 'Old Town Road' from the country charts in late March 2019, the remix was actually released very shortly afterward at the beginning of April, making it look like a response. Moreover, given that the song was at number one for only one week in its original version, but 18 more after the remixes began, Cyrus often got the credit for its success. One journalist contended that 'the Billy Ray Cyrus-assisted remix of "Old Town Road" was the version that spent all those weeks at No. 1, the one that will go down as one of the biggest popular songs in history, and will be played at weddings and karaoke nights for years to come' (Lipshutz Reference Lipshutz 2019c). This is of course not true, as the chart combined all versions, but the incorrectness of the claim serves to underscore how much the success is attributed to Cyrus. Sometimes, it's even referred to as his remix rather than something masterminded by Lil Nas X. One journalist noted that 'Billy Ray had earned eight [MTV Video Music Award] nominations for his remix of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road"' (Havens Reference Havens 2019); another said that 'before dropping his remix, Cyrus showed love to the song' (Lockett Reference Lockett 2019). Similarly, one writer argued that 'Billy Ray polished an already strong record into a superior gem' (Billboard Staff 2019b), defining the situation as one in which Cyrus made substantial changes rather than just participating in the new version. In such ways, like rock 'n' roll before it, the song takes part in the broader tradition Edgar identifies as 'representing the white male performer as the source of black male sounds' (Edgar Reference Edgar 2014, p. 171). Certainly, Cyrus was widely seen as a solution to the track's genre trouble. As one headline put it, 'Lil Nas X Added Billy Ray Cyrus to "Old Town Road." Is It Country Enough for Billboard Now?' (Sisario Reference Sisario 2019). Another journalist put a finer point on it, saying that 'Cyrus hopped on a remix to add "authenticity" – whistling and whiteness, basically' (Serpell Reference Serpell 2019). In such ways, Cyrus's position as an 'authentic' country artist helped reshape the discursive construction of the song.
The ways this was specifically a white man getting more than his share of the credit for what was ultimately a relatively minor contribution to music made by an artist of colour is a recurring tradition in music. Alan Lomax, who Hesmondhalgh notes 'may with some justification be described as the most famous ethnomusicologist of all time', is often critiqued because he is listed as the cowriter of many of the songs he recorded in his fieldwork (Hesmondhalgh Reference Hesmondhalgh 2006, p. 58). As Toni Lester notes, 'Some of those recordings were of black prisoners forced to perform for Lomax by white prison guards', and indeed 'Lomax later refused to let Leadbelly enjoy income from the copyrights to the music in these recordings, arguing that the music as simply part of a larger American "folk music" tradition' (Lester Reference Lester 2014, p. 235). Focusing on remix in particular, the American DJ Diplo has extracted Brazilian music and made only 'minimal changes to the original songs, which often amount to the addition of a sound effect or two on top of the original track'; James McNally argues that, 'by declining even to cite the original artists and labeling the three songs under the anonymous, generic moniker of "Baile Funk," Diplo is able to take credit for the sounds of [Brazilian genre] funk carioca and present himself as the originator of the genuine sonic article in the West', and indeed the DJ even bragged in an interview that he could steal samples in Brazil without having to go through a legal or payment process (McNally Reference McNally 2017, pp. 443, 444). In much the same way, when Diplo made the second of the four official 'Old Town Road' remixes, it was called 'the DJ's latest remix', giving him credit much like Cyrus before him (Reuter Reference Reuter 2019a). That this pattern would repeat even in a case where the Black artist was the driving force towards including white help on his song underscores how pervasive and insidious it is.