Issue #41: How 'Old Town Road' Changed (And Didn't Change) Country Music, with Chris Molanphy

Chris joined us (and the DRTI Book Club!) to chat about his fantastic new book on the genre-smashing song.

Don’t forget: a week from today, newsletter fave Lola Kirke joining us on Zoom for Don’t Rock The Inbox Live! (!!) Mark your calendars for Tuesday, February 13th at 8 p.m. CT; the Zoom link will be sent to paying subscribers that morning, so make sure you’re subscribed before then so you don’t miss out on all the fun! As ever, the conversation will be available later as a podcast (for paying subscribers) and an edited Q&A (for everybody!).

Our other big event to announce this month is our first meet-up!! If you live in North Texas, come party with Natalie (and possibly pick up a koozie and sticker) and see friends of the newsletter Billy Law and Van Plating at Sundown at Granada in Dallas on February 23rd! Pick up your tickets here, and make sure you get there right when the doors open at 9 for all the meet-up fun before the music starts (Natalie may be making a playlist…).

It’s just about impossible to name a more important country song (or, possibly, pop song) from this century than “Old Town Road,” in this writer’s humble opinion — which meant there was no way we were missing the chance to chat about it with music journalism’s foremost chart analyst and critic, Chris Molanphy. His new book for Duke University Press’ Singles series, Old Town Road, explores the song’s significance from just about every imaginable angle with ease and wit; if you decide to pick it up, I guarantee you’ll learn something (I certainly did!). Chris joined us and the DRTI book club to talk about all things country and hip-hop and chart-related — a lightly edited excerpt from the conversation is below! — NW

***If you are a paying subscriber, don’t forget that you can listen to the complete conversation in podcast form here.***

NW: What was your initial impression of “Old Town Road”?

CM: I think my first thought was, "That's catchy, and that's funny," which is exactly what Lil Nas X wanted me to think. One of the points I've kept making since the book came out is if you call the record a comedy record or a novelty record, that is not an insult. Lil Nas X designed this song to be funny. He wanted it to be a meme. He knew the part where, in his thickest drawl, he sings "I got the horses in the back," would be hilarious. Sure enough, he sock-puppeted did it into various social media — including the very zygotic Tiktok, which was only beginning to take off when he dropped the song in December 2018. When people were making their memes and their videos, when anybody gets to that line — "I got the horses in the back" — that's when they jump into their cowboy gear, their hats and their boots and their chaps and so forth. I thought it was catchy, funny and, I guess given the the the subject matter of what we're talking about here today, I also thought, "This guy's wearing a cowboy hat in 2018-19 — that makes him more country than your average country star." Country has been out of the hat boom for a while now. It's all ballcaps. Morgan Wallen, you're not going to catch him in a cowboy hat.

NW: Interestingly, the hats are back a little bit — post-Lil Nas X! I think that he was on the front edge of a real Western culture renaissance — he and the Yeehaw Agenda, which you obviously talk about in the book, have trickled down in a real way to a lot of white people, honestly. People are embracing, like, rodeo culture kitsch across demographics, and locations and everything. It's really been fascinating to watch.

CM: I love that you used the word kitsch. One of the points I was trying to make in the book when I was telling the history of say, the Nudie suit or Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, was how that was that was all basically made up. It's all kitsch, and it's always been kitsch. One of the themes that comes out over and over again in this book is this idea that country has a chip on its shoulder about authenticity and about being real. I say this with love, because I'm a pop fan — I don't mind artificial things, I love artificial things — but y'all have been doing artificial since this genre was invented a century ago. Don't pretend it's been authentic from the jump. It's never been fully authentic, that's what makes it great.

I can think of no genre, except maybe punk rock, that more zealously polices its borders than country in terms of "this is, this isn't." Even hip hop is more chill, and more amorphous, right? I mean we've watched what's happened to rap for the last 20 years, where singing in cadence is basically rap now. Original first-wave punk and country music are the genres where everybody's like "That ain't country, that's not punk."

MM: How big of an impact do you think it had to have, at that moment, people sort of parachuting in to write about this phenomenon and to write about country music and the charts that probably didn't have kind of the base of knowledge that may have been required to really properly situate it in country music history?

CM: The way you felt around that time is probably similar to the way I felt as a chart columnist, to have all these people weighing in about chart stuff. Here’s my weird hot take: I am not arguing in the book that, in a just world, “Old Town Road” would have been number one on Hot Country Songs for five months, because that would have misrepresented the depth of its appeal to a core country audience. The soapbox I have been on for about a decade now is that Billboard pretty royally screwed up its genre charts when they went digital about a dozen years ago, and basically their genre charts now over-index pop fans’ opinion of what a country hit is or what an R&B hit is or what a rap hit is or what a Latin hit is [Read Chris’ book for the details; basically, it’s because the only remaining measured mode of genre-specific consumption is radio, and everything else used to calculate chart position is general consumption — the same numbers used to rank the Hot 100].

When Billboard pulled "Old Town Road" from the Hot Country Songs chart, they had two bad options. They could either leave it on the chart, in which case in two weeks it would have knocked Luke Combs out of No. 1 and stayed there for five months — which would have overstated its popularity with the country audience. Or they could do what they actually did, which was pull it — which looked, and frankly was, racist. It was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, and to me, the original sin is what Billboard did to its genre charts way back in 2012. If all you're doing is taking the Hot 100 and cutting it down to the songs you claim or country, it's going to perpetually overstate the depth of popularity these crossover country records.

I did not predict that in 2023, the very year I put out the book, country was going to run roughshod over the Hot 100. Not only did I not predict 16 weeks for Morgan Wallen, I did not predict “Try That In a Small Town,” I did not predict “Rich Men North of Richmond,” Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves — none of that. Country artists are now paying more attention to the pop charts, because they're realizing that pop success translates back into Hot Country Songs chart success, and then may loop around and get songs spins on country radio.

Reader Katie: In the epilogue, you touch on Blanco Brown and Breland and their success post-"Old Town Road." From your perspective, has that had any staying power? Or was that just kind of a flash in the pan? Do you see "Old Town Road"'s influence on the country chart today?

CM: What was a flash in the pan was what Blanco Brown did with "The Git Up" in 2019. You didn't see too many more versions of that kind of novelty country hit. But things are being permitted on Hot Country Songs now, up to and including some of what Morgan Wallen's doing, that probably would have been looked askance at prior to "Old Town Road." But he died so others may live. He died on the Hot Country Songs chart so that other records would be allowed onto the Hot Country Songs chart. I think it's subtler now — I don't think there's as many Blanco Brown-type songs — but I do think a lot of what we're seeing, this more amorphous country-pop or country hip-hop or country whatever-it-is getting onto the charts and nobody batting an eye, I do feel that that is living in a post-Old Town road world.

Reader Jonny: The narrative I remember is, is country radio and a lot of country artists going out of their way to say Lil Nas X wasn’t country. Then Billy Ray Cyrus jumped on the remix by way of a cosign. Did the way that played out help it from a pop charting perspective?

CM: Datawise, it became the standard and more importantly, the week the Billy Ray remix dropped, the streams for “Old Town Road” went supernova. It was already a hit — Lil Nas X got it to No. 1 on the Hot 100 by himself — but it set the record for streams in a week with something like 142 million streams. That is a staggering number.

But it also gave the song extra substance. I think that the Billy Ray verse became kind of the best verse in the whole song, and it made it stickier from a radio perspective. What it didn't do was get the song onto the country charts, because if Billboard had then backpedaled and said, "Oh, you got a white guy in a cowboy hat on there, now we can allow it," it would have just made it would have vindicated all of the arguments that all of the coastal critics had been making ever since Billboard yanked it. It was a dare. Yet another wonderful thread of this story is that Billy Ray, even though he's a white guy from Nashville, he's got his own history of feeling like he was disrespected by the Nashville establishment. He was very game to help Lil Nas X kind of stick a thumb in the eye of Nashville and say, "Alright, is this country enough for you?" Your move, Nashville. That was kind of the implication. So it's an artistically important move, and yes, datawise it's an important move, but it didn't achieve full country crossover, because I think at that point, the battle lines had been drawn too sharply for country radio to suddenly say, "Oh, we can play this now." It would have been way too eyebrow-raising for that to happen.

MM: What are your thoughts on what he’s worked on since “Old Town Road”? [The day we talked, he had released the teaser for “J Christ”]

CM: I get a little anxious, but I sort of trust his instincts. His instincts have kept his career going way longer than I think a lot of people, myself included when I accepted the assignment to write this book, could have predicted. He has managed to keep himself at the center of the conversation long past "Old Town Road," and I admire him for that. What I love about him, too, is that when he came out, he came all the way out. He is not shy or subtle about it at all. He wants to be the ultimate LGBTQ pop icon and you know, good for him for being so fearless. Knowing what I know about the way he wrestled internally about his sexuality and his identity and his public profile, to see him be this bold — I'm just happy for him, more than anything.