July 2019 | Rolling Stone | 51
LD TOWN ROAD” is more than a hit at
this point — it’s a sign of the future.
Every weird strain of American culture
is in this song somewhere, which is
why it has blown up into the cultural phenomenon
of 2019. A hip-hop/redneck power flex? A yeehaw
manifesto? A “trap country” hit that unites Trent
Reznor and Billy Ray Cyrus? An avant-garde exper-
iment from 20-year-old Atlanta provocateur Lil Nas
X? A SoundCloud rap goof that somehow erupted
into a Number One blockbuster? A banjo hook? A
nationwide scandal?
“Old Town Road” is the perfect pop story: A teen-
age Dutch producer who has never heard of Nine
Inch Nails stumbles across one of their deep cuts,
samples it, puts a track online via BeatStars, and
sees it get leased for $29.99 by a fellow unknown,
an ATL kid whose career up to now has been tweet-
decking in a Nicki Minaj stan account. YoungKio
and Lil Nas X have never met or even talked on the
phone, yet together they created a cowboy-hatted
Frankenstein’s monster that defines the state of the
nation right now.
People dismissed it as a novelty at first, but the
“Old Town Road” saga just keeps getting crazier:
the Billy Ray remix, the controversy over Billboard
banning it from the Hot Country chart, the rise of
the “yeehaw challenge.”It’s a new peak for the long, strange story of
yeehaw culture and black-cowboy mythos, going
back to how Sonny Rollins rocked his Stetson hat
under the yucca trees on Way Out West — the album
cover that inspired Mel Brooks to make Blazing
Saddles. It runs from how Chuck Berry invented
rock & roll by rewriting the country hit “Ida Red” as
“Maybellene,” to Sly Stone yodeling his way through
“Spaced Cowboy.” The Gap Band defined rodeo chic
in the Eighties with their 10-gallon hats and glitter
vests; the Nineties had the Dirty South’s fixation on
The Dukes of Hazzard, a TV show with zero blackcharacters (the biggest star in the cast was a Dodge
Charger named “the General Lee”) yet a hardcore
black cult following. It culminated in the 1993 Miami
bass smash “Dazzey Duks” by Duice, who claimed
their piece of Hazzard County by getting Daisy
Duke herself, Catherine Bach, to floss in their video.
When Nelly blew up with his self-described “porch
flow,” the first thing he did was turn his “Ride Wit
Me” video into a full-on remake of Smokey and the
Bandit.
In the Lil Nas X era, everybody wants in on the
yeehaw mind-state, even Bruce Springsteen, who
made the bizarre yet awesome decision to go West
for his new album, riding down Old Town Thunder
Road with his horses in the backstreets.
It’s especially significant that this is happening in
2019, when a cowboy hat suddenly doesn’t mean
what it used to. Cowboy culture has been right-wing
turf ever since a Hollywood Western B-movie star
named Ronald Reagan and his Sun Belt cronies took
over the Republican Party, cleverly rebranding their
extremist policies as a folksy, down-home move-
ment. But these days, the commander of the racist
right is a New Yorker, with no Southern twang at all,
and his soldiers’ favorite headgear is the red MAGA
cap. Lil Nas X is stepping into a cultural void where
the meaning of the cowboy hat is up for grabs —
which means so is American identity. ROB SHEFFIELD‘Old Town Road’ Is America in a 10-Gallon Hat
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Journey EclipseGuns N’ Roses Chinese DemocracyJohn Fogerty RevivalThe Rolling Stones A Bigger BangSteely Dan Everything Must GoFleetwood Mac Say You WillPhil Collins Testif yPeter Gabriel UpThe Stones have played The Eagles Long Road Out of Eden
509 shows in the past 21
years while releasing just
one LP of new songs.Lil Nas X