Lil Nas X and the Costume of Country Rap

The teens were drinking something called “yee-yee juice.”

In some of the videos, they call it “yeehaw juice,” which makes more intuitive sense, but there is nothing necessarily intuitive about a “yee” potion of any type that turns young people into cowboys so long as they jump in the air as they’re listening to the opening notes of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” This jump-cut transformation has happened hundreds of thousands of times over the last few months in the frenetic video app TikTok. Each clip takes only about 15 seconds and often culminates in gangly kids in Wranglers doing Fortnite dances (which are actually black dances, if we’re keeping score). But when Billy Ray Cyrus joined in for an “Old Town Road” remix, no yee-yee/haw juice was needed to turn all of Twitter into a digital rodeo last Friday.

There is really nothing intuitive at all about the rise of “Old Town Road.” How is it that a song by a black Atlanta rapper felt more like a country song when white kids were meme-ing it to death for the past two months on the latest trendy video app, and more like a rap song when Black Twitter spent a day talking about how the guy who made “Achy Breaky Heart” had snapped? The initial TikTok-fueled excitement over the song had already propelled it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 before the Billy Ray Cyrus remix and subsequent social media frenzy exploded on Friday. In other words, the Song of the Summer race may be over before it started, all thanks to the iconic-duo descendants of Nelly and Tim McGraw.

As with anything else wildly popular on the internet, there’s some light chicanery afoot. Lil Nas X is actually a semi-reformed virality hound who turned his banned Twitter meme account into a rap persona and strategically labeled “Old Town Road” as a country song on SoundCloud and iTunes to help it stand out. This was a brilliant way to troll Billboard (which removed the song from the country charts for not “embracing enough elements” of the genre) and lure slow-Friday writers such as myself into ruminating on what it means to be a “black country star.”

But the focus on the boundaries of country as a genre is an odd fixation in the borderless digital world of streaming, and an even stranger one for a track by an Atlanta-based artist. Southern rap has always been deeply country—this is the subgenre in which OutKast declared a plate of yams with extra syrup an aphrodisiac, Big K.R.I.T. released a track called “Country Shit” with Ludacris and Bun B, and Bubba Sparxxx mud-wrestled a pig, each in a different decade. But as rap has become less bound by physical location, the desire to assert a sense of place in songs has fallen too. ”Old Town Road” and the other “country-trap” songs that have emerged from artists like Young Thug in the past two years are unique because they embrace what was once a cornerstone of hip-hop: regionality. Now, though, the region is a fictional one. These songs play to the stereotypes and visual aesthetics of the country genre rather than the actual experiences of the people who live in the country. No wonder the original video for “Old Town Road” was a montage of footage from Red Dead Redemption 2, a video game about the American frontier made by developers in Scotland.

This is a huge departure from what made Southern rap a creative and commercial force in the first place. The biggest sign yet that hip-hop has arrived at the center of popular music is that its stars are now allowed to put on costumes.

The thing that really sells “Old Town Road” is the John Wayne warble after the beat drops—there’s a reason people have taken to calling it the “horses in the back” song. I say “John Wayne,” but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard John Wayne speak. In other words, it’s a country voice so generic it invites the listeners to fill in the gaps with whatever iconography of the frontier they recall.

Lil Nas X rightfully credits his “country-trap” style to Young Thug, another Atlanta rapper who deployed the exact same voice on his 2017 mixtape Beautiful Thugger Girls (and is now hinting that he will hop on the next of many likely “Old Town Road” remixes). The project ended up much more R&B and much less “country” than the blog hype indicated, but Thugger does yell “yeehaw!” on the opening track, “Family Don’t Matter,” and delivers this couplet in the Wayne Warble: “Country Billy made a couple milli / Tryna park the Rolls Royce inside the Piccadilly.”

This is a delightful lyric because of how many contrasts it stacks on top of each other. Instead of conjuring an imagined Wild West, Thugger describes flexing at a Baton Rouge–based chain of cafeteria-style eateries that are part of the storied Southern lineage of “let’s go out to eat some home-cooked food” restaurants. This scenario would have made complete sense to me if I had gotten $1 million when I was 19 and had never lived outside of Alabama. In other words, this is some country-ass shit. I was hoping the music video for the song would embrace this modern countriness concept, like Thug’s own Hy!£UN35 Tour trailer video, in which he rides a horse in front of a theater on one of the busiest streets in Atlanta. But the “Family Don’t Matter” video is pure Little Thug on the Prairie fantasy.

Beautiful Thugger Girls came and went without much fanfare but apparently cracked open the door for an entire universe of modern-but-retro cowboy rap. Mississippi rapper FlyRich Double was offering up traditional rap braggadocio in relative obscurity before he released “Yup (On My Tractor)” last year. The music video features a couple dozen black people in straw hats dancing around the titular vehicle in a pasture, while FlyRich Double raps about snakeskin boots and incest. It has almost 10 million views, and the artist has rebranded himself as the creator of a genre he calls “hick hop.”

There are more. Lil Tracy, who was raised in Virginia Beach but now lives in Brooklyn (and has some old-head bona fides as the offspring of Butterfly from Digable Planets and Coko from SWV), released “Like a Farmer” last year with Lil Uzi Vert. In the song he sing-drawls, “Hell yeah, yeehaw!” and “I’m sipping lean like a Coors Light.” As I write this, SoundCloud is being overrun with songs tagged country that are actually trap songs rapped with a Forrest Gump affectation.

It’s all a little surreal when you take a step back and consider the arc of the Dirty South to this point. Southern rap rose to prominence by taking a common stereotype—people below the Mason-Dixon Line are backwards hicks—and exposing the haters for their own ignorance. “What you really know about the Dirty South?” was the ingenious reversal by Goodie Mob. From that launching point, Southern rap’s purpose was to vividly document a region whose image had long been shaped in the mainstream by artists in the Billboard-approved “country” genre. T.I. held court in Southwest Atlanta in seemingly every early music video. David Banner ran through a Mississippi cemetery trying to shed a tattered Confederate flag. The Nappy Roots went fishing in overalls and rapped on a hayride, but there was no ironic wink in their celebration of Bowling Green, Kentucky, and the people who live there. Field Mob paid homage to the “GA Red Clay” of their hometown of Albany in a song that sampled Georgia native Ray Charles (who himself made an iconic country crossover album at a time when musical boundaries were much more rigid). These songs’ ideas were too forthright to be subversive, but they collectively made an argument that “country” was not merely the domain of white people strumming on guitars. Consider this: If Nelly had sung the acoustic-driven “Ride Wit Me” with a fake twang, and it still had the same video of him rocking the cowboy hat and hosting an all-black hoedown inside a semi-wide, would the track have rocketed up the country chart instead of the R&B/hip-hop one?

In past eras, regionalist loyalty and authenticity were the credentials you needed in a genre obsessed with exposing frauds. Success required proving yourself among your immediate peer group before having a chance to connect with a wider audience. Identifying with a local community was more than a marketing strategy, though—it was how artists derived meaning from their work. “‘We really need to make music and talk about where we’re from,” longtime record producer Shannon Houchins recalled Bubba Sparxxx saying when they were working on his first album. “Hip-hop has always been an expression of self.”

But money and technology changed the incentives. When “Crank That” was released in 2007 by Soulja Boy, also a teenage rapper from Atlanta who doubles as a savvy internet marketer, it shattered the idea that regionalism mattered for pop success. He was part of a younger generation that identified more with the online world than the physical one. Instead of exporting Southern rap to other parts of the country, Soulja Boy uploaded his idiosyncrasies to the cloud.

Southern rap would never really read as “country” again. Lex Luger and Waka Flocka Flame continued in the Lil Jon and Crime Mob tradition of making bombastic club bangers (I will have a separate dissertation about Southern rap also being punk as fuck). Future’s nihilist growling became a template for Atlanta rap. Artists from rural areas who in the past would have framed their music around their hometown—did you know Rae Sremmurd is from Tupelo, Mississippi?—instead pursued mass-appeal hits. Atlanta producer Metro Boomin had his most viral moment when his producer tag, as rapped by a disembodied Future, was sampled on a Kanye West track that also featured the Future soundalike Desiigner, who is from Brooklyn rather than Atlanta. Everything is now a reference to a reference to reference.

So it tracks that a teenager from Atlanta who has been pumping out songs titled after trending topics (“Thanos,” “Kim Jong Un,” “Donald Trump”) would make a song that is both “Southern,” in the abstract sense, and Red Dead fan fiction, in a much more literal sense. It’s true that black cowboys were historically more prevalent than many people acknowledge, and it’s even true that I have seen a posse of said cowboys strutting down a street filled with Atlanta nightclubs at 1 a.m. in a scene that sounds like it was written by Donald Glover. But Lil Nas X is not offering up a fully formed identity. He’s created a sketch of a stereotype, ripe for the listener to fill in the blanks with their own cultural touchstones. In other words, a perfect meme.

The “country-trap” trend is the latest sign that rap stars, who are now pop stars, are no longer burdened with the responsibility (duty?) to be “real.” Perhaps Lil Nas X is a corporately backed marketing gimmick and the Billy Ray tie-up was deftly executed #content. When Lil Nas X declared (in jest?) that he was an industry plant days before “Old Town Road” went megaviral, his followers shrugged the admission off. It’s a concern of a different time. After all, what is Billy Ray’s daughter Miley Cyrus if not an industry plant who loves to try on costumes?

But of course, the tension between authenticity, stereotype, and the cultural norms that inform our perceptions of both is one of the things that has always made rap such a dynamic genre. The entire OutKast discography is a pushback against preconceived notions of blackness, of the South, of the definition of a “rapper.” But their attempt at a country-blues album on the heels of “Hey Ya” was a comparative flop, perhaps because it drifted too far into a fictional universe that felt far removed from their home of Atlanta. Lil Nas X will have the opposite problem. He’s a “country-trap” star now for a world where most people only interact with cowboys through video games and GIFs. The day he wants to grasp at something in the real world is probably the day the ride ends.