In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
On my daughter’s 10th birthday, her bus driver threatened to turn the entire school bus around, to just take all the kids back to school and then have their parents come and pick them up instead. She had just about had it with this “Old Town Road” business. All day long, the kids from her bus were singing about taking their horses to the old town road and riding until they can’t no more, and she was done. If one more kid started singing that song, that was it, back to school.
My daughter made it through her 10th birthday without suffering the indignity of being driven back to school, so I guess the kids on that bus actually complied. But that moment says something important about “Old Town Road,” the random cowboy-rap novelty song that rose up to become an out-of-nowhere cultural phenomenon. We can sit here and talk about stats all day long, and the numbers that “Old Town Road” racked up are utterly ridiculous. With his first commercially available single, Lil Nas X made the longest-lasting #1 hit in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. But chart numbers are one thing, and societal impact is something else. In the time since my daughter turned 10, only one other song has come along to challenge the chart achievement of “Old Town Road”; we’ll get to it eventually. But I can’t think of any other song that caused an authority figure in my children’s life to absolutely melt down. That’s when you know a song has really arrived.
This column is about a lot of things, and one of them is the shifting place of pop music in the larger cultural conversation. Plenty of the songs that have appeared in this column date back to the days of monoculture, when you might learn every little nuance of a giant hit song without ever going out of your way to hear it. Other songs in past columns are strange little blips that have largely disappeared from our shared memory. With the rise of the internet and of streaming, we’ve had more and more of the second type — songs that are huge among a certain share of the population but that might mean nothing to your mythical average human. It’s simply not as possible for a record label to strap a rocket to a song anymore, to make it omnipresent. Too many things compete for our time and money and attention. But for a months-long stretch in 2019, “Old Town Road” smashed its way out of its containment unit and entered the headspace of millions upon millions of human beings.
I suppose it would’ve been possible to function in 2019 and to avoid all contact with the song “Old Town Road.” Maybe there are people reading this column who never even heard of the song before. That happens all the time, and it still surprises me every time, which means it’ll probably keep happening. But if you did get through that year without hearing about the horses in the back even once, then I know you didn’t have a 10-year-old kid in the house. You didn’t have a seven-year-old, either. If you had kids the right age, then “Old Town Road” would’ve simply become a part of your life. There would’ve been nothing you could’ve done.
In retrospect, “Old Town Road” was not inevitable. It was anything but that. It was a set of random circumstances unfolding, one domino knocking down another and then another. No record label could ever replicate “Old Town Road” if you gave them a million tries. Think about it: A Dutch teenager takes a snippet of an old Nine Inch Nails instrumental, and he makes a trap beat out of it. He then sells that beat to an American teenager for $30. The American teenager uses the beat to make a silly cowboy song. The American teenager turns out to be a genius of internet marketing, and the silly cowboy song becomes the basis for a TikTok trend in the moment that “TikTok trend” first becomes something that can move the needle. Thanks in part to some genre-based chart-watching controversy, the cowboy song goes supernova, earns major-label backing, and then becomes a comeback vehicle for an aging pop-country singer who’d already transitioned into the Disney stage-dad portion of his career. The cowboy song then remains at #1 for longer than any other song in chart history. You couldn’t make that story up. It’s too weird, too reliant on chance and kismet. That’s what’s so magical about it.
It should’ve been a chapter in my book. I started writing the proposal for my Number Ones book during the long stretch that “Old Town Road” was at #1, and it seemed too early and obvious to put that song in the pantheon of #1 hits that reshaped pop music. At the time, I didn’t see that the fusion of rap and country on “Old Town Road” was not just a fun little one-off, that it was a sign of two genres that would continue to work in close conversation with one another in the years ahead. I also didn’t see that TikTok would turn out to be just as important to pop history as YouTube or Spotify has ever been. TikTok gave a real shot of energy into the pop charts right when the charts needed one. Through the machinations of an algorithm that no American adults quite understand, TikTok has the capability to bring all sorts of weird, jagged, unlikely music to the masses, as long as that music has a hook that can be grasped and internalized in about 20 seconds. People complain about the effects of TikTok all the time, but it’s been a net positive for the pop charts, and that starts with “Old Town Road.”
Honestly, an “Old Town Road” chapter might’ve been too long. In 2023, my chart-watcher colleague Chris Molanphy published an entire book on “Old Town Road” and on the cultural and racial and technological currents that allowed the song to become what it became. That story requires tons and tons of context, and Chris has it all — digressions on race in country music, on the rules of the different genre charts in Billboard, on the ways that meme culture affected pop. Chris pretty much worked backwards from the “Old Town Road” phenomenon, using the song to unravel historical threads that only just came into being. He could do that with “Old Town Road” because “Old Town Road” is about as rich as a text can get. Let’s dive in and talk about the people involved before I fuck around and turn this column into a book by itself.
Montero Lamar Hill is named after the Mitsubishi mini-SUV, and he grew up in and around Atlanta. (When Lil Nas X was born, Cher’s “Believe” was the #1 song in America. He turned 20 in the same week that “Old Town Road” reached #1.) As a kid, Hill spent a few years in the Bankhead Courts, the famously rough Atlanta housing projects that have since been demolished. When he was young, his parents divorced and got into a nasty custody battle. Hill spent most of his childhood living with his gospel-singer father in the suburbs of Atlanta. He struggled with isolation and with accepting his own sexuality, and he developed a life for himself online.
As a kid, Lil Nas X became involved with the Barbz, the very-online, vaguely terrifying fan army that exists to prop up future Number Ones artist Nicki Minaj. (It’s crazy that one of the Barbz made it to #1 before Nicki herself did, but that’s what happened.) On Twitter, Lil Nas X — I’m not just calling him “Nas”; that’s weird — became adept at generating and hypercharging memes and at tweetdecking, the process of sending out one tweet so it’ll appear on a bunch of accounts at the same time. At first, he used that skill to promote whatever Nicki Minaj was doing, and that’s how he learned that he could do it to hype himself up just as easily. When he started making music, he named himself Lil Nas X after the other Nas, and I’m pretty sure that was in the moment that Nas was dating Nicki Minaj. (That Nas’ highest-charting single is 2003’s “I Can,” which peaked at #12.)
After high school, Lil Nas X spent a year studying computer science at the University Of West Georgia. While he was there, he worked shit jobs and Zaxby’s and Six Flags, and he started posting music online. It started with a 2018 demo called “Shame,” and then a mixtape called Nasarati. His music was fairly standard SoundCloud rap, but it wasn’t bad. He was amazed when his stuff started to circulate online a little bit, and he used his Twitter-meme abilities to get his music out to more people. LNX was bored in school, so he dropped out and decided to pursue music as a full-time thing. His parents were furious, and he crashed on his sister’s couch for a while. In October 2018, Lil Nas X encountered what would become the “Old Town Road” beat on BeatStars, a platform where producers would sell their beats online. YoungKio, a Dutch producer the same age as Lil Nas X, sold him the beat for $30.
The Surinamese-Dutch beatmaker Kiowa Roukema comes from the city of Purmerend, and he started making music with the FL Studio program in 2016, when he would’ve been about 16. He taught himself how to mess around with melodies and samples, and he wasn’t thinking too hard about copyright law when he made his beats. One day, he encountered a decade-old Nine Inch Nails instrumental in his YouTube recommended tab; he’d never heard of the group before. (Nine Inch Nails’ highest-charting Hot 100 hit, 1999’s “The Day The World Went Away,” peaked at #17.)
Trent Reznor’s industrial alt-rock project had already been through a bunch of different phases before they had a bit of a comeback with the 2005 album With Teeth. Around that time, a British programmer and multi-instrumentalist named Atticus Ross started helping Reznor out, and he would became Reznor’s great creative partner in the second half of his career. In 2008, Reznor and Ross made Ghosts I-IV, a multi-volume collection of mostly-improvised instrumentals. They released Ghosts on their own, charging as little as $5 for the digital download, and they used a Creative Commons license to encourage listeners to do anything with those tracks, as long as it wasn’t for commercial use. I reviewed Ghosts when it came out, and I didn’t like it much. I called it “two hours’ worth of really good soundtrack music for American remakes of Japanese horror films,” and I didn’t know how right I was. Reznor and Ross were just a couple of years away from winning an Oscar for scoring David Fincher’s The Social Network and becoming probably their generation’s greatest movie-music composers. In retrospect, Ghosts works as an obvious demo reel.
The track that YoungKio encountered was “34 Ghosts IV,” a brooding six-minute instrumental that features just a little bit of downbeat banjo. Once he identified the tiny shard of music that he wanted to use, YoungKio didn’t do much to change it. He just sped it up a little and put some trap percussion on it. When he made that beat, YoungKio didn’t think of it as country music; he simply dumped it into the bucket of “Future type beats.” (Future himself will eventually appear in this column.) But Lil Nas X heard the beat, and he heard country. When he heard it, LNX imagined himself as a loner cowboy acting out in defiance of all the people in his life who just wanted him to go back to school. LNX bought YoungKio’s beat for $30 in October 2018, and then he took that beat to an Atlanta studio that only charged $20 for an hour of studio time on Tuesdays. There, he used that instrumental to sing about horses in an exaggerated white rural accent, and he made one of the most ruthlessly catchy earworms in recent memory.
The original version of “Old Town Road” is just one minute and 53 seconds long, and it’s got hooks on top of hooks. The song isn’t really about anything. It’s just Lil Nas X singing a bunch of cowboy signifiers that have nothing to do with his life. He drawls that he’s got the horses in the back, and the drums come barging into the track just as he says it. He sings that his hat is matte black and that his boots are black to match, and he pronounces “matte” wrong. In the second verse — the part where LNX is supposedly playing someone who’s found success and turned toward self-destruction — he keeps flexing, and his flexes just get more cartoonish: a Gucci cowboy hat, a cinematic life full of bull-riding and boobies, a ride on his tractor with lean all in his bladder. It’s all extremely silly on a fundamental level, but LNX still brings wistful defiance to the part about how he’ll ride until he can’t no more and nobody can tell him nothing. That’s the kid who really was doing what his parents didn’t want and trying to make it in an industry that eats its young. I don’t think “Old Town Road” would’ve done what it did if Lil Nas X didn’t sing that part with conviction. He means it. Can’t nobody tell him nothin’.
Before “Old Town Road,” people had been trying to fuse country and rap, the two great genres of American working-class pop music, for decades. It had always been a fascination of mine — stuff like Bubba Sparxxx’s Deliverance or Big & Rich’s rapping sidekick Cowboy Troy or Nelly and Tim McGraw’s “Over And Over.” Some of that stuff got traction, and “Over And Over” was a #3 hit. (It’s a 7.) But none of those hybrids fully captured lots of people’s imaginations. “Old Town Road” takes a cartoonish view of rural life, but most of those previous attempts were cartoonish, too. Ultimately, country and rap both lend themselves to exaggeration, and none of those exaggerations fully clicked before “Old Town Road.” Still, the combination was in the air.
Over on the country side, a new generation of country hitmakers, the proverbial country bros, were messing around with rap cadences and trap 808s in the years before “Old Town Road.” Country stars like Sam Hunt and Florida Georgia Line grew up with rap as part of their cultural diets, and the music sometimes snuck its way into theirs. On the rap side, there wasn’t any persistent country movement, but “Old Town Road” did have a couple of progenitors. Young Thug, who’s been in this column and who will return, messed around with country signifiers on a few songs from his 2017 album Beautiful Thugger Girls. Lil Tracy, the SoundCloud-rapper son of Digable Planets member Ishmael Butler, had acoustic guitars and cartoonish accents on “Like A Farmer,” a 2018 cult hit that got a remix from former Number Ones artist Lil Uzi Vert. I don’t know if Lil Nas X knew anything about Bubba Sparxxx or Cowboy Troy, but I bet he knew Beautiful Thugger Girls and “Like A Farmer.” The first time that I wrote about “Old Town Road,” in March 2019, it was about the idea that the song might herald some new country-rap fusion. I called that one.
Lil Nas X has said that “Old Town Road” was his first real song-song — the first time that he ever really stretched out and tried to make a track where every part at least had the ability to go viral. For a digital-native type, that was the real goal. Lil Nas X uploaded “Old Town Road” to places like SoundCloud and Spotify in December 2018. In the track’s metadata, he tagged it as both “hip-hop” and “country.” The “hip-hop” thing is obvious, the “country” less so. To Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road” basically sounded like country music, though he didn’t exactly have a lot of interest in that area. But he also knew that the track might reach a few new people if it had “country” in its tags; not too many people were uploading country songs to SoundCloud in December 2018.
When Lil Nas X first released “Old Town Road,” he started making his own memes to promote the track. “Old Town Road” is a remarkably sturdy frame for memes, and it was constructed that way on purpose. The artist basically never lived in a world that wasn’t governed by the mysterious, evanescent quasi-joke data-transmissions that we call memes. It’s a short, evocative song full of phrases, plainly stated, that are pretty fun to sing. That describes pop in the meme era, and it also pretty much describes pop across its history. Pop lyrics were always supposed to be stupid and vivid and instantly memorable, and virtually everything about “Old Town Road” qualifies. Ultimately, the meme that took the song to Valhalla didn’t come from Lil Nas X. It was one of those TikTok things that has no beginning and no end. In the TikTok challenge known as the Yeehaw Agenda, people would post videos of themselves in regular clothes that magically shift into cowboy gear as soon as the beat drops and Lil Nas X says that he’s got the horses in the back. Sometimes, they trigger the change by drinking something called Yee Yee Juice. I don’t know, dude. It’s the internet.
Thanks to those Yeehaw Agenda videos, “Old Town Road” started to pick up steam. Lil Nas X continued to crank out new memes to keep the track bubbling. YoungKio heard his beat in some meme or other, and he DM’ed Lil Nas X, telling him that he’d help promote the track if Lil Nas X put his producer tag on the track, so that’s what Lil Nas X did. (Before that, they’d never had any interaction beyond the purchase of the beat.) The Chinese social network TikTok launched in America as a relaunch of the lip-syncing app Musical.ly in 2018, and the network caught on shortly after Twitter got rid of its own short-form video platform Vine. As TikTok gained steam with America’s kids, “Old Town Road” was right there, waiting to be picked up. The Texas Tech Red Raiders, on their way to the national championship game in that year’s Final Four, adapted “Old Town Road” as their anthem and posted a bunch of videos of themselves singing along in the locker room. “Old Town Road” didn’t even have a label or a proper video yet. On YouTube, the song was represented by a montage from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. That was all that the song needed to become a full-on meme hit.
As we’ve seen a few times in this column, meme hits have a way of turning into actual hits. “Old Town Road” didn’t have have sample clearance at first. When the song started to bubble, Trent Reznor apparently told his lawyers to make a deal but not to get in the song’s way. (He and Atticus Ross are credited as co-writers of “Old Town Road,” and I bet those royalties buy a lot of tight black leather jackets and fingerless gloves.) By harnessing the sheer power of virality, “Old Town Road” had enough juice to crack the Billboard Hot 100, debuting at #83 in March 2019. Because Lil Nas X had it tagged as a country song, “Old Town Road” also debuted on the Hot Country Songs chart in the same week, at #19. Hot Country Songs is tabulated the same way as the Hot 100, so it’s not as genre-specific as its name might imply. But enough people in the country music business made a fuss that Billboard decided to drop “Old Town Road” from country contention, admitting a week later that the song had been included on a country chart by “mistake” and claiming that the track “does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.”
This little episode is key to the rise of “Old Town Road.” The whole thing makes a little more sense if you think of country less as a genre and more as a culture, or a community. It’s a whole parallel music business based in Nashville, with its own studios and labels and session players. Everyone knows everyone else, and the whole community is generally leery of people who come in from outside and claim to be country. After “Old Town Road” made its country chart debut, a blog called Saving Country Music published a whole editorial about how “Old Town Road” was not country and was in fact a mockery of country music tropes. (I’d argue that you could say the same about plenty of actual country songs.) There was so much conversation about “Old Town Road” getting kicked off the country chart that the song actually made the country airplay chart — mostly because of drive-time DJs playing the track and then talking about whether it should count as country.
Naturally, this whole thing made Lil Nas X into a very sympathetic figure — the young Black outsider who was told that he wasn’t allowed to call himself country. In the years that followed, the role of race in country music would become a major topic of conversation, and we’ll return to that conversation in future installments of this column. Country, just like every other genre of American popular music, has Black roots. As with many genres, its power structures have moved it away from those roots, pushing a handsome square-jawed white-guy archetype to the detriment of every other demographic. Plenty of people saw Lil Nas X’s exclusion as that dynamic playing itself out again, and you can understand why it might bother people. Lil Nas X was too good at the internet to turn his plight into a social-justice crusade, but people felt angry on his behalf anyway. It helped him in the long run because it brought a whole lot more attention to the song. If “Old Town Road” had stayed on Hot Country Songs, it would’ve been #3 a week later and #1 a week after that. But then, it might’ve faded from memory as a brief novelty. Instead, it became something else.
After the country-chart situation, “Old Town Road” was a catchy little song, a meme, and a cause, and those combined forces were enough to push it all the way up the Billboard Hot 100. The song reached #1 in April 2019 as a Lil Nas X solo track. It’s just the original song, all one minute and 53 seconds of it. That meant that it was the shortest #1 hit since Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” in 1965. It was also the first #1 hit that even nodded in the direction of country music since Carrie Underwood’s “Inside Your Heaven” in 2005. But reaching #1 was really just the beginning of the story for “Old Town Road,” since that’s where Billy Ray Cyrus comes in.
William Ray Cyrus comes from a working-class family in Flatwoods, Kentucky, and he went to Kentucky’s Georgetown College on a baseball scholarship before dropping out, much like Lil Nas X after him, to pursue his future as a musician. (When Billy Ray Cyrus was born, Bobby Lewis’ “Tossin’ And Turnin’” was the #1 song in America. He will probably always be the last baby boomer with a #1 hit, unless we’re counting revivals of old songs.) For a while in the ’80s, Cyrus led a band called Sly Dog, and then he moved to Los Angeles and lived broke and bummy, in search of a record deal. Mercury signed Cyrus in 1990, and his very first single was “Achy Breaky Heart,” a 1992 cover of a Don Von Tress-written song that the Marcy Brothers first recorded in 1991. Cyrus’ version of ‘Achy Breaky Heart” became a line-dancing novelty smash that went all the way to #4 in an era when mega-selling country stars like Garth Brooks stayed far away from the Hot 100 on purpose. At a time when nobody in country wanted to cross over, Billy Ray Cyrus crossed over hard. (“Achy Breaky Heart” is a 5.)
If you were a country music purist in the early ’90s, Billy Ray Cyrus was your sworn enemy — the ponytailed himbo quasi-rocker who sold country to Wilson Phillips and Kris Kross fans. Cyrus’ debut album Some Gave All was the single biggest-selling album of 1992. Cyrus did not, however, have a long spotlight moment. He kept cranking out new records after that, but none of them sold more than a fraction of what Some Gave All did. By the end of the ’90s, Cyrus was off of Mercury and considering a shift to Christian music. David Lynch cast Cyrus in a small role in his 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive, and it turned out that Cyrus was fucking great on camera, even when he wasn’t singing about how his achy breaky heart might blow up and kill this man. Cyrus and his family moved to Los Angeles.
After Mulholland Drive, Billy Ray Cyrus was cast as the lead on Doc, a Christian medical show that ran on the Pax network for a few years. His nine-year-old daughter Miley made her acting debut on one Doc episode, and she caught the acting bug, which quickly led to her getting the lead role in the phenomenally huge Disney Channel sitcom Hannah Montana. On that show, Billy Ray Cyrus played Miley’s father, a real test of his acting range. Hannah Montana put Billy Ray in front of an audience that wasn’t old enough to know “Achy Breaky Heart,” and it was certainly the most successful thing that Billy Ray had done since the early ’90s. (The last time that Billy Ray was on the Hot 100 before “Old Town Road” was 2007, when he and Miley reached #37 with the duet “Ready, Set, Don’t Go.”) Because of Hannah Montana, Billy Ray Cyrus was the only country artist that Lil Nas X knew. A couple of days after he released “Old Town Road,” LNX tweeted that he wanted Billy Ray Cyrus on the remix. He didn’t have to wait long.
As “Old Town Road” zoomed up the Hot 100, record labels got into a bidding war over Lil Nas X, and Columbia won. Around the time that they made the deal, Columbia exec Ron Perry reached out to Billy Ray Cyrus about the possibility of a remix. Cyrus’ then-wife Tish played him the song at breakfast one day, and Cyrus later told The New York Times that he got up out of his chair and said, “God, I love that! That dude is original!” At the time, Cyrus was nowhere near the public eye. His daughter Miley had blown up and become a giant pop star outside the context of Hannah Montana; this is a very rare case where a father appears in this column after his daughter. Cyrus had space on his schedule, and he was in the studio with Lil Nas X a few days later.
I didn’t realize until researching this piece that Billy Ray Cyrus didn’t actually write his verse from the “Old Town Road” remix. Instead, that part came from Jocelyn Donald, a songwriter from Memphis who’s known professionally as Jozzy. Jozzy got her start in the mid-’10s, writing tracks for Monica, someone who’s been in this column a bunch of times. Apparently, Cyrus didn’t really understand his verse; his wife had to tell him that she did, in fact, own at least one Fendi sports bra. Nevertheless, Billy Ray Cyrus bodies the fuck out of that verse. He annihilates it. It’s just unbelievably fucking cool. Cyrus’ voice has a leathery authority that goes a lot deeper than Lil Nas X’s fake white-Southern accent, and he goes straight into the track’s pocket, singing in a quasi-rap cadence that doesn’t sound the least bit forced. His verse is about living as a cowboy in a sped-up world, and he delivers it with a sense of seen-it-all panache that goes far beyond the text.
The text is fun enough — Billy Ray Cyrus singing about his brand new guitar and his Maserati sports car. But Cyrus delivers those lines with a craggy swagger that gives the entire track a dusty intensity that it never even bothered to evoke before. It’s not that Billy Ray Cyrus is a real country star. In fact, his flash-in-the-pan pop-crossover past weirdly lends his voice more pathos than it might’ve had otherwise. It’s that Cyrus is willing to do something silly with the utmost gravity — the same as he did in Mulholland Drive, now that I think about it — that it really just makes the joke funnier. Lil Nas X’s people also recorded Cyrus singing the song’s hook, moving his take on it right to the front of the track. And when Cyrus messed around and whistled a melody in the studio, they added that to the song’s outro. In a track with production as simple as what you hear on “Old Town Road,” a little touch like that whistle can have an impact. (This one gets an exception in my no-whistling-on-pop-songs rule, and I really don’t know why. It just sounds cool, not corny.) Finally, Cyrus performed the important task of getting “Old Town Road” up over two minutes.
So “Old Town Road” is a simple song with a complicated history. You can know about every step of the song’s strange, twisty journey, and you might still have to stop and marvel at how effortless the final result feels. The instruments that YoungKio pulled from that Nine Inch Nails track sparkle in the air like dust in a beam of sunlight, and the rumbling trap 808s don’t reduce their hypnotic force. The melodies are sparse, and the voices are serious, but the lyrics are sheer playful absurdity. You can sing along when you’re halfway into your first listen. Ultimately, “Old Town Road” is pop-music transubstantiation in action. The miracle is that a song can be meaningless and meaningful at the same time.
Around the same time that “Old Town Road” reached #1 as a solo Lil Nas X track, Columbia released the remix with Billy Ray Cyrus, and that shit went crazy. In its first week, the “Old Town Road” remix racked up more streams than any other song’s biggest single week. When the next week’s Hot 100 came out, the Billy Ray Cyrus version of “Old Town Road” replaced the Lil Nas X-only original, and that remix remains the definitive “Old Town Road.” Later in April, Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus performed “Old Town Road” together for the first time at Stagecoach, the country festival that takes place on the same grounds as Coachella. They did it as surprise guests during a DJ set from Diplo, the superstar DJ who was trying to make inroads in country, and it probably says something that all three of these people wanted to play the song during Stagecoach and not Coachella. Soon afterward, Diplo released his own “Old Town Road” remix, which probably had some minimal impact on the song’s gigantic chart run. (Diplo’s highest-charting single as lead artist is “Heartless,” his 2020 collab with future Number Ones artist Morgan Wallen, which peaked at #39. Diplo’s group Major Lazer made it to #2 with their 2016 Justin Bieber/MØ collab “Cold Water.” It’s a 5.)
Eventually, all the bits and pieces of “Old Town Road” backstory — the TikTok memes, the way it got pulled off the country chart, the sudden inclusion of back-from-oblivion Billy Ray Cyrus — faded away, and the song’s continued dominance became its own story. I was deep into writing this column at the time, and it was wild to see this weird little homemade novelty song with the Nine Inch Nails sample smashing past every obstacle and solidifying its grip on the #1 spot. Big stars kept throwing out singles that were supposed to conquer the Hot 100, and those singles kept dying at the hands of “Old Town Road.” New-school heartthrob Shawn Mendes, who first made his name on the pre-TikTok app Vine, dropped “If I Can’t Have You,” the song that was supposed to push him over the edge into household-name status, and it got stuck at #2 behind “Old Town Road.” (It’s a 3. Mendes will appear in this column soon.) Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber, two artists who have been in this column multiple times, released their duet “I Don’t Care,” and they also got stuck in the “Old Town Road” runner-up spot. (It’s a 6.) Most tellingly, Taylor Swift launched her Lover album cycle with her singles “Me!” and “You Need To Calm Down.” Over the past decade and a half, Taylor Swift doesn’t make a habit of losing, but neither of those singles could touch “Old Town Road.” (“Me!” is a 3, and “You Need To Calm Down” is a 4.)
Now: “Me!” and “You Need To Calm Down” are among the worst singles of Taylor Swift’s career. That must be acknowledged. She honestly seemed like she might be on her way out in 2019, which makes her reinvention all the more remarkable. Lover is a great album, and it’ll eventually be represented in this column, but Swift did it no favors with those singles. Chart-pop in general was pretty moribund before “Old Town Road” came along, which is one of the reasons that the “Old Town Road” story was so fun to follow. It’s probably one of the reasons that the song remained on top for so long, too.
As “Old Town Road” racked up victory after victory, Lil Nas X was clearly having a blast, and he remained charming and funny on Twitter and in interviews. I rooted for him and against the stars whose bland streaming-bait singles couldn’t compete, and I had a great time doing it. During those months, Lil Nas X seemed to go viral seemingly at will. The best artifact of that moment is the video of Lil Nas X visiting an elementary school in Cleveland to lead a mass “Old Town Road” singalong. Those kids went off. If you didn’t know who Lil Nas X’s core fans were, the video spelled it out for you. “Old Town Road” might be the first true gen-Z smash.
In a thriving pop marketplace, I don’t think there’s any way that “Old Town Road” breaks every chart record and eventually racks up an astonishing 19 weeks at #1. I tend to get theatrically annoyed when a song stays at #1 for too long, but I never wanted “Old Town Road” to get knocked off the top. It represented a sign of life. The song that ultimately ended the “Old Town Road” reign also represented a sign of life, but we’ll get to that next week.
That song did not have an easy time knocking “Old Town Road” out of the frame. Whenever the momentum of “Old Town Road” started to slow down, Lil Nas X did something that kept it bubbling. In May 2019, for instance, he finally dropped the video. He’d never been on a horse before he filmed it. The big-budget clip, directed by Calmatic, is twice as long as the song. It plays out as a series of time-traveling slapstick set-pieces, along with cameos from people like Chris Rock, Vince Staples, Rico Nasty, and Diplo. (Jozzy and YoungKio are in there, too. Lil Nas X and YoungKio finally met face-to-face after “Old Town Road” reached #1.)
And then there were the remixes. In July, Lil Nas X released a posse-cut version of “Old Town Road” with a couple of carefully chosen guests. Young Thug, the aforementioned hitmaker whose Beautiful Thugger Girls album helped inspire the country/trap fusion of “Old Town Road,” is on that remix. So is Mason Ramsey, a little boy who found viral fame as the “yodeling kid” when someone filmed him singing a Hank Williams song in a Walmart. Ramsey bodies his “Old Town Road” remix verse, too: “Hop up on my Razor, got a thousand acres.” (Ramsey’s only Hot 100 hit, 2018’s “Famous,” peaked at #62.) In picking only the silliest country singers to appear on his track, Lil Nas X tapped into something more cartoonishly fun than what mainstream country was willing to offer. A few weeks later, Lil Nas X released his Seoul Town Road remix with RM, a member of the massive South Korean boy band BTS. (Don’t worry, we’ll get plenty of BTS in this column in the weeks ahead.)
All those remixes helped “Old Town Road” keep the #1 spot for an unprecedentedly long stretch — the entire spring and summer of 2019, more or less. Pride Month fell during that stretch, and that’s when Lil Nas X came out on Twitter. He treated his sexuality like it wasn’t a big deal — “deadass thought i made it obvious” — and it was cool that nobody made a big deal out of it. It’s true that he never really hid it. I remember him telling Genius that “Old Town Road” was inspired by the movie Dallas Buyers Club, and I was like, ohhhhh. Only a few openly queer pop stars had #1 hits before “Old Town Road,” and Lil Nas X is probably the only person who’s come out while his song was sitting at #1. It didn’t affect the song’s chart fortunes one way or the other. “Old Town Road” stayed up there for a few more weeks after that.
In June, Lil Nas X released his 7 EP, which had songs with Cardi B and Blink-182’s Travis Barker. Two of its eight tracks are different versions of “Old Town Road.” Eventually, Lil Nas X’s follow-up single, the 7 track “Panini,” peaked at #5. Kurt Cobain is in the “Panini” songwriting credits, apparently because the melody is close enough to Nirvana’s “In Bloom.” (“Panini” is a 6.) Hilariously, 7 got an Album Of The Year Grammy nomination despite clearly not being an album. Nobody knew what to do with this guy.
I heard “Old Town Road” so many times when it was on top, and I never got sick of it. My kids would play all the remixes, and they’d go outside the official-remix channels, finding a version of “Old Town Road” that was ostensibly by the beeping-not-singing Animal Crossing dog KK Slider, or a parody where it’s Thanos singing. (I got a little sick of those ones.) Eventually, the 7 EP went double platinum, and the “Old Town Road” single went platinum 17 times over. Lil Nas X was nominated for six Grammys, and he won a couple of them. During the Grammys telecast, Lil Nas X performed a big, showstopping all-star mega-version of “Old Town Road” with YoungKio, BTS, Mason Ramsey, Diplo, and Billy Ray Cyrus. That led right into Lil Nas X doing a version of his song “Rodeo” with the actual Nas. (“Rodeo” peaked at #22.) At that point, nobody knew whether Lil Nas X would have a proper career, but the Grammys were right to make a big deal out of “Old Town Road.” It was the kind of pop phenomenon that you’ll only see a few times in your lifetime.
Lil Nas X never really made another cowboy song after “Old Town Road,” give or take “Rodeo,” and the temptation must’ve been overwhelming. Plenty of other people tried to recapture that magic. Later in 2019, the former pop-rap producer Blanco Brown released “The Git Up,” a song that might as well be nothing but barn-dance instructions, and it reached #14. Breland, another guy who’d once been a peripheral figure in the rap world, made it to #92 with his extremely fun novelty “My Truck” in 2020. I really liked Sam Hunt’s verse on the remix. In 2020, a masked R&B singer named RMR also built up a whole lot of buzz with a viral hit that was essentially a Rascal Flatts cover with some thrown-in gun bars. But the country-rap fusions that really clicked were the ones that felt a little less silly. One of them is the song that eventually tied the “Old Town Road” chart record last year. We’ll get to some of those songs in this column eventually.
“Old Town Road” did not lead to a career renaissance for Billy Ray Cyrus. His marriage to Tish, Miley’s mother, had almost fallen apart a few times over the years, and they finally got divorced for good in 2022. After that, Cyrus was briefly married to an Australian singer named Firerose. During Donald Trump’s inaugural Liberty Ball in January, Cyrus came up onstage looking drunk as shit and sounding like Zombie Tom Waits, said he couldn’t hear anything, sang a couple of lines from “Achy Breaky Heart,” and then bounced. It was uncomfortable. He’s apparently dating Elizabeth Hurley now? I don’t even know, man.
Nobody was really expecting a Billy Ray Cyrus renaissance. At the same time, I don’t know how much people were expecting from Lil Nas X. It’s hard to define yourself as an artist if the first thing that anyone ever hears from you is, by some metrics, the biggest hit single in history. But he did it. After the 7 EP, Lil Nas X’s first single was “Holiday,” which came out before Christmas 2020 and peaked at #37. That’s basically a song for children, and Lil Nas X quickly moved away from that audience. We’ll see just how far he moved when he returns to this column.
GRADE: 10/10
BONUS BEATS: This whole column is basically an “Old Town Road” Bonus Beat, and I don’t have as many options as you might expect for this section. But here’s fan footage of Blondie — that Blondie, the one who’s been in this column a bunch of times — messing around with an “Old Town Road” cover at a 2019 show in Los Angeles:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Buy until you can’t no more.
