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OZY Newsmakers: Dive deeply into the names you need to know.
What happens when you combine weird guitar sounds and traps, cowboy memories by the fireside, a young black innovator and a country music fan? A painful breaking picture.
The improbable collaboration of Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus (best known, according to your age group, as Hannah Montana's father or 1992 smash crooner Achy breaky heart) on the song Soudain Partout Old Town Road (I have horses at the back) has raised racial issues and related to a genre as old as popular music itself, with a backstory made for the era of social media. In doing so, he crowned a new star and relaunched the career of another. Not bad for a song originally recorded in less than two minutes.
In December 2018, the little-known Atlanta musician named Lil Nas X (his real name is Montero Lamar Hill) downloaded the single as part of the "Yeehaw Challenge" on TikTok, a social media site. The song then went viral on all platforms and went up to number 19 on Billboard Hot Country Songs Chart at the end of March. But at the same time, the rise of this song provoked vehement reactions as to whether Old Town Road belonged to the genre. The week of March 23, the billboard was removed Old Town Road in the national charts – a move that only fueled the fire of Internet controversy.
Billboard insisted that the reclbadification of the song "had absolutely nothing to do with race" (insisting that you are not always racist, no?), But that the song "does not embrace enough elements of the current country music to figure in its current version". from Justin Bieber to the country singer, Meghan Linsey objected. Enter Billy Ray Cyrus, whom Lil Nas X jokingly tweeted in the middle of all repression, with a chance response.
At the beginning of April, Lil Nas X posted a remix of Old Town Road with none other than Cyrus himself. The substance and lyrics have largely remained unchanged, but the song now presents the legendary country musician singing with Lil Nas X, who celebrated his 20th birthday this week as the song climbed to the top spot of Hot 100's Billboard, replacing Ariana Grande, Post Malone and Swae Lee.
.@ LilNasX I watch everything that happens with OTR. Waylon Jennings said, "Take this as a compliment," that means you're doing something awesome! Only outlaws are outlawed. Welcome to the club!
– Billy Ray Cyrus (@billyraycyrus) April 3, 2019
Lil Nas X has only started downloading music via SoundCloud that last year – first to encourage his internet monitoring. The enthusiast meme first accumulated fans via Nicki Minaj's Twitter account, @NasMaraj, which has since been banned from Twitter. Cyrus, 57, is an artist who sells numerous records and has won eight singles in the Top 10 of the Billboard Country Songs. He is the father of singer / songwriter Miley Cyrus.
The irony in Cyrus' loan Old Town Road country, it has also been criticized in the past for mixing pop and national influences, says David Wild, a longtime journalist Rolling stone music critic. Country music can not be frozen in time, especially because of the presence of cross-over in the industry, says Wild. In this case, Billboard fell on himself trying to enforce rules that do not apply, he notes.
The entire episode brings up a tension between evolution and dissolution of a genre, which must write the rules in the first place and when the rules warrant a quick update. It also highlights the fundamental differences between traditional caretakers and a younger generation who do not use them. At the time of its release, Lil Nas X was not yet signed with a label, although he signed a contract with Columbia Records after a bidding war in March.
"Including Wild West signifiers or references to horses in no way qualifies a rap song with a beat rhythm," wrote Kyle Coroneos, aka "Trigger," in an editorial that sparked controversy. Lil Nas X has "not signed a country label, and … has no connection to the Nashville Music Campus". "Trigger" also pointed out that the absence of an official music video in the song was a disqualifying factor, the video performed includes rather scenes from a Wild West video game.
The racial nuances are impossible to ignore too. Country music has been described as hostile to black artists in the past, but it is a larger historical problem. As Lindsay Zoladz notes in The ring, Billboard's R & B charts were once known as "Race Records" and "Hot Black Singles". However, as artists have been mixing genres for decades, white musicians like Florida Georgia Line and Jason Aldean have not been subject to the same level of criticism.
Country advocates argue that there is an identity deeply rooted in this genre – which must resist its own character conversion. "Trigger," for one, writes that there is "no credible reason to include this song on a country map, apart from a sectarian stereotype born from the fact that horses and the cowboy hats are referenced in the lyrics.
But in the age of fragmentation of all forms of entertainment, there is something refreshing about cross-success. In Wild's eyes, modern music is a chemistry set. "Mix good ingredients and see if it explodes," he says. This song has undeniably, and Lil Nas X intends to return to the lab before long.
"I will always experiment musically, try new things," he said. Complex. "I have tried to make sure that everything sounds different, so you do not hear two songs and think that they sound the same way."
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