Fight for your right to yeehaw: Lil Nas X and the country's racial problem | The music

Saddle up: the "yeehaw program" is in full swing. The term – invented in 2018 by Bri Malandro, a Dallas resident, who wanted to celebrate black cowboys and cowgirls in pop culture – covers the emoji movement in the cowboy hat to the memorial power that drives strongly the black identity of the southern United States. He is thrilled with the impact of the region on music, style and culture and embraces the obsolete archetype of the South, the Marlboro Man chiseled, white, sandpaper.

The yeehaw agenda is not just about the leather issue, although it's definitely part of the fun. It's pure aesthetic dynamite to watch Cardi B fall into the Rainbow Brite at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo (where she broke a record of participation previously held by Garth Brooks). Or see Solange and Kelela singing 10-gallon hats, and the golden girl of country music Kacey Musgraves having fun with two winners of the RuPaul's Drag Race winners at her concerts.

If today's open mind has a soundtrack, it's 20-year-old Lil Nas X, the country's hottest country-catching anthem, Old Town Road. The song breaks Drake's record for US streams (143m in a week) and reaches No. 1 in the Top 40 British charts and US Billboard. Very tight wound traps play on banjo strums, sampled in the 2008 Nine Inch Nails' 34 Ghost IV, while his vocal strikes move smoothly between the tropics and hip-hop. "Ridin 'on a tractor / Lean all in my bladder," he rhymes. It spawned remixes – CupcakKe's Old Town Hoe being a highlight – and the abbreviated TikTok video app was flooded with Old Town Road clips to the sound of the hashtagged #yeehaw soundtrack. However, despite her viral weight and commercial legs, Lil Nas X's song was removed by compilers in Billboard's Hot Country Songs, who said the song "did not encompbad enough elements of country music. current ".

Naturally, Lil Nas X was "disappointed" by his exclusion from the national charts, but understands that the existence of the song announces a transition. "[The yeehaw agenda] it's just kissing what's not cool or hip, "he says. "I think people are just ready for something different, a change in the world."

Nevertheless, the wheels of the country of general public advance slowly. And although Yeehaw is currently dominant in hip-hop, pop and indie, his presence – and the case of Lil Nas X – has sparked a debate over whether non-white artists will be a fully accepted day on the Nashville scene. In Billboard's Hot Country Songs 100, by the end of 2018, there were only five main songs composed by artists of different colors, including three by biracial star Kane Brown. In comparison, more than half of the Hot 100's end-of-year songs featured black artists.

Rapper Ski Mask the Slump God was one of many who wondered if the "discrimination" had played in Old Town Road and was dropped from the chart. Billboard officials have denied this, but the ban on Lil Nas X symbolizes what the New York Times calls "the problem of including country music" and the tendency of the genre to exclude women and people of color . The seriousness of this discrimination really hits when we consider that this country is the largest radio format in the United States, favored by 15% of the total listeners (compared to the 10.6% who listen to the news and 8% who listen to the 40 best stations).

Nick Murray, a country music writer from Charlottesville, Virginia, thinks there is a double standard and uses another viral monolith to illustrate his point: Gangnam Style, from the Korean rapper PSY. "When it came out in 2012, Billboard was ranked # 1 on the rap song chart, although no rap radio plays it and its success is entirely based on streaming," he says. "I think it's the same [to Old Town Road]because this is the record that nobody expected, it's really far from the center of the industry. I remember people complaining, but Billboard did nothing. Who can talk to [the fact that] Nashville still has some power – and that's what they do themselves to do. "

The keepers of country music are certainly selective as to how they use this muscle. Universal Nashville's (white) hip-hop (white) storyteller, Sam Hunt, is adopted by Billboard's Hot Country Songs, and Meant to Be, a pop-themed ballad of Bebe Rexha, Lay & # 39; s Chips, with Florida Georgia Line, is played in turn. Taylor Swift could also rank at the top of the country's albums for 16 weeks with Red, his pop-rock masterpiece at the career realignment, even though it contained little banjo. The rap collaborations of white country artists also tend to get a pbad. Jason Aldean asked Ludacris for a remix of his country, anthem # 1 Dirt Road; Nelly's report on the Florida Georgia Line's clbadic Cruise series has helped him become the best-selling American country music title in the digital age. However, when black rappers are inspired by country styles – an intuitive mesh that is an integral part, for example, of recent music Young Thug – they are not entitled to a place at the table.

Melanie McClain, a former New York-based music content specialist based in Nashville, who plays a key role in helping emerging artists elevate herself, agrees. "If you're considered a country-artist who does country-rap, that's okay," she says. "But if you're considered a rapper and you do country rap, the perception is a little different."

Murray explains that the imposition of racial fault lines to traditional music is not new. "Since the beginning of the industry, there has been a long history of using the genre to try to separate music and separate black and white artists. Lil Nas X is fighting this.

"This has happened in the past," said McClain, pointing out that, in an example of institutional prejudice, Beyoncé's root, Daddy Lessons, was excluded from the 2017 Grammy Awards. "But I think that today's climate has allowed us to shake our heads and say, "Are you going to say this [music] Is not that what it is?

In a kind of hollow irony, it is a recognized fact that black artists are an integral part of the birth of the country. The Lone Ranger, an important Western archetype, would be a former slave named Bbad Reeves, while the banjo was originally an African instrument. In the 1950s, Ray Charles changed the country's sound by incorporating blues, pop, and R & B influences. In the 1970s, black country artist Charley Pride was RCA's biggest commercial success Records from Elvis. The tactics of etiquette to make it pbad to the country radio with white domination? Send Pride's music to station directors without mentioning his run.

The biggest black artists in the country, Jimmie Allen and Kane Brown, mentioned above, spoke frankly about their struggle to overcome prejudices. Last year, Brown tweeted (and then deleted): "Some people in Nashville who have[lishing] Business will not be written with me because I am black. Last year, Allen told the Guardian: "Nothing ever happened to my knees, I had to go out and work for it. Especially that there is a lack of experience of people who look like me. "

Outside the country, artists find the space and freedom to place dark life in the heart of Dixie. Black Cowboys, Mexican, African-American and Mexican artist, Grammy nominee, nominates Grammy Awards. It challenges the stories of white supremacy and includes a new version of a 1934 song, originally performed by the traditional black folk artist Moses "Clear Rock" Platt. He recently said about Lil Nas X: "The fact that he becomes a black cowboy is simply wonderful." The Flemings also praise Solange, whose majestic recent album, When I Get Home, was inspired by black cowboys in which she had grown up. Houston, Texas. The album's accompanying film shows black cowboys in the city, lbados flying in the air. "All the first cowboys I saw were black," she said. "I do not know who John Wayne is, I do not know what his story is."

True Country Leaders know that the most crucial figures of the genre, from Pride to Merle Haggard, a non-conformist underdog, or feminist pioneer Kitty Wells, have always upset the status quo. Superstar Billy Ray Cyrus commented enthusiastically on Lil Nas X's Twitter debate by writing, "When I was dropped from the charts, Waylon Jennings said to me," Take this as a compliment. [It] means you are doing something big! Only outlaws are prohibited. Earlier this month, Cyrus participated in an extra-twangy remix of Old Town Road, which immediately reached the No. 1 iTunes in a painting of all genres. "It was a truly uplifting connection," says Lil Nas X, of the collaboration. "In a way, it was like having another father.

Even in this case, there is a bittersweet note on the fact that it took the signature of a former statesman of the country for the song to return in the good books of the genre. The keepers of country music continue to fortify the walls of their castle as they should lower the drawbridge to accommodate new voices. Can the success of Old Town Road help bring this accusation? Lil Nas X is optimistic. "I hope this will open doors for all genres – and that people will be more open to change," he says. "Music is music."