The track also arrived at a fortuitous moment — on the heels of a trickle of Western aesthetics into the high-style universe over the last couple of years, and also following the success of stylistically diverse country performers like Kacey Musgraves, who have demonstrated that a country musician can be a beacon of cool far outside the genre’s walls. Even Kanye West recently took to the countryside, unveiling his last album at a Wyoming cowboy ranch.
In another moment, the aesthetic choices of “Old Town Road” might have been perceived as pure kitsch, but now they are kitsch with a side of tastemaker. And though the removal of the song from the country chart reflected an initial resentment, the mood soon switched. Some country singers said they found “Old Town Road” to be country, or country enough. They didn’t want to be on the wrong side of cool.
Billy Ray Cyrus, who joined the song’s remix, is not a country insider at the peak of his powers, but he’s still a performer with a great deal of resonance within Nashville thanks to his 1992 pop-country crossover smash “Achy Breaky Heart.” Cyrus’s “Old Town Road” verse is pure glitz, a blend of hip-hop braggadocio and country-boy-in-the-big-city awe: “Spent a lot of money on my brand-new guitar/Baby’s got a habit, diamond rings and Fendi sports bras/Ridin’ down Rodeo in my Maserati sports car.” The performance is effortless, showing a version of country music that’s cosmopolitan, flexible and self-aware.
Whether Cyrus’s co-sign will be enough for the industry side of Nashville to embrace “Old Town Road” remains to be seen. That’s because, when it comes to charts and common practices, country isn’t a genre or a set of sounds as much as it is an oligarchy, the product of a limited number of record labels; a media environment that relies heavily on radio (with programmers who can lack imagination, as female country performers have long known); and a profound bottleneck in terms of new talent and new ideas. (To be fair, country is not alone in this: In 2012, the K-pop novelty star Psy went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Rap Songs chart with “Gangnam Style,” which was — and remains — one of the biggest viral YouTube songs in history, but was by no means a rap song in the American context.)
Nashville’s initial resistance suggests some unfortunate things about country as a genre: that it might not be able to make fun of itself; that it might look askance at outsiders, especially black performers; that it understands itself only through the lens of protecting its central ideology, and not as an omnivorous sound in dialogue with the rest of pop, and the rest of America. Country music is preoccupied with borders, and it treats each new incursion as an opportunity for identity crisis. It’s a wild contrast with contemporary hip-hop, which understands itself as music that borrows widely, and experiments with glee.
But perhaps the greatest indictment of how the country music leadership handled “Old Town Road” comes from a cursory listen to some other songs on the chart. Take “Look What God Gave Her,” the new single by Thomas Rhett, perhaps the ur-country gentleman of the last few years. It’s a soft soul song with a faint disco undertow, nothing country about it beyond the perceived affiliation of the performer. Elsewhere there are soft-rock ballads and R&B songs, none of them subject to anything like the skepticism that has greeted Lil Nas X, whose reference points might in fact be more classically country (even if refracted through a kitsch lens).
from Best News Viral http://bit.ly/2IofLPf
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