Front Burner - A controversy over race, rap and country music

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

For weeks, the song "Old Town Road" by rapper Lil Nas X had been climbing the country music charts. After Billboard disqualified the hit saying it wasn't "country" enough, there's been a big conversation about genre, authorship and race. Brittany Spanos from Rolling Stone breaks it down.

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You start killing when you're in your late teens or early 20s. Uncover. The Village. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Have you heard this song? I got the horses in the bag. Horse stock is attached. Head is matted black. Have you heard this song? It's called Old Town Road, and it's by an artist called Lil Nas X. And it's been everywhere on the internet. The video on YouTube has over 22 million views. It's been number one on Spotify.

Now it's number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. But it's ignited this controversy. See, when Old Town Road debuted, it was on two charts, the hip hop chart and the country music chart. And this got a lot of people asking, is this a country music song? It's about horses. There's a banjo. But Billboard disagreed. They took it off the country chart.

And this has started a whole other conversation about country music, stereotypes, and importantly, race. So today, we're going to talk about it with Brittany Spanos from Rolling Stone magazine. This is Frontburner. Brittany, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me.

So I want to start today with the big question, which is, is Old Town Road a country song? I believe it is. I believe it definitely is a mixture of both trap and country in a way that we'd never seen it before. And when we talk about trap, what do we mean by that? Really overproduced beat sounds, kind of that driving clubby sound to it. those beat sounds, kind of that driving clubby sound to it. So if you think this was a country song, why do you think Billboard decided that it wasn't a country song and took it off the country charts? I mean, it's really fascinating because

Trap has been infused into country for a few years now. Florida Georgia Line with Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, all these major country stars have been kind of playing with it. But no one has made it where it's like trap is the primary genre on it. And then there's the country undercurrent to it. And also Lil Nas X, he's not a country star. He started doing SoundCloud rapping. decided to make this song that plays with a lot of country tropes, with the sound of, like you mentioned, talking about horses, talking about all these kind of country-specific settings and scenes.

I want to get back to Lil Nas in a second, but first, let's play a clip from Florida Georgia Line, which you just referenced. So that sounds like sort of country to me. And this was allowed to stay on the country music charts. And so why do you think this is different than Lil Nas? I think it's because Flora Georgia Line sell themselves as country artists first. And I think it's the inverse of what Lil Nas X did, which is where country is the primary thing. It's like you have the twang, you have the guitar as a primary instrument on there. It does lead with country, but then as the song develops, there's a little bit of rapping on the verses.

They bring Nelly in for the remix. And there is that hip-hop beat kind of carrying the entire song. So you mentioned the Florida Georgia line bills themselves as country artists, but who is Lil Nas X? So Lil Nas X is a 19-year-old rapper who kind of got his start through making memes on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. It's your boy Soulja Boy and Dubai. Look at that camel behind me, though, scratching his neck. Turn up. I got the Louis show. And he does sort of have this internet comedy background to him.

We actually interviewed him for Rolling Stone, and basically he wanted to do something that didn't sound like SoundCloud rap. He comes from Southern culture. He wanted to make something that felt like himself. And he even said, this was me doing what I wanted to do. And so it is a song that was a departure for him. I want to talk about how this song got so big, you know, how it's spread on the internet. It's really quite extraordinary. Yeah, I think even Lil Nas X is trying to figure out what even the mass appeal of the song was, why this particular song for him has blown up in the way it has and had such widespread semi-humorous, but also just really genuine love from a lot of people for it. A lot of it can be owed to TikTok. Lil Nas X has cited a couple of TikTok stars who have helped the song grow, but it became part of a meme, the Yeehaw Challenge. And it was people drinking something that was very shoddily labeled Yee Yee Juice for Yeehaw. And they would drink that. And then all

of a sudden, Old Town Road would play and they would be wearing a bunch of country paraphernalia like cowboy hats and like big belt buckles and cowboy boots and they'd be doing a little bit of a square dance. Where's my yee-yee juice? Let's get it. And so that was the big meme that took off. And because TikTok is growing bigger, people repost the videos to Instagram, to Twitter. And it was all over social media. It still is. And that was kind of the big push for the song. Right.

So I want to talk about TikTok for a second. I've watched some of these videos. They're really funny. They're exactly what you say they are. People are sort of morphing into cowboys. And it's like this funny meme. Every time I feel like I've got a handle on the internet, something reminds me that I'm just not very cool. And TikTok is one of the things that

has reminded me of that, which is this new platform where essentially people are like lip syncing to songs. Am I right? And it has 6 million users in the United States alone. I know it's really popular here in Canada as well. It's sort of the lip syncing thing. It's interesting because it bought out Musically, which was a big lip syncing app for specifically Gen Zers. And now it's sort of a mixture of both lip syncing and dancing. Some people like monologue on there. Some people just like model. Don't you be drinking toilet water in there again.

Just finished putting some touch-up paint on this Tesla here. This is John Marceloel, the flamingo caller. There's a pack of flamingos. Like it's just like a weird, it's a mess of an app that has many, many uses, but lip syncing. It's a mess of an app. Yeah. It's like sort of like Instagram and Snapchat and all of them on steroids. Like, is that a fair way to describe it? Yeah, it's all in one. Humor is definitely the main crux of that. I want to hang out here for a second because I find this song so fascinating because it feels like it was made for the internet. The lyrics feel like they were made for Twitter.

The beat, I know, came from a website that you can lease or purchase tracks from. And radio stations just had to rip this thing off of YouTube because it was blowing up so fast on social media that I guess they just needed to figure out a way to put it on airwaves immediately. What do you make of that? I mean, again, that's really due to Lil Nas X's start as a viral meme creator. Like that's always been something he has leaned towards. And so obviously, but I think he definitely absorbed a lot of the fast pacedness of it. The song is super repetitive. It's really, really short. It's really catchy. Like it's not a long country ballad that we expect, but it does kind of pull in a lot of those stereotypes and tropes that relate to it. And so it feels a little bit fun and cheeky and also just as genuinely catchy. Right. And you mentioned fun and cheeky and we know TikTok is very much focused on comedy and Lil Nas himself has a background in comedy, which really brings me to this question, which is that is he serious? Is this song actually a country song or is it actually making fun of country music? And of country, it does feel like it is stereotyping itself because people do bring up these same tropes repeatedly that you know that, like, I know that Luke Bryan is not on a tractor, but yet he is still singing about tractors.

is that element of you have to know the brand and you have to know exactly what you're selling. In a lot of ways, even if he didn't intend to, it is kind of throwing that back into the face of what country music is in general, which is that it's kind of building on a near century of tropes and stereotypes that aren't really evolving. Because I can get more women than a passenger train can haul. And I know Lil Nas, I should say, tweeted that he was, quote, extremely disappointed that the song was removed from the country charts. And he wrote, quote, just because Old Town Road has funny lines doesn't mean it's a parody. He is also referencing what you were just saying. I find very interesting, too, and super fun. He's leaning into being a cowboy now. Essentially, he's been posting lots of photos of himself

wearing cowboy hats and denim. And he recently led a square dance at an Atlanta Hawks basketball game, which was hilarious. He's got the number one song on Spotify. And he's in the house tonight. Please welcome Atlanta's own Lil Nas X. You know, is he doing that to sort of fight back against the people that are telling them he's not

country or why do you think he's doing that? I think so. And I do believe that there is definitely an earnestness to the song. And again, to quote from the article that my colleague Elias had done, Lil Nas X had even mentioned that the source of it was he felt like a loner cowboy. He had written this song because, and I quote, my parents were disappointed in me for leaving school to do music. So it was like a loner cowboy song. So there is sort of that. He felt related to this identity, to this specific character. He was told it was not enough of that character. and now he's like, well, so what? I'm going to keep doing this,

and I'm going to take it to the next level, and he is. So I know people like Taylor Swift end up on the country charts, and her music doesn't seem particularly country to me. So why her and not Lil Nas X? I mean, she is someone who brought country to the mainstream in a really big way. There is a lot of separation between what country is and what pop is and how we see country and pop fusing together and someone like Taylor Swift who got her start in country really crossed over in a big big way in a way that a lot of country artists desire to and don't really get to see where she

was played on pop radio even as a country artist when she started making explicitly pop music I would say beginning with Speak Now and moving into Red and I mean 1989 was obviously the biggest shift but Speak Now and Red being seen as country and rising out of the country charts and being nominated in country categories at the Grammys was a moment of not letting go of this artist who had brought country to the mainstream for them and I mean we've seen it a lot with like Jason Aldean too with Burning It Down was another controversial one. It has a lot of the same trap elements. That song sounds nothing like a country song, but also was really big on country. But because they are artists who had helped make country feel a little bit less of this Southern-specific genre. They remained on those charts.

We'll be back in a second. At Franklin Templeton, we help you invest in companies that believe good enough is never far enough. Reach for better. Franklin Templeton Investments. To get to sort of a more serious issue around this, many fans have been saying that the reason Lil Nas X isn't on the country charts is because he's not white. And so what do you make of that? I very much believe that. I do think that all of our music divisions come down to race, and they have not evolved since then. A lot of our categories for music, a lot of the way that we look at genre is based off of racial stereotypes that have existed since the 50s when popular music really began being quantified by genre.

One of the biggest examples for me is the way that we've consistently categorized a lot of Black artists as R&B, Black singers specifically, even when they're not necessarily making R&B music. I look at Janelle Monáe, whose album was categorized as R&B on the Grammys and for the Billboard charts as well when that was a pop album. Also with Beyonce, too, I mean, I mean, she has repeatedly made pop songs and has been categorized as urban contemporary, which is a made-up genre, R&B.

We look at the separation of rock from blues. Very little difference between what rock and blues are. A lot of Black musicians categorize as blues where they had invented the entire genre of rock and were not categorized as such. So a lot of these genre stereotypes are coming from a racialized place. Let's talk about Beyonce a little bit more because she is also an example of an artist that wasn't embraced by country music as well. Her track Daddy Lessons. I mean, with Lemonade, Beyonce had done a lot of experimentation with other genres, and she had Daddy Lessons, which was a country Americana song, an ode to her roots in Texas. It was shut out of country categories on the Grammys, which was kind of ridiculous because even more so than Lil Nas X,

where Lil Nas X, you can see it as kind of humorous, and it is a trap-heavy song. Day Lessons was a pretty straightforward country song. Dixie Chicks even sang it with her at the CMAs. The girl is what I had to be. Did a mashup with one of their own songs. There is really no difference between what the Dixie Chicks song sounded like in comparison to Daddy Lessons. And so, I mean, that was just sort of an interesting moment where there was a lot of pushback from this community, from

the people coming from the top and saying this song was not country enough when she had made a pretty country song. And I mean, the same thing happened with Don't Hurt Yourself, which was her rock song that she worked on with Jack White for the album. That song was in the rock categories, but there was a lot of controversy from rock artists who were in that category. Specifically, the members of Disturbed had said that she was not rock enough when she had made a rock song. You know, there also seems to be a backlash to this from Black artists who are dressing like cowboys in their videos and on their album covers. And how did that trend start and what's going on there? We've seen a lot of crossover of country aesthetic in recent years.

I mean, Daddy Lessons was one of the biggest launches of that movement where we're seeing pop artists either go back to their country roots or begin to evoke country in their music. We've seen a big movement of Black artists like Solange and Cardi B dress in country garb and wearing the cowboy hats and doing all that. I mean, Cardi B was performing at the Houston Rodeo, which was a big reason why it is sort of a fashion movement. It's a moment right now where people are looking at the history of Black cowboys, of Black artists doing country music. You know, I know that we could do an entire podcast on this subject alone, but what's

interesting to me is that there is this really rich history of black cowboys that has essentially been erased from a lot of the history books. A lot of that has reflected in the anger towards what has happened with Lil Nas X being taken off of country radio. Brittany, thank you so much. This has been such an interesting conversation and really, really appreciate you being here. Yeah, thank you. So an important addendum to this story.

So an important addendum to this story, Billy Ray Cyrus, country star, achy, breaky heart fame, is going to do a verse on an Old Time Road remix. Cyrus is a fan of Lil Nas X. This is what he wrote about him on his Instagram page. Don't try and think inside the box. Don't think outside the box. Think like there is no box. Hashtag horses in the back. Happy Friday, everyone. FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Chris Berube, Elaine Chao, Shannon Higgins, and Sylvia Thompson. Associate producers Aisha Barmania and Abby Plitter.

Special thanks to Jennifer Fowler and Mitch Stewart Derek Vanderwyk does our sound design The Executive Producer of FrontBurner is Nick McCabe-Locos And I'm your host, Jamie Poisson See you Monday For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus.

Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.