OLD TOWN ROAD P1

• Lil Nas X or Montero Hill is from a poor area of Atlanta. His debut musical single became an unexpected hit using meme culture on TikTok.
• The song's success led to controversy over whether it qualified as country music.
• Lil Nas X bought the instrumental off of Young Kio, a dutch record producer, for just £30. Young Kio used a sample from Nine Inch Nails to create the instrumental. He later appeared in the music video.
• Montero used the popularity of TikTok to create waves of videos to promote his music. Lil Nas X first used RDR2 gameplay for his song's music video. This linked to the major western and country element in the song.
• Old Town Road is the longest running No 1 of all time - 18 weeks.
• The song fits in a hybrid genre of rap and country. The song gained controversy after Billboard decided to take it off the Country Charts. This was seen as racially motivated by many.
• Billy Ray Cyrus featured in the remix version of the song which helped boost its popularity even further. Cyrus is a famous country singer who came out in support of Montero. When Billy featured on the song, after being asked by Lil Nas X, the song was put back onto the Country Charts. This links to the music video starting off with, 'you're with me this time'.
• The music video includes lots of western elements. This was probably used to showcase it's country genre and prove BillBoard wrong. In the song Lil Nas X is positioned a heroic figure. The song features a black neighbourhood and a white bingo town hall. This highlights the segregation and division in the US.
• Lil Nas X subverts representations of a rapper by being a gay black man. Due to the song's popularity he has been signed with Columbia Records.
• The song uses a sample from Nine Inch Nails' "34 Ghost IV".
• In the music video LNX states 'cheated on my baby, you can go and ask her'. Here he conforms in order to appeal to a mainstream audience indicating to the world that he is straight.
• The combination of the two genres within this song highlights the double consciousness that some African American people feel as they are both African and American. Double conciousness is the struggle African Americans face to remain true to Black culture while at the same time conforming to the dominant white society.
• Trap is a subgenre of hip hop music that originated in the Southern United States during the late 1980s.
• Lil Nas X is an auteur. Arguably, he had to gender perform in his Old Town Road video in order to be seen as mainstream and part of popular culture, his later videos embrace his homosexuality and express gender fluidity, subverting most expectation of rap music that is often hypermasculine. His video ‘Industry Baby’ from 2021 can be read as a commentary on black hyperincarceration in America and the final shot of the prison burning shows Lil Nas X’s criticism of the prison system in America. 
• In the first video for “Old Town Road”, Lil Nas X used footage from the popular computer game “Red Dead Redemption 2” to promote his song. Henry Jenkins used the phrase textual poaching to describe the process of reworking the “semiotic raw materials” of media products to create something new. The western themes obviously suited Lil Nas X’s lyrics and the mashup was an incredible success, racking up at least 1 million views on YouTube.