Music

Fight for your right to yeehaw: Lil Nas X and country’s race problem


Saddle up: the “yeehaw agenda” is thriving. The term – coined in 2018 by Dallas resident Bri Malandro, who wanted to celebrate black cowboys and cowgirls in pop culture – covers the meme-powered, cowboy hat emoji-peppered movement that pulls southern US black identity into powerful focus. It rejoices in the region’s impact on music, style and culture, and skewers the south’s outdated archetype of the sandpaper-jawed, cis, white, straight Marlboro Man.

There is more to the yeehaw agenda than leathering up, though that’s undeniably part of the fun. It is pure aesthetic dynamite to watch Cardi B bust down in Rainbow Brite chaps at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo (where she broke an attendance record previously held by Garth Brooks). Or to see Solange and Kelela rock 10-gallon hats, and country music’s golden girl Kacey Musgraves giddy-up with two winners of RuPaul’s Drag Race winners at her live shows.

If today’s open-minded yee-naissance has a soundtrack, it is 20-year-old artist Lil Nas X’s preposterously catchy country-trap anthem Old Town Road. The song smashed Drake’s record for US streams (143m in one week) and reached No 1 in the UK Top 40 and the US Billboard charts. Tightly wound trap snares play off banjo strums, sampled from the 2008 Nine Inch Nails deep cut 34 Ghost IV, while his speak-rapping moves fluidly between western and hip-hop tropes. “Ridin’ on a tractor / Lean all in my bladder,” he rhymes. It has spawned remixes – CupcakKe’s Old Town Hoe being a particular highlight – and the shortform video app TikTok has been flooded by Old Town Road-soundtracked clips hashtagged #yeehaw. However, despite its viral heft and commercial legs, Lil Nas X’s song was removed by Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart by the compilers, who said the song didn’t “embrace enough elements of today’s country music”.

Naturally, Lil Nas X was “disappointed” by his exclusion from the country charts, but understands that the song’s existence signals a transition. “[The yeehaw agenda] is just embracing what’s not cool or trendy,” he says. “I think people are just ready for something different, a change within the world.”

Yet the wheels of mainstream country move slowly. And while yeehaw is currently dominant in hip-hop, pop and indie alike, its presence – and the case of Lil Nas X – has ignited debate about whether non-white artists will ever be fully accepted in the Nashville scene. Billboard’s 2018 year-end Hot Country Songs 100 featured just five lead songs by artists of colour – and three of those were by breakout biracial star Kane Brown. By comparison, more than half of the Hot 100’s year-end songs featured black artists.

Rapper Ski Mask the Slump God was one of many who wondered whether “discrimination” played into Old Town Road getting dropped from the chart. Billboard officials denied that, but Lil Nas X’s ban emblematises what the New York Times called “country music’s inclusion problem” and the genre’s tendency to shut out women and people of colour. The gravity of this discrimination really hits home when you consider that country is the biggest radio format in the US, favoured by 15% of total listeners (compared to the 10.6% who tune into news and 8% who listen to Top 40 stations).

Nick Murray, a country music writer from Charlottesville, Virginia, thinks that there is a double standard at play and uses another viral monolith to illustrate his point: Korean rapper PSY’s Gangnam Style. “When that came out in 2012, Billboard made it No 1 on the rap song chart, despite no rap radio playing it and its success being totally based on streaming,” he says. “That, I think, is similar [to Old Town Road], in that it’s this record no one expected that’s really far from the industry centre. I remember people complaining, but Billboard didn’t do anything. Which may speak to [the fact that] Nashville still has some power – and this is them flexing their power to do this.”

Country music gatekeepers are certainly selective about how they use this muscle. Universal Nashville’s (white) hip-pop raconteur Sam Hunt is embraced by Billboard’s Hot Country Songs, and Meant to Be, a pop-leaning ballad by Lay’s crisps spokesperson Bebe Rexha with Florida Georgia Line is played ad nauseam. Taylor Swift could also lasso the country albums top spot for 16 weeks with her career-realigning pop-rock masterpiece Red, even though it contained barely a banjo. White country artists’ rap collaborations also tend to get a pass. Jason Aldean tapped Ludacris for a remix of his country No 1 Dirt Road Anthem; Nelly’s feature on Florida Georgia Line’s bro-country classic Cruise helped it become country music’s best selling US single of the digital era. Yet when black rappers draw from country styles – an intuitive mesh that’s integral to, say, the recent music of Young Thug – they are denied a seat at the table.

Melanie McClain, a New York-based, former Nashville-dwelling music content specialist, who plays a key role in helping new artists ascend, agrees. “If you are considered a ‘country artist making country-rap’, it’s OK,” she says. “But if you’re considered a rapper and making country-rap, the perception is a little different.”

Murray explains that the imposition of racial faultlines on mainstream music is not new. “From the beginning of the industry, there’s a long history of trying to use genre to try to segregate music, and separate black and white artists. Lil Nas X is fighting that.”

“This has happened in the past,” says McClain, noting that in an example of institutional prejudice, Beyoncé’s rootsy Daddy Lessons was shut out of country categories at the 2017 Grammys. “But I think the climate today has allowed us to stick our chests out and say: ‘Are you going to say this [music] is not what it is?’”

In a kind of hollow irony, it is an acknowledged fact that black artists were integral to the birth of country. The Lone Ranger, a significant western archetype, is said to be a former slave named Bass Reeves, while the banjo was originally an African instrument. In the 1950s, Ray Charles changed the sound of country by bringing in influences from blues, pop, and R&B, and in the 70s, black country artist Charley Pride was RCA Records’ biggest commercial success since Elvis. The label’s tactic to get him on to white-dominated country radio? To send Pride’s music to station managers while not mentioning his race.

Country’s current foremost black artists, Jimmie Allen and the aforementioned Kane Brown, have spoken frankly about their struggle to overcome prejudice. Last year, Brown tweeted (then deleted): “Some people in Nashville who have pub[lishing] deals won’t write with me because I’m black.” Allen told the Guardian last year: “Nothing ever fell into my lap, I had to go out and work for it. Especially since there is a lack of experience of people who look like me.”

Outside of mainstream country, artists are finding space and freedom to place black lives at the heart of Dixie. African-American and Mexican artist Dom Flemons’s Grammy-nominated 2018 album Black Cowboys challenges white supremacist western narratives and includes a new version of a 1934 work song, originally by the black traditional folk artist Moses “Clear Rock” Platt. He recently said of Lil Nas X: “The fact he is repping black cowboys is just wonderful.” Flemons also praises Solange, whose majestic, jazz-inspired recent album When I Get Home was partly inspired by the black cowboys she saw growing up in Houston, Texas. The album’s accompanying film depicts black cowboys riding through the city, lassos flying through the air. “All of the first cowboys I saw were black,” she said. “I don’t know who John Wayne is, I don’t know what his story is.”

Country’s real heads know that the genre’s most crucial figures, from Pride to maverick outsider Merle Haggard or feminist pioneer Kitty Wells, have always disrupted the status quo. Superstar Billy Ray Cyrus hearteningly weighed in to the Lil Nas X debate on Twitter, writing: “When I got thrown off the charts, Waylon Jennings said to me: ‘Take this as a compliment. [It] means you’re doing something great! Only Outlaws are outlawed.” Earlier this month, Cyrus guested on an extra-twangy Old Town Road remix, which instantly rocketed to iTunes’ No 1 in a chart taking in all genres. “It was a genuine uplifting connection,” says Lil Nas X of the collaboration. “In a way, it was like having another dad.

Young Yoni
(@CakeMaster3000)

Damn. They took @LilNasX off the country charts but gave Billy Ray the congrats sign over here on Music Row in Nashville, TN. pic.twitter.com/TeDvOH6sxh


April 24, 2019

Even so, there is a bittersweet note to the fact that it took a co-sign from an elder statesman of country to get the song back into the genre’s good books. Country music’s gatekeepers continue to fortify the walls of their castle when they should be lowering the drawbridge to welcome new voices. Can Old Town Road’s success help to mount that charge? Lil Nas X is optimistic. “I hope it opens doors for all genres – and people are more open to change,” he says. “Music is music.”





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