From the culture department: "Old Town Road" and what gets to be "country music"

The New York Times reported recently on the controversy surrounding Lil Nas X's hit, "Old Town Road," which it describes thusly:

For its first 25 seconds, “Old Town Road” could be any other rural lament, a lonely howl delivered over a plucked ukulele. It’s only when the trap drums kick in and the vocals change from singing to quasi-ironic rapping that the song’s true intentions come to the fore. It’s a genre-hybrid exercise — a hip-hop song with country-themed subject matter, partly rapped and partly sung in an exaggerated honky-tonk accent — and also a comedy sketch. The way Lil Nas X overaccentuates his vowels and makes them wobble is a caricature of stoic drawl, and when he raps “cowboy hat from Gucci, Wrangler on my booty,” it’s both confident boast and funny fantasy.

Read Jon Caramanica's feature for the "rest of the story," which includes this explicit link b/w rural and race--specifically, whiteness:

For decades, Nashville has essentially framed and marketed the rural experience as white — despite and in defiance of the deep black roots of country music. So when an artist like Lil Nas X — who is black, and raps, and is from Atlanta, with no ties to the country music business — lays claim to rural aesthetics, even in a way that’s partly tongue in cheek, it causes real disruption.

Another controversy over the relationship  between race and country music, this one from spring of 2013, is here.

I'm also reminded of some of the commentary around Kacey Musgrave from a few years ago (alluded to in the Caramanica piece), as well as in the immediate run up to and in the wake of her win for Album of the Year at the 2019 Grammy Awards.  Apparently Kacey has not always been widely accepted as a country musician.  I wonder how much that has changed at all since her big Grammy wins this year.

And while we're on the subject of Kacey Musgrave, don't miss this story about how women over the age of 40 are disadvantaged in the world of country music.  (Indeed, I'd argue that they are disadvantaged everywhere ...)  Good thing for Musgrave that she's only 30.

N.B.  Caramanica's story is the cover story of the Arts and Entertainment Section of the April 21, 2019 New York Times, accompanied by this related story and a feature about/interview with Shannon Houchins, "a producer and executive who has been spreading the country-rap gospel since the late 1990s."