The hit song "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X (a persona of Montero Lamar Hill) drew more attention than most chart-topping tunes for a number of fascinating reasons that Slate columnist Chris Molanphy (Kurt Cobain: Voice of a Generation) elucidates in Old Town Road. For one, the single stayed at the top of the charts for longer than any other. Also, Billboard, which tracks song performance by genre, forbade it from being tracked as a country single, despite its signifiers as one.
Molanphy's investigation of the song's cultural moment ranges back to the history of race and country music; the cross-pollination between rap, hip-hop, and country; and the Internet's role in making digital music viral. He writes, "Montero Lamar Hill had organically created a proudly artificial cultural product: a heartfelt joke song, built out of a sample of an alternative rock band, sped up by a Dutch beatmaker Hill had never met, that Hill transformed into a country anthem with a hip-hop beat."
Molanphy's astute analysis shows readers the full cultural 360 in tracking the success and controversy of the song, the artist, and the evolution of online platforms like TikTok and YouTube to democratize the distribution and awareness of music. He also discusses the role that Lil Nas X's queerness has played in his success and post-"Old Town Road" career to date. Molanphy's book is a masterful and entertaining piece of cultural studies that, at 152 pages, takes exactly the time it needs to tell its story. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.