“Old Town Road” is simplistic, catchy as a nursery rhyme, and easy to dismiss as a joke. It is a joke, of course—and brazenly jokey, as it spits out country-music clichés about “ridin’ on a tractor” and “cheating on my baby” and tosses off pure gag lines about “bull ridin’ and boobies” and “Wrangler on my booty.” In fact, its very silliness—its elemental nature as neither a country-and-western song nor a hip-hop track but a specimen of a third category, a novelty song—is the key to its success. The audiences for country music and hip-hop are so far apart, so isolated from each other’s aesthetic values and ideologies and so protective of their respective domains that they are able to meet up only on the neutral ground of humor.
The jokiness of “Old Town Road” provides Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus with safe cover. “I’m kinda doing the other guy’s thing but kinda making fun of it,” they’re both saying through the goofball intensity of their performances as well as the Mad Libs randomness of the words and music. Cyrus gives himself an additional layer of protection from charges of falsity by basically performing an act of self-parody. Bellowing the hook that opens the track, “I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road / I’m gonna ride till I can’t no more,” he inflects the generic lyrics with more throaty drama than he brought to anything on his 2011 album of pandering jingoism, I’m American. He sounds like Jimmy Fallon doing a Billy Ray Cyrus impression and pushing a little too hard.
It is conceivable that a deeper union of country and hip-hop may come in the wake of “Old Town Road,” now that artists in both arenas can see plainly that such a thing is possible and can be profitable, highly profitable. Lil Nas X originally released his version of “Old Town Road” on YouTube in December 2018—a very long time ago by the pop-music calendar—when he was unsigned and unknown. The song, being self-evidently something of a joke, clicked with the Yeehaw Challenge, in which TikTok users competed to show off their most ridiculously country outfits to the sound of the track. By March, the song had made it onto three Billboard charts: the Hot 100, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, and Hot Country Songs, and Lil Nas X was signed to Columbia Records.