1 queer millennial + camp catchy cowboy country hip-hop song by Lil Nas X named “Old Town Road” = a fierce battle for no. 1 artist spot on my 2018 Spotify Wrapped (Janelle Monáe did edge Nas out following their flawless album Dirty Computer). “Old Town Road” (hereafter OTR) did and does resonate with me as a “pop artifact” (5), “chart phenomenon” (123), and “cultural watershed” (17). This commercial and cultural success is the focus of Chris Molanphy's book Old Town Road, in which he offers a unique interpretation of OTR's success and ingenuity, placing emphasis on “dissecting the chart as much as dissecting the song” (3). He examines its chart success through analysis of the chart's evolution from the 1940s, the relationship between country and hip-hop, and the creative and online savvy of Lil Nas X (hereafter Nas). Molanphy is a pop critic specializing in chart analysis who is a columnist for Slate, hosts the Hit Parade podcast, and writes for magazines such as Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. Scholarship related to Nas includes Pop Masculinities (2021), in which Kai Arne Hansen devotes a chapter to Nas and OTR, investigating how his queer tactics, both musically and visually, challenged accepted boundaries across country and hip-hop. Hansen's work is musicologically authoritative, but Molanphy's focus on charts draws needed attention to the commercial artistry also at play. Further scholarship on Nas largely discusses his music videos and fashion choices from MONTERO onwards,Footnote ¹ or situates him and his work within queer studies via queer futurity, queer utopia, Afrofuturism, and transness.Footnote ²

In the first three chapters Molanphy outlines the three building blocks of OTR, discusses the ongoing relationship between country and race where Black people are erased and Black culture is co-opted by white people, and illuminates how country and hip-hop have a more established history of mutual influence than the charts suggest. Molanphy constructs a convincing narrative that Nas was destined for creative success from the outset of the book: he was raised in the Bankhead Courts project, which spawned Atlanta hip-hop innovators T.I., D4L, and Young Dro, and by the Internet, which he understood and gained traction on in different guises during his teenage years. The links between Black history and culture and how country music evolved from it are made explicit by Molanphy: white musicians travelled through Black communities to pick up (read, appropriate) black musical characteristics in the early 1900s, which were subsequently gatekept by the Nashville country scene; some forms of rap started to be accepted in country music, but by white artists and with minimal rap production as Black artists were deemed too novelty. While Molanphy gives a clear sense of how race informed Nas's trajectory within country music, there is a lack of attention given to Nas's queerness within the book. There are few queer Black artists in both hip-hop and country. It is significant that OTR was as successful as it was considering the racism and homophobia inherent in certain circles of each genre. That the song's success continued and increased after Nas came out publicly warrants more attention from the outset. Considering Nas's current cultural position as a queer icon, those searching for commentary on how his queerness influenced OTR's commercial success will not find it here. However, Molanphy provides useful chart data by which researchers might be able to explore this relationship further.

Chapters 5 and 5 explain the evolution of the charts and the Hot 100, how their criteria have changed over time, how Billboard introduced genre charts, how disparities between parameters based on genre had racial implications, and how reworkings of these parameters led to misrepresentation of actual popularity and inequitable identity markers. Molanphy provides a clear evolution of the charts to reflect popularity more closely through Billboard's switch from analog to digital: SoundScan technology tracking physical sales, Broadcast Data Systems tracking radio plays, the tracking of the newly available digital sales, and, most crucially, counting streaming numbers from Spotify audio and YouTube video. With this context, Molanphy is able to illustrate how the popularity of OTR was therefore captured more thoroughly than it could have been at any time previously.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how Nas mobilized social media and gaming culture to heighten the reach and success of OTR, as well as how the notorious racist rescinding of its place on the Country Hot 100 boosted its popularity. The book culminates with a chapter that elucidates the frenzy of OTR and tracks its chart performance through 2019, contextualizing it within the broader pop culture: Black cowboy culture is a focus through the TikTok #Yeehaw challenge, the song becomes a cause célèbre when it is booted from the Country Hot 100, Justin Bieber endorses the song, exposé pieces on the Country Hot 100 are published, Nas performs in Atlanta and appears in TIME magazine, Billy Ray Cyrus features on a remix and the two perform together at venues including Coachella, the official music video is released and instantly goes viral, Nas releases his EP, he comes out in Pride Month, and he fights off other no. 1 spot contenders with remixes featuring viral stars Young Thug, Mason Ramsey, and RM of BTS. Throughout the book Molanphy skilfully crafts a sense of building up to cultural revolution: we are provided with a context of country which is rigid in its reinforcement of normative whiteness. As such, we root for Nas and his success. Nas manipulated the racist, homophobic, and appropriative structures in place not just to expand the box, but to break the box. When we arrive there in the final chapter, it is suitably satisfying.

There are a couple of things that Molanphy's book might have benefited from. For a book about a song, there is a distinct lack of musical analysis of it: Molanphy dissected the chart and the song's performance expertly but not the song itself. There is some analysis of aspects of country music, mostly historical, but no detailed analysis of OTR's musical characteristics. For example, while Molanphy makes the point that Cyrus's involvement on the song challenges the gatekeepers and those running the Country Hot 100 as Cyrus is such a mainstay of country, analysis of Cyrus's vocals and accompanying instrumentation would have made this point more convincing. Cyrus's vocal presence and musical stylings act to shield Nas from being othered, both as a Black man and as a gay man. Hansen expands on this “sonic styling” and how the different musical meaning derived from them is more racially complex and inherently queer: Cyrus's performance coded with white masculinity through his nasal voice, exaggerated southern drawl, lyrical markers of whiteness such as references to the “Marlboro man,” and the sparse accompaniment, consisting of a banjo sample (sonically white but historically not), which emphasizes his voice in the mix. This is juxtaposed with Nas's performance, coded with black masculinity as he sings with an accompanying bass and a trap-style drum pattern, which drops out when Cyrus starts singing again. The texture is denser and the drum pattern is prominent in the mix, this typifying “blackness for the ‘hostile ears’ of the mainstream.”Footnote ³ While Molanphy's arguments in the book are not necessarily dependent on musical analysis, acknowledgement of this complex musicality could have enhanced his overall discussion of chart performance.

Molanphy's book is a well-thought-out approach to understanding how conditions of the chart aligned in such a way that Nas's subversive OTR could manipulate the chart itself, country gatekeepers, and audiences, and break chart records and remain relevant, a true cultural watershed. Well supplemented with examples, readers can overlay their own experience of the song onto the map Molanphy creates, and critically reconsider what the charts really show us, who is empowered by them, and who is excluded.