A Hero For Our Time
"You know it's funny when it rains it pours, they got money for war, but can't feed the poor" - Tupac Shakur (1993)
"Hey Panini, don't you be a meanie" - Lil Nas X (2019)
A lone guitar strums softly as the duo takes the stage. They walk through a pair of brown batwing saloon doors solemnly but confidently, aware of the eyes of the audience in front of them and at home. One of the two is a familiar face to the average American; Billy Ray Cyrus is as famous for his hit 1992 song "Achy Breaky Heart" as he is for his 2000s television career alongside his superstar daughter Miley Cyrus. The man next to him, little more than a teenager, is less recognizable but far more visually strikingāhe sports a black cowboy hat, a black and yellow fringed leather Western jacket with stars on each sleeve, and nothing underneath but his bare chest. Emblazoned in gothic signature on his back is his name, a name that hangs on the lips of every American teenager, a name that has rattled every pop culture institution from Billboard to Rolling Stone, a name that a year ago was unknown to anyone, including the artist himself: Lil Nas X. He turns to the crowd and smiles as the 808 drums drop, the crowd cheers, and his smash song "Old Town Road" begins.
I sit at home watching the entire performance, an incredulous witness to a living, breathing, anomaly. In what world could Iāor anyone else in Americaāhave foreseen a young, queer, black cowboy becoming the biggest pop star of the year? Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" has become a musical sensation, breaking a dizzying amount of records that seem to multiply each week: it was streamed 143 million times in the US in a single week and beat out Mariah Carey to become the longest charting #1 song in Billboard's Hot 100 history. How did it happen? And what does it mean?
The "how" is easy to answerāLil Nas X explained it himself. In an interview for Rap Genius he said, "I found the beat on Youtube...I started pushing it on my Twitter account through memes. I was pushing it on my account for I guess a few months until it finally picked up on TikTok. Then, I didnāt have to do much after that because itās been skyrocketing ever since to this day." This level of virality, a literal manifestation of overnight success, is typical of our current age and reflective of the sharp turn hip hop has taken in recent years. Hip hop is a craft, and, like any craft, it is typically honed over time through the building of core skills such as lyrical ability, musical intuition, and performance presence. All of this is becoming lost in the rush of experimental pop rap. In the mold of rappers like Lil Nas X, high schoolers across the nation, more interested in rapping for Instagram likes during their lunch breaks than in making enduring music, are becoming the face of the hip hop world. Last January, a 16-year-old Memphis high school student who goes by the name NLE Choppa posted a video of him and his friends goofing off and dancing to an unfinished song he had freestyled only hours earlier; within a week he had garnered hundreds of thousands of views and an $8 million record deal. There is no hard-earned rise to the top anymoreāthereās just quicksilver success.
Though I am an active consumer of contemporary experimental rap, I am still a hip-hop purist; I grew up on poets-turned-rappers like Lauryn Hill and Tupac Shakur. They were, and still are, my golden standard of hip-hop: masters of flow and cadence, weavers of universal narratives, truth-tellers in the midst of the unenlightened. Lil Nas X, on the other hand, is a Twitter meme celebrity known to rhyme "tractor" and "bladder," "boobies" and "Gucci," all in the same verse.
This trend of superficiality is especially frustrating in the context of rapās recent mainstream dominance. In 2018, hip hop officially passed rock as the most popular genre of music in America. The rise of Lil Nas X is symptomatic of this takeoverānow that hip-hop has become the commercial mainstream, itās only a matter of time before more commercial artists like Lil Nas X emerge and corrupt the genre, writing songs about nothing, crafting personas ready-made for controversy and virality rather than substance and admirable values.
I intentionally put off listening to Lil Nas Xās latest EP because I didnāt want to dignify it as real music. This resistance was complicated by my realization that I was alone in this view. Many of my favorite hip-hop artists * loved * his song āOld Town Roadā; Grammy award-winning artist Chance the Rapper tweeted out his support of "Old Town Road" upon its release, and even Jay-Z, arguably the greatest rapper of all time, was recently seen spending time with the young rapper on Halloween.
After class one afternoon, I sat on my bed to listen to the song āOld Town Roadā in earnest for the first time. I popped my headphones on and pressed play. As expected, the song began with a mix of 808 drums and banjo strums, a novel but not particularly innovative idea. Lil Nas Xās voice floated in above the fray:
"I got the horses in the back/Horse tack is attached/Hat is matte black/Got the boots thatās black to match"
I laughed slightly at the absurd imageāthe idea of a black cowboy stylish enough to ensure his clothing is matted at all was hilarious. I reluctantly nodded my head in time with the bass until my mind zoned in on the pre-chorus:
āCanāt nobody tell me nothin/You canāt tell me nothin/Canāt nobody tell me nothin/You canāt tell me nothinā¦ā
A small smile spread across my face as I sensed the underlying sentiment of rebellion. The spirit of defiance is common in hip hop, but usually in the face of systematic oppression and the threat of violence, not in defense of riding a horse over a Porsche or preferring to buy a cowboy hat from the luxury brand Gucci. True, it wasnāt political but it was funny, absurdist, and an admittedly pleasing sonic escape. As the song faded away, I added it my online music library.