Backlash after Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" removed from Billboard Hot Country chart

don’t you be a meanie.

some of this stuff isn't awful but he's a meme maker who happened to turn a meme into a hit song... i don't get the sense from this EP that he has much future in music per se, which is prob fine anyway

love "c7osure"

rip lil nash ex 12/2018–6/2019

Then, there’s the sloppy finale “C7osure (You Like),” which sounds like B.o.B. got hired to make a J.C. Penney commercial in 2010.

kudos for going for "jc penny commercial" over "overheard at h&m" i guess

where are all these funky jc penny commercials tho

1993 i think

i had never even heard of "chowder" but i'm going to continue believing LNX has written a love song to a sandwich

Part of its minor charm is that it sounds like an EP a regular person of above average taste and some talent would cut.

he seems like a pretty classical one hit wonder

EP is actually entirely tasteless in a way that also feels completely refreshing right now.

yep

The greatest thing about Lil Nas X was always that he clearly never overthinks his songs. This ep confirms that.

Only caught up with this a couple of days ago--I'm that disengaged. (Two kids danced to it at the school talent show.) As someone who found Big & Rich's cowboy song somewhat more horrifying than Sha Na Na, I'm surprised to say I like it. (Which doesn't mean I won't be sick of it soon.) As those two kids danced, pretty much the whole student body sang along, and then same thing yesterday when it got played a couple of times at our outdoor playday. I'm intrigued by their clear connection to the song...and kind of nice that not one of them has any awareness at all of all the back-and-forth such a song triggers.

I don't think I've heard the song yet! Maybe I'll ask my kids. I really hate trap.

"rodeo" sounds like a big hit tbh. like he's not gonna serve even soulja boy-esque longevity in music obviously but he's using his remaining minutes quite well no?

that and "c7osure" are the highlights for me. like most of the rest of the ep that one sounds a bit tossed off but i love the tentative-sounding, imprecise piano loop.

rest of the ep is not bad but i wouldn't call it good either. "f9mily" sounds cute when laid over an rt'd video of the opening to a disney channel/nickelodeon show but as an aging millennial that's not really my preferred mode of #engagement w/ music yet.

i don't understand what the various digits mean. oh actually he has dogs named 7 and 9 but idk why he chose those

EP is terrible, the sound of A&R & I don’t know how someone reads authorial intent of any kind into it

Will probably be fondly remembered just bc good will towards him is so high (see all the ppl giving the mediocre knockoff of the makonnen/peep song props or the posts itt) but ultimately just not good

*sighs and adds LNX to his list of musicians who are better at social media than they are at music*

(see all the ppl giving the mediocre knockoff of the makonnen/peep song props or the posts itt)

lol fair

i wonder what it would have been like if the current media landscape was around when vanilla ice came out

it would be a combination of thinkpieces about his appropriations of black and gay culture and affiliate linked consumer guides to his hair products of choice

Vanilla Ice an amazing example of someone who never recorded even one worthwhile track after (the b-side of) his first single

(guest spots on Bloodhound Gang's Boom and Betty Blowtorch's Size Queen notwithstanding)

deej otm, this is a too many cooks situation which is the opposite of old town road. but the people who cashed a good check meditating on the ~meaning~ of Billy Ray Cyrus on the remix will manage to find something to love

'cashed a good check'?

That “mediating on the meaning of Billy Ray Cyrus on the remix” dollar is a good dollar

To Lil Nas X’s benefit, it never mattered whether “Old Town Road” was good or bad. It’s so good it’s bad; it’s so bad it’s good. It’s a critical hall of mirrors from which there is no escape. Criticizing “Old Town Road” is like trying to fight the sun. From the start, the song was completely aware that it was essentially a meme. Everyone was in on the joke, and if you tried to criticize the joke, you were now the joke who was trying to ruin everyone’s fun. ... “Old Town Road” was a spectacle and everyone loved being a part of the ride.

haven’t heard the ep yet but i want to say that i disagree with this from the p4k review. Old town road is obviously a good song. not so bad it’s good or so good it’s bad; just good. i don’t know what it means for the song to be ‘aware it’s a meme’; it only became a meme because it is very good. i wasn’t ‘in on the joke’ and i don’t really think there is or was a ‘joke’

If I took you everywhere, then well, you wouldn't know how to walk
If I spoke on your behalf, then well, you wouldn't know how to talk

That's deep though!

you've missed the "ahma take you from this party/we might go and have some sex" lyric, which i believe is original to ovid

lnx has put out, at the least, some three or four quite enjoyable songs on an ep pumped out at record speed following his near unprecedented ascendency to being one of the best known and most popular young artists in the world not three months ago and he's done it without feeling the need to dip (much) into the easily accessible troughs of misogyny, self-pity, or tough guy bullshit. my money would've been on 7 being an unredeemable pile instead of extending his fifteen minutes with a clear follow up single. as i say, not bad.

i don't consider it patronizing to either him or the more haughtily discerning among you to suggest that complaining this kid's work lacks artistry or authorship is to bitch that the bear isn't riding the bicycle well.

a clear and satisfying distinction between a 'meme' and a 'hit' in pop music has yet to come into focus for me. virtually all pop songs are aspiring memes.

I haven’t listened to the EP but it sucks that he and the label didn’t just go all in on “country trap” and throw him in a room with Nashville songwriters and big name beatmakers

Like an album of “ft. Pistol Annies, prod. MikeWillMadeIt” would obviously have a shelflife of like 12 months, but what a great 12 months it would be

Otm

totally

Def a missed opp

I don't particularly like "Old Town Road" so I didn't expect much from the EP and... it's meh imo.
I agree that it would have been more fun to go all the way with the country/hiphop trend and I was a bit surprised by the 90s rock style of some songs.
My main issue with him in general is that he seems bright and nice but he's a really mediocre singer/rapper and has no charisma whatsoever.

LNX with Maren Morris + Musgraves over an "In Bloom" simulation would've killed.

Where's Bubba Sparxxx now that clearly we need him more than ever?

haven’t heard the ep yet but i want to say that i disagree with this from the p4k review. Old town road is obviously a good song. not so bad it’s good or so good it’s bad; just good. i don’t know what it means for the song to be ‘aware it’s a meme’; it only became a meme because it is very good. i wasn’t ‘in on the joke’ and i don’t really think there is or was a ‘joke’

― flopson, Sunday, June 23, 2019 9:51 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

??? its clearly a parody of country music from a guy who played a lot of red dead redemption i think its obvi that theres a joke element to it

that paragraph to me is simply describing the intense alienation that comes from a song you dislike becoming absurdly popular; I felt an even stronger dislike of "Fuck You" by Cee Lo which was also one of those songs that felt pretty intensely "popular" in both the charts & critically (& on ILX) in a way that felt "critic proof" (ie it was a success and lots of ppl liked it & its effective therefor it is good)

i "lost" the argument abt this song (that it was in essence a parody rap) but I cant imagine ppl looking back on this the way we look back on like, crystal waters or "cmon ride the train." the last line of his review captures it for me ... "you had to be there"

it's hard to divine his intentions. flopson otm about it being a good song anyway

does that matter? xpost

the fact that it isn't serious doesn't disqualify OTR from being a good or even great song

no one is complaining that it isn't 'serious.' i compared it to 'cmon ride the train'

does that matter? xpost

― recriminations from the nitpicking woke (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, June 24, 2019 11:05 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean... yes? what is this question

Unless I'm misreading you, why worry about posterity?

I dunno, posterity is a relatively good metric for quality.

yeah, when it's 2027, sure. But to speculate now on whether it will still get played/remembered like "Gypsy Woman" or "C'mon Ride the Train" is fruitless to me idk.

Also: some songs become such phenomena that liking or disliking them is irrelevant (e.g. "Macarena").

But I do understand the "intense alienation" of horrible songs becoming inescapable; we all do.

I like "Rodeo" as a sequel to "Old Town Road," but I wish Cardi would cut the swears for what is essentially children's music

Old Town Road went over huge at the bat mitzvah i went to this weekend, the kids were into it more than any other song. one woman at our table was asking loudly "why is he saying, going to take my horse to the old hotel, what's this song about?"