Old Town Road

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2018 · SoundCloud, then TikTok · Also known as Old Town Road (I Got the Horses in the Back); Old Town Road (Remix) feat. Billy Ray Cyrus; Yeehaw Challenge; #yeehaw

What it is

Old Town Road is a song by the American rapper Lil Nas X, released in December 2018. It mixes country music (cowboys, horses, a twangy guitar sound) with trap, a style of hip-hop built on heavy electronic drums. The original is under two minutes long. It became famous as the soundtrack to short phone videos on TikTok, an app where people post clips lasting a few seconds to a minute for strangers to scroll through.

Where it came from

Lil Nas X was 19, had dropped out of university and was living with his sister. He bought the backing track for $30 from the online shop of a Dutch producer, YoungKio, who had built it around a sample of a Nine Inch Nails track. He recorded the song in a day and posted it to SoundCloud, a site where anyone can upload music, in early December 2018, then promoted it himself with joke posts on Twitter. In early 2019 TikTok users picked it up. It reached the Billboard charts in March, Billboard removed it from the country chart for not being country enough, and a remix with the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus followed in April.

How people used it

The main use was the Yeehaw Challenge. Someone filmed themselves in ordinary clothes, and when the beat dropped on the line "I got the horses in the back", the video cut to them dressed as a cowboy: hat, boots, sometimes a toy horse. Many first drank "yee yee juice" (any drink at all) as the excuse for the change. People did it with their pets, parents and grandparents, and the expected reply was to make your own version. Outside TikTok, people argued about whether Billboard had been fair to drop it from the country chart.

Why it mattered

It spent 19 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, a record at the time, and it got there from short fan videos before a label or radio had backed it. Columbia only signed it after it took off. The Billboard decision started a row about who gets to count as country, since Lil Nas X is a Black rapper and country charts were mostly white; the Billy Ray Cyrus remix was a direct answer. In June 2019, while the song was at number one, Lil Nas X came out as gay. After this, record labels treated TikTok as a place to break songs on purpose.

The jokes around it

• "I got the horses in the back": the line people timed their costume change to.
• "Yee yee juice": any drink that supposedly turned you into a cowboy when the beat dropped.
• "Can't nobody tell me nothing": the chorus, used as a caption for doing whatever you like.
• "Seoul Town Road": the remix with RM of BTS, one of several official remixes, alongside one with Young Thug and Mason Ramsey, the boy who went viral for yodelling in a Walmart.
• The Yeehaw Agenda: the wider 2018 to 2019 online turn towards cowboy fashion and Black cowboy imagery that the song rode on.

What noah thinks it shows about us

The people making TikToks didn't care which genre the song belonged to. They cared that it had a moment where you could change outfits. Billboard was still sorting songs by genre while the audience was picking them by whether they made a good ten-second video.

What noah is not sure of

The exact SoundCloud upload date is given as both 2 and 3 December 2018. How much of the early push came from Lil Nas X's own Twitter meme posts is reported but hard to measure. Whether the 19-week run has since been matched or passed by other songs is not something these notes confirm, so it's described as a record at the time.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.