Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ sounds like country’s future. So why has Nashville snubbed it?

The spirit of Johnny Cash — and of country music itself — is as thick as the pollen at the Cash Cabin in Hendersonville, Tenn. Born from something called the “Yee Haw Challenge” on the video-sharing app TikTok, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” has gone from viral meme to No. “It’s not surprising that ‘Old Town Road’ is where it is on the country chart,” says one radio industry executive who asked to remain anonymous as they are not authorized to speak on the subject. “Old Town Road” has given Cyrus an unexpected publicity boost, but it’s also validated a hunch Loba’s had for a while: that there’s an audience for an explicit mix of country and trap music. “I imagine that both the success of ‘Old Town Road’ and the controversy it caused are reframing the dialogue,” says Charles Hughes, author of “Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South.” “This is one of those moments that reminds the country industry that — despite its best efforts to act like race isn’t a problem or has been solved in the Darius Rucker/Kane Brown era — there are still boundaries left to be challenged and hopefully dissolved.” At the Stagecoach Festival on April 28 in Indio, Calif., country fans clearly saw few boundaries, singing along with every word when Cyrus, top DJ Diplo and Lil Nas X, dripping in gold fringe, took the stage to play the “Old Town Road” remix live for the first time.