Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” has burrowed itself into the consciousness of an entire nation, managing to stay at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for 11 weeks and elbowing out Elmo on the elementary-school popularity index. It’s part luck, part genius, part of the YeeHaw agenda, a song so unstoppable, it has actually shifted the status quo of country music and is currently one of the biggest singles—and memes—of all time. Even if you pass on bootcut jeans, the meme has the same contagious effect.
Before he became the newly crowned prince of country, Lil Nas X was just another guy looking for fame by quietly throwing his music onto SoundCloud. When it happened, it happened fast: A $30 YouTube beat, a hypnotic Nine Inch Nails sample, a faux-twangy accent, and “Old Town Road” went from a viral moment on TikTok to the center of a controversy about whether or not the song could be classified as country music. (It was initially removed from the Billboard country chart because it did not “embrace enough elements of today’s country music.”) One irresistible, if slightly harrowing Billy Ray Cyrus remix later, and Lil Nas X was back—not just on the country charts, but on the Hot 100 with the biggest song in the U.S.
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. The fact that Lil Nas X’s vocals were easily imitable or that the lyrics were packed with country buzzwords gleaned from “Red Dead Redemption 2” or that the drums could be programmed by your little cousin who heard Astroworld one time was irrelevant. “Old Town Road” was a spectacle and everyone loved being a part of the ride.
On Lil Nas X’s debut 7—a 19-minute EP bookended with the Billy Ray Cyrus remix and the original version of “Old Town Road”—he opens himself up to the criticism that “Old Town Road” bypassed. Each new song on 7 is an attempt at stumbling into another lighthearted hit. We don’t learn a single thing about Lil Nas X on 7 other than he might have actually been born in a Reddit test tube in 2018. His collaborations with the production duo Take A Daytrip are soulless. On “Panini,” Lil Nas X has the droll personality of a Kawhi Leonard interview when stripped of all the gimmicks. So it makes sense that “Rodeo,” his second track with Take A Daytrip, is a desperate return to the bulletproof cowboy persona. “Rodeo” hits all the beats of 2018’s “Mo Bamba”—also produced by Take A Daytrip—and feels like Lil Nas X just praying that the “Old Town Road” goodwill has enough legs to latch onto this single. It probably does.
That hit-seeking dart game continues on with “F9mily (You and Me),” a cheap rock song made to be performed at summer camp talent shows. In an Instagram snippet for the song, Lil Nas X gets out in front of the potential criticism of this track, calling it “Disney soundtrack confirmed” and “Travis Barker on the beat.” Both are perfect descriptions, neither is positive. While listening to his attempt at SoundCloud alt-rock on “Bring U Down,” I can picture Lil Nas X thinking up this song while sitting at a big corner-office desk at Columbia Records.
For the entirety of 7, it’s unclear if Lil Nas X actually likes music. He uses a lazy, out-of-tune melody on the reflective “Kick It,” a song that looks back on the past six months, which is apparently the only thing he has anything to say about. 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. The EP ends up being a set of nothingness, like watching a Kylie Jenner vlog, content made for the sake of justifying its existence.
Eventually, one of these songs on 7 will draft behind the still-overwhelming charm of “Old Town Road” and find some success of its own, and Lil Nas X will be there online, with his savvy internet wit, ready to saddle up and burn another meme to the ground. What he lacks in musicality he makes up for in Instagram followers, boots he can strap on whenever he needs to remind people that he’s the great unifier, the one who tore down the walls of a genre. When that’s all over, which it will be, what’s left will be “Old Town Road,” an all-time hall-of-fame pop hit that will one day be explained with an “I guess you had to be there.”
