The Nashville establishment has finally embraced Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road.' Now he's leaving country music behind on his debut EP.
Six months after he posted the song on the internet, three months after Billboard said it wasn’t a country song and two months after it went to No. 1 on the Hot 100 — where it’s stayed put ever since, fending off would-be chart-toppers from superstars like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran — Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” has finally been embraced by the Nashville establishment.
The overdue love comes just as Lil Nas X is preparing for Friday’s release of “7,” the major-label debut EP that will determine whether his left-field country-trap hit marks the beginning of a long career in music or the end of a very short one. But here’s a twist worthy of the delightfully unpredictable ride he’s been on so far: With Nashville on his side at last, Lil Nas X has up and left country music behind.
So it makes perfect sense that he’d go searching for new boundaries to bust. “Y’all think they gone let me on the rock charts?”along with a video of himself dancing to his song “Bring U Down” — a neat distillation of the complicated questions his success has raised about race, heritage and cultural ownership. “7” channels some of that renegade energy, as on “Kick It,” where he references the Billboard incident in the scoffing tone of someone telling his co-workers about a boss’ reprimand.
These songs, simply put, are great: vivid, funny, full of feeling and supremely catchy, even if they don’t quite offer a clear picture of who Lil Nas X is offstage or off-screen. Like “Old Town Road,” they’re short — around two minutes apiece. But within those tight structures he’s flexing new muscles. In “Panini” he sings in a weathered rock-dude whine over a throbbing trap beat; the credits acknowledge the song’s interpolation of Kurt Cobain’s vocal melody from Nirvana’s “In Bloom.
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