Looking Back At The Top Hip-Hop Song Of 2019 On Genius
A little bit country, a little bit trap, a whole lot of weeks at No. 1.
In honor of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary year, we’re looking back at the top artists, songs, albums, and producers of “The Genius Era,” 2009 to the present.
Roughly two years into the Trump presidency, as racism, anti-LGBTQ sentiments, and raging culture wars threatened to divide the country as never before, a Black gay teenager released a country-trap hybrid that subverted traditional symbols of masculinity and blurred the lines between “rural” and “urban.” And guess what? Everyone loved it.
This song blew up on TikTok, then graduated to Top 40 radio, then—with a little help from Miley Cyrus’s dad, of all people—became the biggest pop hit of all time. Thinking back on those glorious 19 weeks it spent atop the Billboard Hot 100, it’s hard to not feel a little more hopeful about the future of America.
We’re talking, of course, about Lil Nas X’s triumphant “Old Town Road,” the sound of a floundering wannabe rapper-singer imagining himself as a classic Hollywood loner cowboy. When the Atlanta artist born Montero Lamar Hill wrote the song, he was a recent University of West Georgia dropout living with his sister and using a cell phone his father paid for. He’d spend most of his time promoting his music on the internet, and he had little to show for his efforts. It was a dark time.
“I had headaches, literally almost daily, I guess from depriving myself of sleep,” he told Time magazine. “And I was just being talked down to because I left school.”
Then in October 2018, Lil Nas X happened across a beat by a Dutch producer called YoungKio. It was built around a banjo-driven sample from “34 Ghosts IV,” a song from Nine Inch Nails’ largely instrumental 2008 albums Ghosts I-IV, and Lil Nas X liked what he heard. He purchased the beat for $30, played it over and over, and spent the next month composing lyrics that would soon become lodged in the brains of millions.
“It needed to be funny,” Lil Nas X later recalled on Twitter. “It needed to be catchy. It needed to be hip-hop. It needed to be short.”
Lil Nas X somehow checked all of these boxes and recorded the song at a local studio for $20 in early December 2018. He promptly posted the track, which clocked in at 1:53, on SoundCloud, and within weeks, it caught fire. “People say I paid influencers—but I didn’t even have money for a video,” Lil Nas X told Rolling Stone. “How am I gonna pay people?”
From there, things moved very quickly. Lil Nas X signed with Columbia and watched as “Old Town Road” hit the Billboard charts—emphasis on plural. The week dated March 19, 2019, “Old Town Road” pulled off a rare trifecta by debuting on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, the all-genre Hot 100, and the Hot Country Songs charts. A week later, Billboard removed the song from the country tally, stating that it “does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” This decision sparked heated debate about what role race plays in the classification of music. After all, here was a banjo-powered song lyrically loaded with cowboy signifiers. The first verse could almost be a Toby Keith song.
I got the horses in the back
Horse tack is attached
Hat is matte black
Got the boots that’s black to match
Lil Nas X works some hip-hop tropes into the second verse, where he goes from troubled drifter to certified baller. He’s dreaming of what success might be like and riffing on the trappings of celebrity culture. “The second verse is like the future,” Lil Nas X told Genius on an episode of Verified. “What do you see a lot in Hollywood? Adultery, you know, all that.” All the while, he keeps it country—notice it’s not a Lambo he’s driving.
Riding on a tractor
Lean all in my bladder
Cheated on my baby
You can go and ask her
Lil Nas X didn’t seem overly concerned with his ouster from the country charts. “Initially I was like, ‘I think I’m being discriminated against,”” he told NPR. “But then as I went on to think about it, I felt like it was more of a purist situation, like, ‘We want this to stay this way.’ And even though they have a lot of changes going on with country [music]—like a lot of pop country and even the [songs] with trap influence—maybe this was [them saying], ‘Hey, we let some stuff fly, but this was too far.’”
Next came Lil Nas X’s masterstroke. On April 5, he released an “Old Town Road” remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, the veteran country star best known for 1992’s “Achy Breaky Heart,” a fluke pop crossover that reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spawned a nationwide line-dancing craze not unlike the “yeehaw challenge” fad that accompanied “Old Town Road” on TikTok. Fortuitously, the rise of “Old Town Road” happened to coincide with the “Yeehaw Agenda,” a movement celebrating the seldom-discussed history of Black cowboys in America. The song also followed Young Thug’s 2017 album Beautiful Thugger Girls, an amalgam of country and trap that Lil Nas X has credited with birthing the subgenre.
Lil Nas X may not have chosen Cyrus due to his history with novelty hits—he claims he knew Billy Ray purely from his role on Miley’s Disney series Hannah Montana—but the collaboration worked on multiple levels. With his lyrical nods to buying brand-new guitars and living like the Marlboro Man, Billy Ray gave “Old Town Road” even more country cred and bizarro charm. Now the horses were off to the races.
“Old Town Road” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 13, 2019, and it didn’t relinquish the summit for a record-breaking 19 weeks, until August 24, when Billie Eilish claimed the top spot with “bad guy.” (The previous record, 16 weeks, was a tie between Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey’s “One Sweet Day” and Luis Fonzi’s “Despacito,” featuring Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber.) With sudden fame came increased scrutiny from the media, and even before “Old Town Road” hit No. 1, publications like Billboard and Hot New Hip-Hop did some digging and reported that Lil Nas X had once run a popular Nicki Minaj stan account on Twitter. Nas promptly denied that claim, telling NPR it was a “big misunderstanding,” but it turns out he was the Minaj stan, or Barb, behind the @nasmaraj account. And he had a legit reason for keeping that information private.
“I didn’t want people to know I was gay tbh,” Lil Nas X tweeted on June 16, the day he revealed his Nicki fandom, in response to a fan’s question about why he wasn’t open about being a Barb. Another fan responded, “Being a barb don’t make you gay,” to which Nas replied, “It don’t but people will assume if you had an entire fan page dedicated to nicki u are gay. and the rap/music industry ain’t exactly built or accepting of gay men yet.” The next day, Nicki tweeted at Nas and told him it was a “bit of a sting” when he initially denied being a Barb, but she congratulated him on finding the confidence to speak his truth.
“The generous queen, i love u,” Nas replied. “And i’m sorry i did that in a time where u were already getting so much bandwagon hate. i felt so bad, hoping u wouldn’t see my denial. i was just so afraid of people finding out about me and losing everything before i even got a chance.”
Two weeks later, Lil Nas X officially came out as gay on the final day of Pride Month. At this point, “Old Town Road” had already been the No. 1 song in America for more than two months, and the revelation about Lil Nas X’s sexuality did nothing to slow the momentum. A second remix, featuring Young Thug and country-pop phenom Mason Ramsey, arrived in late July, helping “Old Town Road” maintain its chart dominance just a little longer.
In September 2019, after “Old Town Road” had ended its historic streak, Lil Nas X told Gayle King for CBS News that he believed his coming out would help other young people do likewise, though he acknowledged there was “still a lot to be done” in terms promoting tolerance in America.
Lil Nas X would be more explicit about his sexuality on his second chart-topping single, 2021’s “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name),” with which he escaped Billy Ray Cyrus’s fate and became more than a one-hit wonder. Later in 2021, Lil Nas X notched a third No. 1 on the Hot 100 with “INDUSTRY BABY,” a collaboration with rapper Jack Harlow. These days, Lil Nas X is a genuine superstar who commands attention with both his music and expert, irreverent use of social media. He’s apparently working on finishing his second album, the vibe of which he says will be “happy escapism.” In other words, he’ll once again be giving America exactly what it needs.
1. “Old Town Road (Remix),” Lil Nas X
2. “Homicide,” Logic
3. “The Box,” Roddy Ricch
4. “Earfquake,” Tyler, The Creator
5. “Middle Child,” J. Cole
6. “Highest in the Room,” Travis Scott
7. “death bed (coffee for your head),” Powfu ft. beabadoobee
8. “Ransom,” Lil Tecca
9. “Dior,” Pop Smoke
10. “Lalala,” Y2K & bbno$
