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For one thing, it’s not obvious what key it’s in. Even though it’s a simple loop, this progression has caused some music-theoretic controversy. Wikipedia cites a transcription that gives the chords as G♯7, B(add9), F♯sus4, E6. Like most current top forty songs, “Old Town Road” is based on a four-chord loop that repeats identically throughout. This is a slightly more conventional song structure, but it’s still minimal, even by mainstream pop standards. Then he and Lil Nas X duet on another chorus at the end, and someone adds a whistling melody on the outtro. The remix with Billy Ray Cyrus is a little longer, because Billy Ray does an additional verse after the second chorus. My guess is that YoungKio’s original track was less than two minutes long, and Lil Nas X simply followed its structure without altering it–my students do the same thing with type beats they find on YouTube and SoundCloud. A more conventional songwriter might have followed all that with a breakdown, followed by a few more choruses to stretch the track out to three minutes. The structure is minimalist to the extreme: four bar intro, chorus, verse, prechorus (“Can’t nobody tell me nothin'”), another verse, another prechorus, one last time through the chorus, and that’s it. Wikipedia informs me that it’s the fifth shortest number-one single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, and the shortest since 1965. One thing you notice immediately about the original version of “Old Town Road” is how short it is, just one minute and fifty-three seconds. It’s an elegantly simple instrumental, and an attractive one. He also added multiple layers of intricate hi-hat patterns pitching up and down against a straightforward clap backbeat. As is customary in trap, he used a tuned 808 kick drum sample to play the bassline. He sped the loop up a bit, thereby changing its key from G to G-sharp. YoungKio said in an interview that he heard this as a “rock-type” sample, not a country one. The melancholy guitar and banjo are sampled from Nine Inch Nails, which is not the most obvious source for a country vibe. Lil Nas X bought the beat for $30 from Kio’s BeatStars shop. There’s a lot going on here! Before we take a look at its broader cultural significance, then, let’s take a close look at the musical details of “Old Town Road.”Ī Dutch beatmaker named YoungKio produced the instrumental–you can hear his producer tag in the intro. The banjo suggests country, but as we’ll discuss below, that suggestion was unintended by the track’s producer.
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The beat sounds like hip-hop, but then, the beat of almost every slow or medium-tempo pop song sounds like hip-hop right now. It’s definitely not a rap song–Lil Nas X sings throughout, with a clear country twang. Like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” it sits entangled in a vast musical rhizome. “Old Town Road” defies genre categorization. It might also be the most interesting pop song of the 21st century so far. As of this writing, the biggest song in America is “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X.