Can't nobody tell me nothin’: ‘Old Town Road’, resisting musical norms, and queer remix reproduction

Abstract

Abstract‘Old Town Road’, a genre-defying song fuelled by proliferating remixes, is a key site to unravel the position of remixes in contemporary popular music and culture. In this article, I examine mainstream press discourse about ‘Old Town Road’, finding that Lil Nas X's use of remixes to boost the song's popularity was generally seen as smart, while the racial politics of genre were contested but still powerful. Ultimately, the popular conversation around the song showed a sense that one key possibility of remixes is to resist the ways that genres normatively operate as straight lines of descent from musical forebears, instead engaging in a queer kind of reproduction, a joyful excess of proliferating versions.