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Home , Alive in America, Flaws and All, For Real, Kenny Loggins, Lil Nas X, Lisa Stansfield

always stealing it. everybody is freedom. complete artistic been the sound of in bondage, has black music, forged or centuries, ￿ hoto illustration by ByWesley Morris ￿ he 1619 he 60 ￿ ￿ roject o wonder ichael ￿ aul ￿ ritto

Credit by Name Surname ugust 18, 2019

61 who’s an incurable degrees of blackness in the choir-loft ing without violating it? I could hear saunter-their do could which And border? racial the to up saunter investigation.artistswould Which I tasted in that absurdity was black. what because but absurd, is Rock Yacht category a as because not — laugh to had I known warmth. a moment, into Baptist rawness, into tian yearning that would reach, for a Chris- earnest an taste:practically couldn’t give language to but could I that quality familiar a toward ed gravitat-sound the accrued, of dozens and passed hours the as But white. all were they tions, excep- two With dudes. all were yacht the aboard passengers the exception, single a With relax.’’ and chair deck a up pull Dockers, your on ‘‘put to exhortation an by Pandora’sdefi accompanied nition, is rock’’ soft ’80s ’70s/early late of sounds breezy the for name cheek ‘‘Atongue-in- Rock. Yacht called station a found he dinner, making were we while Saturday one started putting each track under ’ve got a friend andora guy, delivers the lyrics in a desperate desperate a in lyrics the delivers keep the yacht rocking. But Loggins and has the requisite smoothness to the line. ‘‘This Is It’’ was a hit in 1979 arrivedtookandthingsfar beyond of Little River ’s ‘‘Reminiscing.’’ Long’’toy-boattheand wistfulness ‘‘HowAce’sof miserymalt-liquor of ’s ‘‘Do It Again’’; in the rubber-bandsoul Believes’’;the in Michael McDonald on ‘‘What a Fool Brothers-era Doobie of certitude You have to hand it to her. boy. to Go, white boy. it Go. hand to have You son inhabits blackness with gusto.per- white a anytime alwaysfelt It’s:I’ve theconfl ation ofpride and chagrin embarrassment and exhilaration. It’s day,Ilaughed out of ba lement and himself out even more. he’s baring it all yet begging to wring if chorus.assoundsHe theduring theverses,snarling tearyin — ing of his yearn- you over intensity is the doesn’t wakethe baby. Whatbowls mined to make the kind of love that deter- someone like whisper, stage Playing black-music detective that Then ’s ‘‘This Is It’’ But it’s also: also: it’s But It’s: It’s: Go, white ￿ he 1619 he Here 62 ￿ elaborate tangle almost from the the from almost tangle elaborate music has been fated to thrive in an , alive deeply it matters to the music ofblackest parties, beingthen it’s proof of how Wait’’ remains the whitest jam at the Shooz’sreasonNu‘‘ICan’ttheit’s seeminglyPlatt;ifas Ben green as a of angst angelic the in does canitsurface unexpectedlyas itas vulnerabilities of ; if animate the swagger in the sardonic toMe’’ into agospel hymn; if it can chorus of ’s ‘‘You Belong packof Newports; if it can turn the like— she knows her wayaround a tion,’’‘‘Portuguese Love,’’ Biz,’’‘‘Revolu- ‘‘Lovergirl’’ ‘‘Square — everything nem; if it can make Teena MarieEmi- of singout origami psychotic this literarinessout of Steely Dan and all blacknesscan draw all of this ornate again. go we on . live-in-concert and stank of , , visceral DMX’s The bark. scorched-earth siren. police emotional Davis’strumpeting.LaBelle’sPatti Miles of heat dusky The zooms. ard’s woosknuckledand keyboard Rich- Little — instrument an of bre arise from the particular hue and tim- ‘‘noise,’’called that sounds unique copationthisandrougher element with call and response, layers of syn- completelydi erent story. Itbrims largelyungrained. Black musica is wood Mac, something choral, ‘‘pure,’’ Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleet- the of harmonies singable hugely aretheingredients for sometheof breof voice andinstrument: These tim- clean harmony, matic-chord Chro- songs. pop American of lots for basis overarching the is music with dismaying ranges of consent. interracial collaboration conducted of manner all of it, called ago long ‘‘miscegenation’’tion’’theyand as ‘‘amalgama-of centuries opposite: the of years400 foradvertisement an is music country’s This tain? main- to struggles separation that of many are at least both. The purity aspects characterwhen ‘‘black’’ in ‘‘white’’either be or can forms art that idea the separateness, racial of myth a investmentinpolitical a made have Americans beginning. roject It’s proof, too, that American American that too, proof, It’s ‘ht,’ ‘‘Western,’’ ‘‘classical’’‘‘White,’’ The problem isrich. If to America. ing, of play, of exhaustion, of hope. were denied literacy), music born of feel- people enslaved (because music — music no one ‘‘composed’’ on a plantation: through art, through waythatwould havepossible been onlythe in completelyfree free,be by which singers and musicians can is the architecture to create a means Particulartoblack Americanmusic creates. noise that elements ating itself and not the distorting or devi- the of composition the into improvisation, a listener is seduced aesthetic worldsong.’’a of Without sionto the highest place withinthe creativity/expres-individual of ing ‘‘The rais- music: of we as black think whatin elements crucial most the of one improvisationis that email an in explainedCollege, Wheaton at teaches who musician a Case, fundamental, too. My friend Delvyn ‘‘appropriation’’ can approximate. approximate. can ‘‘appropriation’’ like word catchall a than more is we’ve been dealing with ever since parody.’’ and theft byWhat only if society, has always been American integrated, of state the whatever entertainment, ‘‘American 1920s, the in culture popular of history ‘‘TerribleHonesty,’’in writes her Douglas Ann historian the 1830s, of some in octane the tripling back, all it ed the black . wrest- wailed and jived jumped, Beatles Winwood and the Janis and Joplin Steve and Plant Jagger and lascivious winks at whiteness. Mick roll with uproarious guitar ri s and ness. sculpted rock ’n’ believed he’d been called by black- he that Presley Elvis bewitched so by it. The blues rockin’ backwoods who can withstand being possessed where it settles, selective only about about indiscriminate racially host, You’re catching the spirit. se. per notes, of arrangement the You’re errand. fool’s capturing not a like it, about think you if seems, it rerecord to attempt The arise. moments those which from ration or sampling but the mood or inspi- sandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats onlyjustnot glis- — , once happen really an can that experience sound, of miracle a is music But there’s something even more And the spirit travels from host to black in hearingyou’reWhat their songs. Since the the Since songs.

Opening pages: Source photograph of Beyoncé: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images. Holiday: Paul Hoeffler/Redferns, via Getty Images. Turner: Gai Terrell/Redferns, via Getty Images. Richards: Chris Walter/WireImage, via Getty Images. Lamar: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images. Above left: From The Public Library. Above right: Shutterstock. ￿ugust 18, 2019

The blackface performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice (T. D. Rice), who Sheet music of ‘‘Jim Crow Jubilee: A Collection of Negro Melodies,’’ pioneered the ‘‘Jim Crow’’ character, in a portrait from the mid-1800s. published in 1847.

The truth is more bounteous and in, underscoring that black people Blackness was on the move before black man while grooming more spiritual than that, more con- have often been rendered unnec- my ancestors were legally free to a horse on the property of a white fused. That confusion is the DNA of essary to attempt blackness. Take be. It was on the move before my man whose last name was Crow. the American sound. Billboard’s Top 10 songs of 2013: ancestors even knew what they On went the light bulb. Rice took It’s in the wink-wink costume It’s mostly nonblack artists strongly had. It was on the move because in the tune and the movements but of ’s ‘‘’’ identifi ed with black music, for real white people were moving it. And failed, it seems, to take down the old from 1999, an whose kicky and for kicks: , Miley the white person most frequently man’s name. So in his song based nonsense deprecations circle back Cyrus, , Mack- identifi ed as its prime mover is on the horse groomer, he renamed to the popular culture of 150 years lemore and Ryan Lewis, the dude Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New him: ‘‘Weel about and turn about jus earlier. It’s in the dead-serious, who made ‘‘The Harlem Shake.’’ Yorker who performed as T. D. so/Ebery time I weel about, I jump nostalgic dance-floor schmaltz Sometimes all the inexorable Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted Jim Crow.’’ And just like that, Rice of . It’s in what we mixing leaves me longing for some- after as ‘‘Daddy’’ Rice, ‘‘the negro had invented the fellow who would once called ‘‘-eyed soul,’’ a thing with roots that no one can rip par excellence.’’ Rice was a min- become the mascot for two centu- term I’ve never known what to do all the way out. This is to say that strel, which by the 1830s, when ries of legalized racism. with, because its most convinc- when we’re talking about black his stardom was at its most reful- That night, Rice made himself up ing practitioners — the Bee-Gees, music, we’re talking about horns, gent, meant he painted his face to look like the old black man — or Michael McDonald, Hall & Oates, drums, keyboards and guitars doing with burned cork to approximate something like him, because Rice’s Simply Red, , Tay- the unthinkable together. We’re also those of the enslaved black people get-up most likely concocted skin lor Dayne, Stansfi eld, talking about what the borrowers he was imitating. blacker than any actual black per- — never winked at black people, and collaborators don’t want to or In 1830, Rice was a nobody actor son’s and a gibberish dialect meant so black people rarely batted an can’t lift — centuries of weight, of in his early 20s, touring with a to imply black speech. Rice had eyelash. Flaws and all, these are atrocity we’ve never su ciently theater company in Cincinnati (or turned the old man’s melody and homeowners as opposed to rent- worked through, the blackness you Louisville; historians don’t know for hobbled movements into a song- ers. No matter what, though, a know is beyond theft because it’s sure), when, the story goes, he saw and-dance routine that no white kind of gentrifi cation tends to set too real, too rich, too heavy to steal. a decrepit, possibly disfi gured old audience had ever experienced 63 ￿ he 1619 ￿roject

Ma Rainey, an early blues singer who performed in black minstrel shows, with her band. before. What they saw caused a taking over concert halls, doing — that would lay the groundwork the borderline-mythical Old Corn permanent sensation. He report- wildly clamored-for residencies in for American popular music, from Meal, who started as a street ven- edly won 20 encores. , New York and . bluegrass to . Some of dor and wound up the fi rst black Rice repeated the act again, A blackface minstrel would sing, these instruments had come from man to perform, as himself, on a night after night, for audiences dance, play music, give speeches Africa; on a plantation, the banjo’s white New Orleans stage. His stu so profoundly rocked that he was and cut up for white audiences, body would have been a desiccated was copied by George Nichols, who frequently mobbed during perfor- almost exclusively in the North, gourd. In ‘‘Doo-Dah!’’ his book on took up blackface after a start in mances. Across the Ohio River, not at least initially. Blackface was Foster’s work and life, Ken Emer- plain-old clowning. Yet as often as an arduous distance from all that used for mock operas and politi- son writes that the fi ddle and banjo not, blackface minstrelsy tethered adulation, was Boone County, Ky., cal monologues (they called them were paired for the melody, while black people and black life to white whose population would have been stump speeches), skits, gender par- the bones ‘‘chattered’’ and the tam- musical structures, like the polka, largely enslaved Africans. As they odies and dances. Before the min- bourine ‘‘thumped and jingled a beat which was having a moment in were being worked, sometimes strel show gave it a reliable , that is still heard ’round the world.’’ 1848. The mixing was already well to death, white people, desperate blackface was the entertainment But the sounds made with these underway: Europe plus slavery plus with anticipation, were paying to between acts of conventional plays. instruments could be only imagined the circus, times harmony, comedy see them depicted at play. Its stars were the Elvis, , as black, because the fi rst wave of and drama, equals Americana. Other performers came and con- the ’NSync of the 19th century. The minstrels were Northerners who’d And the muses for so many of the quered, particularly the Virginia performers were beloved and so, never been meaningfully South. songs were enslaved Americans, Minstrels, who exploded in 1843, especially, were their songs. They played Irish melodies and people the had never burned brightly then burned out During minstrelsy’s heyday, white used Western choral harmonies, met, whose enslavement they rare- after only months. In their wake, songwriters like Stephen Foster not the proto-gospel call-and-re- ly opposed and instead sentimen- P. T. Barnum made a habit of book- wrote the tunes that minstrels sang, sponse music that would make talized. Foster’s minstrel-show sta- ing other troupes for his American tunes we continue to sing. Edwin life on a plantation that much ple ‘‘Old Uncle Ned,’’ for instance, Museum; when he was short on Pearce Christy’s group the Christy more bearable. Black artists were warmly if disrespectfully eulogizes performers, he blacked up himself. Minstrels formed a band — banjo, on the scene, like the pioneer the enslaved the way you might a By the 1840s, minstrel acts were fi ddle, bone castanets, tambourine bandleader Frank Johnson and salaried worker or an uncle: 64 Left: Redferns via Getty Images. Right: Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. contempt could become fantasy. fantasy. become could contempt jubilation, become could fear tial existen- which upon stage a ism rac- lent also it But polemics. and ribaldry skill, of entertainment an the country this period during was into slavery’s fun house. escape an Itbondage?wastheir of dangerous lustwith enamoredand docile, stupid, as humans other of presentation the upon predicated escape a reckoning. But a good time to urge the(generously) asbe read minstrelsy’scouldpopularity haps War.Civil the Per-of end the until form art the U.T.C.s,over as took slavery.known adaptations, These BeecherStowe’sriet novel,against Har- to faithful remaining simply in and, for arguing stage, the for adapted minstrels that landmark ‘‘UncleTom's Cabin,’’ polarizing a of 1852, inpublication, the ed with Lincoln. of Abraham assassination the and Ferry Harpers at rection botched instigation of a black insur- Brown’s John Douglass, Frederick of ascent rhetorical ferocious the Reconstruction, War Civil and the included that years Negroes; and islatively ambivalent about slavery leg- and violently most its as was countrythe years1870s, when the to 1840s the from stretched peak Day.’’ He’s Minstrelsy’s not wrong. Thanksgiving and July of Fourth the as certainly colonizations as conquests, and emigrations, its all in American ‘‘the follows that force a character,’’ national the of side popular more the of sions expres- ‘‘true the were this like songs assessment; 1850 Taylor’s Bayard critic ‘‘air,’’white as the in essential as was Ned Uncle dead) for poor old (enslaved, soon-to-be- What blackface minstrelsy gaveminstrelsy blackface What Minstrelsy’s ascent also coincid- Such an aan Such ectionate Niggas go. poor Old Ned — Niggas go, poor Old Ned — bow: and de hoe, He’s gone whar de good good de whar gone He’s for work hard more No good de whar gone He’s for work hard more No fi de de and up ddle Hang shubble de down lay Den

showcase showcase Tina Turner performing at a festival in Lake Amador, Calif., on Oct. 4, 1969. 4, Oct. on Calif., Lake Amador, in festival a at TurnerTina performing country’s cultural juggernaut, money juggernaut, Negroes pay would who cultural country’s the was blackface If performer? did where But swung from a tree. it as body his or back lashed his ignore theycould as surely as Ned overworkedUnclefor weep could Theylust. as repulsion as adoration, contempt desire, as loathing experience could They human. more feel audiences let white bent dehumanizing its Paradoxically, this leave a black black a leave this ￿ ugust 18,2019 65 row presumptions. As Thomas Thomas As presumptions. row nar-consumer’s a white on blight would outrageous an him rendered have black actually being his And black. genuinely was course, was Diamond (and Diamond outdo could time, the at reported was it who, boy, a found Barnum hall, dance City New a In York minstrel. star white for replacement John his Diamond, pinch. Once, P. T. Barnum needed a a in only was it hired, were they When themselves? as perform to good ). The boy, of of boy, The ). as ‘the champion nigger-dancer of nigger-dancer champion as ‘the out him brought and locks curled tight his over wig woolly a on put vermilion, lips thick his painted cork, burned of blacking new a overit with rubbed and face ger’s’ So Barnum ‘‘greased the little ‘nig- look at the of dancing a real negro.’’ the fashion, insult of being asked to energetic very a in resented, have audience in America that would not Life,’’American ‘‘There an was not ‘‘Forty 1864 compendium, Years of his in write would Nichols Low ￿ he 1619 ￿roject the world.’ ’’ This child might have There was, perhaps, not a white for it’s as glamorous a blackness What a panicked clairvoyant! been William Henry Lane, whose audience in America, particularly as this country has ever mass-pro- The fear of black culture — or was Juba. And, as Juba, in the South, that would not have duced and devoured. ‘‘black culture’’ — was more than a Lane was persuasive enough that resented, in a very energetic fash- The proliferation of black music fear of black people themselves. It Barnum could pass him o as a ion, the insult of being asked to across the planet — the prolifera- was an anxiety over white obsoles- white person in blackface. He look at the majestic singing of a tion, in so many senses, of being cence. Kennard’s anxiety over black ceased being a real black boy in real Negro. black — constitutes a magnifi cent infl uence sounds as ambivalent as order to become Barnum’s min- The modern conundrum of the joke on American racism. It also ’s, when, all the way from her strel Pinocchio. black performer’s seeming respect- confi rms the attraction that some- native New Zealand, she tsk-ed rap After the Civil War, black per- able, among black people, began, in one like Rice had to that black man culture’s extravagance on ‘‘Royals,’’ formers had taken up minstrelsy, too, part, as a problem of white black- grooming the horse. But some- her hit from 2013, while recogniz- corking themselves, for both white face minstrels’ disrespectful black- thing about that desire warps and ing, both in the song’s hip-hop pro- and black audiences — with a straight ness. Frederick Douglass wrote that perverts its source, lampoons and duction and its appetite for a partic- face or a wink, depending on who they were ‘‘the fi lthy scum of white cheapens it even in adoration. Lov- ular sort of blackness, that maybe was looking. Black troupes invented society.’’ It’s that scum that’s given ing black culture has never meant she’s too far gone: important new dances with blue-rib- us pause over everybody from Bert loving black people, too. Loving bon names (the buck-and-wing, the Williams and Bill ‘‘Bojangles’’ Robin- black culture risks loving the life Every song’s like gold teeth, Virginia essence, the stop-time). But son to Flavor Flav and . Is out of it. Grey Goose, trippin’ in the these were unhappy innovations. their blackness an act? Is the act under And yet doesn’t that attraction bathroom Custom obligated black performers white control? Just this year, Harold make sense? This is the music of a Bloodstains, ball gowns, to fulfi ll an audience’s expectations, E. Doley Jr., an a luent black Repub- people who have survived, who not trashin’ the hotel room expectations that white performers lican in his 70s, was quoted in The only won't stop but also can’t be We don’t care, we’re driving had established. A black minstrel was Times lamenting West and his align- stopped. Music by a people whose Cadillacs in our dreams impersonating the impersonation of ment with as a ‘‘bad major innovations — , funk, hip- But everybody’s like Cristal, himself. Think, for a moment, about and embarrassing minstrel show’’ hop — have been about progress, Maybach, diamonds on your the talent required to pull that o . that ‘‘served to only drive black peo- about the future, about getting as timepiece According to Henry T. Sampson’s ple away from the G.O.P.’’ far away from nostalgia as time will Jet planes, islands, tigers on book, ‘‘Blacks in Blackface,’’ there But it’s from that scum that a allow, music that’s thought deeply a gold leash were no sets or e ects, so the black robust, post-minstrel black Ameri- about the allure of outer space and We don’t care, we aren’t blackface minstrel show was ‘‘a can theater sprung as a new, black robotics, music whose promise and caught up in your love a air developer of ability because the art- audience hungered for actual, possibility, whose rawness, humor ist was placed on his own.’’ How’s uncorked black people. Without that and carnality call out to everybody Beneath Kennard’s warnings that for being twice as good? Yet scum, I’m not sure we get an event — to other black people, to kids in must have lurked an awareness that no-frills excellence could cur- as shatteringly epochal as the reign working class England and mid- that his white brethren had already dle into an entirely other, utterly of Motown Records. Motown was dle-class Indonesia. If freedom's fallen under this spell of blackness, degrading double consciousness, a full-scale integration of Western, ringing, who on Earth wouldn't also that nothing would stop its spread to one that predates, predicts and prob- classical orchestral ideas (strings, want to rock the bell? teenage girls in 21st-century Auck- ably informs W. E. B. DuBois’s more horns, woodwinds) with the instincts land, that the men who ‘‘infest our self-consciously dignifi ed rendering. of both the black church (rhythm In 1845, J. K. Kennard, a critic for promenades and our concert halls American popular culture was sections, gospel harmonies, hand the newspaper The Knickerbocker, like a colony of beetles’’ (as a contem- doomed to cycles not only of claps) and juke joint Saturday nights hyperventilated about the black- porary of Kennard’s put it) weren’t questioned ownership, challenged (rhythm sections, guitars, vigor). ening of America. Except he was black people at all but white people authenticity, dubious propriety and Pure yet ‘‘noisy.’’ Black men in Arma- talking about blackface minstrels just like him — beetles and, eventu- legitimate cultural self-preserva- ni. Black women in ball gowns. Sta- doing the blackening. Nonetheless, ally, Beatles. Our fi rst most original tion but also to the prison of black bles of black writers, producers and Kennard could see things for what art form arose from our original sin, respectability, which, with brutal musicians. Backup singers solving they were: and some white people have always irony, could itself entail a kind of social equations with geometric cho- been worried that the primacy of appropriation. It meant comport- reography. And just in time for the ‘‘Who are our true rulers? black music would be a kind of kar- ment in a manner that seemed less hegemony of the American teenager. The negro poets, to be sure! mic punishment for that sin. The black and more white. It meant the Even now it feels like an assault Do they not set the fashion, work has been to free this country appearance of refi nement and pol- on the music made a hundred years and give laws to the public from paranoia’s bondage, to truly ish. It meant the cognitive disso- before it. Motown specialized taste? Let one of them, in the embrace the amplitude of integra- nance of, say, ’s being in love songs. But its stars, those swamps of Carolina, compose tion. I don’t know how we’re doing. very black and sounding — to white songs and their performance of a new song, and it no sooner Last spring, ‘‘,’’ America, anyway, with his friction- them were declarations of war on reaches the ear of a white ama- a silly, drowsy ditty by the less baritone and diction as crisp as the insults of the past and present. teur, than it is written down, Lil X, was essen- a hospital corner — suitably white. The scratchy piccolo at the start amended, (that is, almost tially banished from . He was perfect for radio, yet when of a Four Tops hit was, in its way, spoilt,) printed, and then put Lil Nas sounds black, as does the he got a TV show of his own, it was a raised fi st. Respectability wasn’t upon a course of rapid dissem- trap beat he’s droning over. But abruptly canceled, his brown skin a problem with Motown; respect- ination, to cease only with the there’s defi nitely a twang to him being too much for even the black ability was its point. How radically utmost bounds of Anglo-Sax- that goes with the opening bars of and white of a 1955 television set. optimistic a feat of antiminstrelsy, ondom, perhaps of the world.’’ faint banjo and Lil Nas’s lil’ cowboy 66 Photography by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images its current version.’’ This doesn’t doesn’t This version.’’ current its in chart to music country today’s of elements enough ‘‘embrace to failed song the that determined didn’t explain why. Then, Billboard radio refused to play the song; they for now at least, a last. fiA chart. Songs Country And, rst. Hot its and chart Songs Hip-Hop R&B/ Hot its both on up showed 100 singles chart, either. In April, it Hot Billboard’s on just not — ed chart- It happened. thing crazy a on YouTube it to TikTok.and Then dances posted — promgoers black — cops, soldiers, dozens of dapper a phenomenon. All kinds of people into snowballed song fantasy. The , left, and perform in Indio, Calif., in 2019. The gatekeepers of country country of gatekeepers The black for certain white people. anyway: thorough, be let’s but translation, warrant utes in support, and one, Billy RayBilly one, and support, in utes White singers recorded pretty trib- this. sense to seemed genre the of too was Nas Lil Perhaps era. minstrel the of spine musical the banjo, a is trackNails Inch Nine a of sample song’s the in instance, for Here, historical. feels mixing The thesis. American birthright of cultural syn- the up taken just he’d black, with music white merged really hadn’t kid black A culture. integrated of and tapped into the confused thrill imagination nation’s the captured But by that point it had alreadyhad it point bythat But American. Other country artists e song is too too is song e

￿ ugust 18,2019 67 and put through hell. Twenty became in Virginia.workto They put were than20 kidnapped Africansarrived Get o my land. encroachment. of progress remains another’s symbol of sign person's One is. place this way but as proof of what a fiyacht-rock surprised, ne a mess in not — too laugh, me makes thing whole the over bottomless the And record. a setting April, since chart Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 singles adaisical wonder. It’s been No. 1 on casual grit alongside Lil Nas’s lack- with Lil Nas X himself. a on his performed Cyrus, Four hundred years ago, more more ago, years hundred Four Cyrus’s lays newer version The Screw the history. Screwthe land. their is land This the ride. Musically, they both know: for down is Exoduster.Cyrus And a westward-boundrefugee; he’s an outfihearcryIancestry. at.of He’s an more’’),in nokid don’t heara I OldTown Road,can’trideIandtil the to horse my take gonna (‘‘I’m chorus its reaches song the once history,‘‘yee-hawthe agenda.’’ But of sense deep a and idiosyncrasy black young internetters branded, what with adorable kitsch, Western ance. The verses of his song flirtdeliver-believer in a be to withappears descendedfrom those millions and has NasX Lil music. powerof the found — somehow — deliverance in millions,andsomethoseofpeople