Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” gets a time-traveling Western mini movie

Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” has cemented itself as one of the biggest songs of 2019, sitting on top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart for six straight weeks as of May 13; its Billy Ray Cyrus-featuring remix also holds five of the top seven spots on Billboard’s list of the biggest streaming weeks in the publication’s history. And though the jury remains out on whether the “country trap” hit should classify as country music — Billboard voted no, you may recall, by removing the song from its Top Country Songs chart — few can deny that its long-awaited official music video is a surrealist neo-Western in miniature.

Lil Nas X, a.k.a. rapper Montero Lamar Hill, premiered the five-minute video (or “official movie,” as he calls it) on his YouTube channel on May 17, after dropping a teaser for it the night before. The video serves as something of an allegory for his real-life experience with “Old Town Road,” after the song, which originally found fame due to a viral TikTok meme, was decried by country music traditionalists as an aberration.

The video begins in 1889 on the “old town road,” somewhere in the Old West. Lil Nas X stars as our wily cowboy hero, who’s got his fast horse in the back and a big bag of money in his hand as he outruns the residents of a nearby town who are ostensibly trying to get that cash back. His clean escape is cut short, however, when a suspicious (white) family notices that he’s hiding out, and immediately arm themselves against him. 

While the video’s Old West analogues of his modern-day country music critics may be wary of him, however, the year 2019 — to which Lil Nas X is eventually transported when he dives through a weird, Being John Malkovich-esque time portal — is home to people who are far more accepting of the rapper and his genre-bending song. Or at least that’s the case in the video, where Lil Nas X is received by a predominantly black community. At first, people don’t seem to know what to make of the old-timey traveler, but they quickly change their ways.

All in all, the video is a fitting tribute to this inescapable earworm — silly, a little nonsensical, and weirdly mood-boosting, with a side of subtle social commentary. Yeehaw, indeed.