What’s the name of the song that goes “take my horse to the old town road”?
Monday, August 26th 2019
Hey it’s Guy,
Another week has flown by, it’s the last week of August already and summer has come to an end unfortunately.
I am changing this format just slightly, moving away from current affairs/news and having lots of content that always follows the same structure…
I have decided less is more.
In the short life of this newsletter, I have found that having set ‘headings’ forces me to seek things to talk about.
Searching for topics to please an agenda isn’t why I started this, I just want to share interesting stories, discoveries, opinions and more, that I come across each week.
Simply put, whatever I do publish will be more focused, more enjoyable and certainly more worthwhile reading.
I think (hope) this one is pretty good.
TikTok Meme to No.1 in the World
The break-out no.1 song ‘Old Town Road’ had a very different path to success…
An avant-garde form of distribution, something the music industry should learn a lot from.
“Though the song came out of nowhere, it wasn’t quite a fluke. Lil Nas X, now 20, had been a student of online virality and a prolific amateur meme-maker, skills he put to use while marketing the song himself in its early stages.”
(read more - NY Times)
Lil Nas X, then an unemployed 19 year old teen and aspiring wrapper, recorded the first released version of the song in his bedroom.
Shortly afterwards, he began his clever and calculated marketing drive to pump his music out everywhere.
Shortly before releasing it, Lil Nas X messaged the producer Kiowa Roukema, also 19 years old, who produced the original sample published on SoundCloud, asking to lease it for his track.
Kio, from The Netherlands, originally sampled the banjo section from a Nine Inch Nails song.
Lil Nas X initially pushed the song on twitter by making his own memes, designed to go viral, and they did.
‘Influencers’ then reached out to use it in their viral videos, they too were instrumental to the songs success, it was first used on the short-form video platform TikTok by Michael Pelchat, and the rest is history.
I think this is the most clever thing of all…
He made his own Reddit thread asking the forum “What’s the name of the song that goes “take my horse to the old town road”?", and then subsequently answered his own question with the lyrics, so that they were there online for anyone that wanted to find them.
As this was in a text form, it was much better ranked by google’s bots and therefore much easier to find and it appeared in all early searches for the song.
It then began climbing the Billboard country music charts. However, Billboard removed the song for not being ‘country enough’, which sparked a big debate surrounded in claims of racism, but ironically if this was the conclusion by Billboard, it attracted enough press to accelerate the growth of the song even further.
Then by invitation of Lil Nas X, Billy Ray Cyrus came on board, lending the song further credibility.
“Though the song was not re-entered onto the overall country charts, both the original version of the song and the remix featuring Cyrus eventually peaked at number one on the flagship Billboard chart, the Hot 100, for a record-breaking nineteen consecutive weeks.”
Main stream media started to credit the song to the country legend but he made a point to give Lil Nas X and Kio all the acclaim.
“To rehash: A Dutch producer (Kio) stumbles across a Nine Inch Nails song while digging through YouTube, samples its “beautiful” banjo section, puts it on top of a trap beat, a teen from Atlanta leases the beat for $30, makes a winking cowboy song over it, the song blows up on TikTok, gets removed from the Country Music charts by Billboard, ignites a heated debate over race and genre, and the song only continues to mushroom as a phenomenon. Is there a more 2019 story?”
(read more - GQ Magazine)
This short doc by The New York Times features interviews with rapper Lil Nas X, producer Kio and Billy Ray Cyrus.
(worth the watch - 6 mins)
Smile 😊
Photography 📷
Think 🤔
The object of golf is to play the least amount of golf.
Profound 🤯🌊
We use the term hair for all of it, but hairs for just a few.
That’s all for now 🤙🏽
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Thank you,
Guy