•"Old Town Road" (also known as "Old Town Road (I Got Horses in the Back)") is a song by American rapper Lil Nas X.
• The song reached the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 and number 19 on the Hot Country Songs chart before the magazine disqualified it from being included on the latter. Had it not been disqualified, "Old Town Road" would've been the Hot Country Songs number-one song, as of the chart dated April 6, 2019.
• Country rap, and its subgenre country trap, began making a resurgence into the mainstream following American rapper
Young Thug's experimental mixtape Beautiful Thugger Girls (2017). Lil Nas X has cited Young Thug as a pioneer of the country trap genre.
• "Old Town Road" made Billboard history when it became the first song to simultaneously chart on the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts in March 2019. However, Billboard quietly removed "Old Town Road" from its Hot Country chart for "not [embracing] enough elements of today's country music". "Old Town Road" would've peaked at number one on the April 6, 2019 Hot Country Songs chart if it were never removed.
Lil Nas X stated he was "extremely disappointed" by the decision. In an interview, Time reporter Andrew R. Chow brought up Billboard's decision to remove "Old Town Road" from the Country chart but keep it on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart, asking Lil Nas X if he considers "Old Town Road" a country song. Lil Nas X replied, "The song is country trap. It's not one, it's not the other. It's both. It should be on both [charts]."
The exclusion of "Old Town Road" brought criticism of the evaluation of the work of non-white artists in the country genre, with Rolling Stone writer Elias Leight referring to Beyoncé, another black artist, whose song "Daddy Lessons" failed to be considered a country song by The Recording Academy in 2016.
-Wikipedia-