Proposal

Re-Release ‘Till I Can’t No More: A Digital Edition of “Old Town Road”

When most Spotify centric artists release a remix of a song, they are perceived as trying to stay at the top of the ‘New Music’ heap and to build their image. When Lil Nas X released the second version of his song “Old Town Road” with a verse from Billy Ray Cyrus, there were conscious decision to associate the song with country music through his choice of collaborator. This image is further confused, however; when Lil Nas X added the rapper Young Thug, Mason Ramsey (otherwise known as the Walmart Yodeling Kid), and hit K-Pop group BTS’s RM to his list of collaborators.

“What is ‘Old Town Road’?” is the question I will seek to answer in my edition. Is it only the first release that lacks the “(Remix)” tag that subsequent publishing’s bear? Is it the selfconsciously country version with Billy Ray? Or is “Seoul Town Road” the true opus, but needed Lil Nas X to build his cred before asking RM to work with him? The fact that this answer isn’t Lil Nas X to build his cred before asking RM to work with him? The fact that this answer isn’t readily apparent indicates to me that using some of the editorial practices we’ve discussed over the course of this term will be useful in determining which version of the popular earworm should be remembered as the ‘truest’ expression of Lil Nas X’s vision for the song.

Since so many of the texts I will be considering are digital, I think a website based edition that links out to, or embeds, the various Lyrics Genius or Youtube pages I’ll be drawing on will present the corpus of X’s work in a more manageable way than hunting for them individually.

I see the audience of this edition as the future young person who was not alive to witness the controversy around “Old Town Road” but is curious about that song on the throwback radio station. As a result of encountering the edition, I would like them to have the ability to interact with its different versions, many of which I suspect will not make it into the next year, to say nothing for the next decade.

As of right now I am wondering about the best way to present the variations between the texts of the song, but have considered using the ability to present each block of lyrics as a column on a webpage to compare 2-4 of the songs at the same time. I’m not looking to privilege one version as a copy-text, but it may be most useful to treat the first, shortest, edition of the song as a template to compare to and mark variances in the other song in a different shade, using glosses or another type of annotation to discuss what the differences add in meaning.