Roda’s coursework blog

    Background and cultural contexts Read  this Vox feature and podcast transcript on Lil Nas X and Old Town Road . Make sure you read the whole thing - including the podcast transcript - then answer the following questions:  1) What is the big debate regarding Old Town Road and genre?  A number of factors have contributed to Lil Nas X’s popularity, particularly the debate over whether “Old Town Road” should be classified as country music 2) What do you learn about the background of Lil Nas X and Old Town Road from the podcast transcript? Lil Nas X is a 20-year-old rapper from Atlanta. Technically his birth name is Montero Hill, but he has been calling himself “Lil Nas X” for several years now. And last year he joined SoundCloud, as many people do. And by the end of the year in December he released a song called “Old Town Road.” The background for Old Town Road is that Lil Nas X bought a beat that had this sort of country-sounding instrumental to it. And he said he was living at home f

    Wider reading on race and Old Town Road Read  this W Magazine deep dive on the Yeehaw agenda  and answer the following questions:  1) What are the visual cues the article lists as linked to the western genre?  Visual cues associated with what could be classified as western—cowboy hats, cow prints, rhinestones, and fringed suede jackets. 2) How did the Yeehaw agenda come about?  The Yeehaw aganeda came about in September 2018, the trend of black pop-culture figures wearing cowboy garb was dubbed the “Yeehaw Agenda” by Bri Malandro, a Texas-based pop-culture archivist. 3) Why has it been suggested that the black cowboy has been 'erased from American culture'?  The reasons why  black cowboy has been 'erased from American culture' states back to during the Civil War, Texas slave owners left cattle wrangling up to the black slaves they purchased while the slave owners fought in battle. After the war ended, many slaves had become expert cowhands, and roughly 25 percent of