Nailing a riff for Old Town Road is a backstory

The most entertaining and enduring music story of 2019 so far belongs to American rapper Lil Nas X.

Billy Ray Cyrus, Lil Nas X and Keith Urban in Nashville, Tennessee. Picture: Getty Images

The most entertaining and enduring music story of 2019 so far belongs to American rapper Lil Nas X, whose country-influenced debut single, Old Town Road, has sat at No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 16 weeks and counting. For Lil Nas — real name Montero Hill, aged 20 — it must have been a head-spinningly sudden rise from nobody to celebrity, yet a scroll through his Twitter account finds him cheerfully mixing it up with fans by retweeting memes and starting his own, while also being transparent in his desire to set a new record for most weeks on top of the US charts. Here, it has topped the ARIA singles chart for 13 weeks.

To my ears, the most curious thing about the two-minute song is that it’s built on a track by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails named 34 Ghosts IV, which appeared on the 2008 instrumental album Ghosts I-IV. Composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the main element of 34 Ghosts IV heard in Old Town Road is a looped banjo riff, which was sampled by teenage Dutch producer Young Kio, who added a trap beat and uploaded it to a website called BeatStars. Lil Nas X bought that beat from Kio for $30 before adding his vocals and releasing it online, with no idea that the result would top charts around the world.

Here’s where things get really juicy, though: Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV under a 2008 Creative Commons licence that allowed fans to share, remix and redistribute the work as they saw fit, provided that they attributed the author. However, the licence did not cover sharing and remixing for commercial purposes — which is exactly what Kio did when he uploaded his remix to BeatStars, and what Lil Nas did when he initially self-released Old Town Road, then signed a deal with Columbia Records — owned by parent company Sony Music — in March. Because of this, according to Rolling Stone, either the artist or the label probably had to pay Reznor and Ross a substantial sum of money in back royalties once the song became a global hit, as that original banjo loop sample had not been cleared prior to being played millions of times without the band’s approval or attribution.

“I didn’t even know about the Nine Inch Nails sample at first,” said Lil Nas in an interview published on Genius in April. “After I did find out about it, it was like, ‘Wow, so it’s rock, country, hip-hop all in the same room.’ ”

While none of the parties involved has publicly commented on the specifics of the arrangement, Reznor and Ross have been added as co-writers and co-producers on the track — meaning that, with their contribution to Old Town Road, Nine Inch Nails now has its first and only No 1 charting single in its 31-year career.