Despite your feelings towards the song, a certain credit is due to Lil Nas X for exploiting the marketing community and social media in the way he did to get to top #1 of Billboard’s Hot 100. Lil Nas X, after buying the Nine-Inch Nails sample “Old Town Road” beat he poured everything into creating the perfect song from this sample. After recording it in a studio, he released the song the exact same day. Instead of pushing thousands of dollars into marketing campaigns Lil Nas X took the one thing social media can’t resist and turned his song into it, a meme.

The meme took off, as they tend to do in the hands of young generations and the entire internet. The minute the song started to become popular Lil Nas X announced that his first remix of the song was going to be Billy Ray Cyrus, a country singer whose success had come before Lil Nas X was even born.

This dynamic duo took Lil Nas X’s song and made it #1 on Billboard’s Top 100 for 17 weeks. However, this is a story you may have heard of before, and in the aftermath of Lil Nas X’s success there has been an uproar in a small town called Marlborough, NH. The real “Old Town Road”, where the music video claims to take place, resides in NH.

Since the song’s rising popularity there has been some comments from the Marlborough Police Department towards fans of the song. On multiple occasions, fans have brought their horses to Old Town Road and filmed “amateur rap videos” as the police department put it. A Facebook post went out in Mid-May from the Marlborough PD asking fans of the song to please stop intruding on this quiet neighborhood.

Despite the popularity of the song, there is little reason to disrupt a small rural town’s road, one which is honestly a far cry from looking like the Old Town Road displayed in Lil Nas X’s music video with Billy Ray Cyrus. But sometimes that is the price of fame and internet memes.