Reality—a shaky old warhorse who’s taken some pretty rough knocks over the last few years—suffered another sharp, vicious jab to the solar plexus today, as Dolly Parton, one of the greatest country music artists of all time, began publicly communicating with musician Lil Nas X via pictures of horses.
To be fair, Parton was responding to Nas’ suggestion that she participate in a remix of his massively successful, defiantly horse-themed “Old Town Road,” a proposition that is fairly unique in so far as it’s both kind of completely ludicrous, but also impossible to deny that it’d probably slap. Nas’ track has swiftly become the unofficial song of the summer, after all, quietly smothering all other candidates in their sleep with its infectious blend of melancholy banjo, trap rhythms, and heady, irresistible memes about where the horses are. (They’re in the back.) So far, he’s promoted remixes of the Billboard Hot 100-topping track from Billy Ray Cyrus, Diplo, Young Thug, and, of course, Mason Ramsey, that fucking Walmart Yodeling Kid, and really—wait. Does it smell like burnt toast in here? Who’s making toast in our Newswire?
Anyway, Nas has also fielded remix offers from the likes of (obviously) Smash Mouth and Lil Wayne, so we can’t blame him for going after a legend while he’s got the momentum behind him. (He’s also pursuing Megan Thee Stallion for a remix, too.) And, again: It’s not like we can even be annoyed by any of this—both because Nas himself seems like a pretty good guy, and because a Dolly Parton remix of “Old Town Road” would actually fucking own. (Not to mention being a pretty amazing fuck you to all the people who once suggested that the genre-blending track wasn’t “country” enough.)