And yet not even four months have passed since Billboard heaved Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” off the same chart, saying it “does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” (The remix with Billy Ray Cyrus, an actual onetime country star, fared no better, apart from spending 14 weeks and counting at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.)

The apparent about-face shows that the country music industry isn’t strict in its dogma , only in its hypocrisy. It is historically cloistered, presenting significant roadblocks to outsiders — the charts reflect those pressures. (Just ask the women of country music.)

But there are several reasons “The Git Up” thrived where “Old Town Road” failed. Brown is signed to a country music record label (BBR Music Group). He deploys a country twang earned growing up spending summers in the rural South. He plays lap steel guitar.

The most crucial reason might be structural. “Old Town Road” didn’t arrive through Nashville’s front door. It rose up from the SoundCloud murk with an arched eyebrow, fortified by the language of memes. On TikTok, where young people transformed into cowboys to its theatrically comic country boom-bap, it was a shared idiom. It leapfrogged right over the country music industry to the pop world, leaving Nashville in the cold, and resentful.