Some of the country-diehard pushback to the song has been about pure sound. “Country music is about stringed instruments, simple melodies, and vocal harmony,” the YouTube critic Grady Smith said in a Lil Nas X response video titled “That Ain’t Country.” But he went on to tell country at large to “take yourself more seriously than just letting anyone walk in [and] say something is country when it’s clearly not.” Others have rejected the song in harsher terms, saying its country classification comes from a “bigoted stereotype bred from the fact that horses and cowboy hats are referenced in the lyrics,” as Saving Country Music put it. Such arguments are oddly reminiscent of the cultural-appropriation charges that hip-hop fans have often had to level against interlopers to their genre. The common logic: You can’t just parachute in.

But the question of who has a right to claim country culture is not simple. Lil Nas X’s song follows other rappers who have presented themselves, for a song or two, as earthy rural workers (see Lil Tracy’s “Like a Farmer,” basically a prototype for “Old Town Road”). It comes amid a cultural boom semi-jokingly referred to as the “yee haw agenda,” which sees black people donning cowboy garb. This has been a fun aesthetic movement, but it’s also one that has spotlighted black Americans’ actual historical association with country music and rural life. Solange’s recent album, When I Get Home, for example, drew on the thriving tradition of black cowboys in her native Texas.

Meanwhile, in recent decades, country has borrowed more and more from hip-hop. There have been a smattering of collaborations between rappers and denim-swathed singers, but the larger trend has been for country stars to simply, themselves, rap. And when they do so, they’re often not just taking the formal technique of rhyming fast over a beat. They’re taking hip-hop’s lyrical tropes. Look to the exemplary “hick-hop” hit “This Is How We Roll” by Florida Georgia Line: “The mix in our drink’s a little stronger than you think,” “All up in my new Maybach,” and so on. They’re using the same sort of imagery as Rick Ross, just put into a backwoods context.

The flirtation between the two genres makes sense, because they’re fundamentally more similar than is often recognized. Both mainstreams of country and rap typically present themselves as highly tied to place and to realness, and artists in both love to express pride with lists of material possessions and hometown references. They’re genres of self-styled underdogs and go-it-alone types, but when they score a hit, what they end up selling is a portable, feel-great alter ego for anyone to try on. This means they’re vulnerable to their traditions being used as costumes, which can be an asset—but also a problem when it ends up distorting or undermining the original meaning.