When Lil Nas X dropped “Old Town Road” at the tailend of 2018, country music was confronted with its most recent identity crisis. But a closer look at country’s entanglement with pop over the years reveals that the scrutiny around what makes a song authentically "country" has been a longstanding debate that artists like Shania Twain and Willie Nelson have all been in the crossfire of. In this episode, series producer Amanda Burt, episode director Simon Ennis, and journalist Natalie Weiner break down why country music is consistently renegotiating its relationship with authenticity, how the genre reckons with its most radical trailblazers, and what artists like Orville Peck can teach us about why the future is always informed by the past. This Is Pop is now streaming internationally on Netflix. Follow us on Instagram to stay in the loop. The theme music for this podcast was created by Ryan Hemsworth.