Last week I dreamt I was a cowboy. My name was Billy ‘Toothpick’ Pickett, and I was the fastest pistolero east of Whiskey Row. I dreamt of robbing stagecoaches. I dreamt of playing three-card monte with Toothless Dan down by Granite Creek. I dreamt of owning a Smith & Wesson and shooting buffalo. I dreamt of riding a buckskin stallion named Tex. I dreamt of vintage Americana. And then I woke up. 

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This was the third cowboy dream in a fortnight. Once again, I had fallen asleep watching videos of cowboys on Instagram and paid the price. For months, my algorithm has been inundated with visions of a neo-Wild West. Videos of Monument Valley and the sandstone rocks of Utah. Young men with mullets camping in the Sierra Nevada. An influencer by the name of Cowboy Chuck saying things like, ‘You can tell a lot about a man by the way he makes his chilli.’

Big belt buckles. Stetson hats. Vintage Marlboro Red adverts. Sam Elliott moustaches. Route 66. An AI-generated image of a lonesome cowboy beneath the silhouette of a snowy mountain range. Couples dancing the Cowboy Cha-Cha. Landscape montages set to the music of Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell and Townes Van Zandt. A smorgasbord of images from an America I will never know. An America I can only experience through a 6.1-inch Super Retina screen.  

All of this content is part of a much wider trend known as ‘cowboy core’: a subgenre of Americana that has taken this side of the Atlantic by the horns and bulldogged us into submission. But what’s behind this rise in cowboy fever? And........

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