Professional Bull Riding was meant for TikTok fame.

It’s short, intense, and impossible to look away. A rider adorned in thick gloves, a protective vest, and a helmet hops onto a bull from the side of the fence that surrounds the ring. A stock contractor tightens a flank strap around the bull's sensitive stomach, which makes the bull buck. The gate opens, and the bull instinctively jerks out into the arena. As soon as the bull's shoulder or hips clear the gate, the timer starts. The rider’s goal is to stay on the bull for just eight seconds — and it's as hard as it looks, with the rider holding onto the beast with one hand (if they touch the bull with the second hand, they're disqualified) and two legs. Not only do they have to hang on, riders also have to demonstrate their own personal style and fluidity, which they'll be judged on. Eight seconds later, sometimes sooner, the rider is typically bucked off and flees for safety.

Finish recording and immediately upload. It's not just a sport, it's a TikTok worth millions of views.

PBR — the sport, not the beer — has made big waves on TikTok in 2025. Since January, Professional Bull Riding has gained 650,000 followers across social media accounts, just 200,000 short of the growth they saw in the entirety of 2024. This recent popularity has jettisoned them to the upper echelons of social media, with 2.9 million followers on TikTok. Mitch Ladner, the social media lead for PBR, told Mashable that most of that growth is thanks to followers between 18 and 35 years old.

"We've seen a massive spike in our followership across all of our platforms, but definitely more so on TikTok and Instagram, and I definitely attribute that to a younger audience," Ladner said.

Once a symbol of conservative Americana, cowboy culture — from rodeo-inspired fashion like Pinterest’s Western Gothic to the visceral thrill of professional bull riding — is being reimagined by Gen Z. On one end of the spectrum is Beyoncé, whose Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter album and tour shine a spotlight on a long-overlooked side of the cowboy narrative. On the other are tradwife influencers in prairie dresses, reviving idealized visions of ranch life. Together, they signal a shift: cowboycore is no longer just a fleeting aesthetic; it's a full-blown lifestyle, and it defies political binaries. Nowhere is this cultural collision more vivid than at PBR events, where Chappell Roan and Morgan Wallen tracks spin back-to-back; newbie influencers cozy up to livestock while rodeo athletes put their bodies on the line; and American identity feels up for grabs. Suddenly, cowboycore isn’t just a style — it’s a statement, and everyone wants a piece.

Make no mistake: Cowboys are not strictly American. Their roots trace back to Spain and Portugal, and many of the riders who joined the cattle drives of the late 19th century were African, Mexican, and Indigenous. The vaquero traditions in northern Mexico likely spurred much of what we consider cowboy culture today, and, during the late 1800s, 25 percent of workers in the range-cattle industry in the American West were Black cowboys, a truth rewritten in many portrayals of the American West in order to favor a settler-colonialist tilt. But the reality of past American life is often forgotten when aesthetics take over.

"If you go around the world and ask, 'What's your idea of an American?' a lot of people would say a cowboy," Joshua Garrett-Davis, the H. Russell Smith Foundation curator of Western American History, told Mashable. Whether or not it's based in simple historical reality, cowboy culture "is a shorthand for what America is."

Now, in a time of national uncertainty, Millennials and Gen Z are reshaping cowboy aesthetics through a new lens, incorporating ideas about identity, danger, nostalgia, digital performance, and the influencer economy, often with very different results. PBR is ground zero for that transformation.

Cowboycore’s complicated dual identity

As more young people flock to a sport with conservative roots, you might presume an immediate political line has been drawn. And it’s true that Gen Z, once seen as a progressive and digitally native generation, has surprised pollsters by, in some cases, actually leaning conservative. According to a new poll out of Yale, while voters aged 22 to 29 years old favored Democrats in the 2026 congressional elections by 6.4 points, those aged 18 to 21 years old leaned Republican by 11.7 points — an 18-point swing within a single generational bracket.

Still, it’s complicated, and the fact is, people of all political stripes are finding resonance in cowboy Americana. Take Chappell Roan's queer anthem "The Giver," which debuted at no. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs Chart, and Stud Country, a line dancing and two-stepping event specifically for queer people that has taken off in big cities. Palestinian supermodel and activist Bella Hadid is a literal cowgirl. Pharrell Williams, who showcased embroidered suits, cowboy hats, and bolo ties for Louis Vuitton's 2024 menswear presentation, told GQ that "it was an honor" to create a collection "around the West and Western workwear vibes" because cowboys "look like us, they look like me, they look Black, they look Native American." And of course, there’s Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, along with movies like The Harder They Fall, Concrete Cowboy, and Queen & Slim, which all push against the narrative that cowboy culture is inherently white.

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But there’s also a more conservative (and highly popular) romanticization of cowboy culture. For instance, tradwife influencer Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm, whose Instagram bio reads, "city folk turned ranchers," has 10 million followers.

PBR officials, for their part, hope to keep their version of Americana apolitical as much as possible. "If loving your country and honoring your veterans and the heroes and those that sacrifice before us is a political issue, then you could paint us with a political brush, because we've done that from day one," PBR CEO and Commissioner Sean Gleason told Mashable.

PBR doesn't have a political arm or any official donations to candidates, though it has encouraged its viewers to vote. And although its leadership has emphasized keeping the organization apolitical, the cultural and economic realities around rodeo often place it at odds with liberal politics. For example, some Democratic politicians have introduced bills that would ban rodeo and PBR in their states because of the effect it can have on the animals involved. At the same time, affiliations and moments in PBR's recent history lean more conservative — the Border Patrol has been a sponsor since 2016, and that same year, when Colin Kaepernick kneeled to protest racial injustice, PBR athletes countered with a public pledge to stand during the national anthem.

"Our mantra is: Be cowboy," Gleason said. "It doesn't matter where you live, what you drive, how you dress, the color of your skin, or your gender. If you live honestly with integrity, hard work, and an appreciation for the history and heritage of America, you're a cowboy."

Meanwhile, the "American" sport is not actually that American — just 10 of PBR's top 25 bull riders hail from the U.S. Fourteen are from Brazil, and one is from Australia; a Brazilian rider won the sold-out MSG series.

In uncertain times, Americans reach for ‘Americana’

Historically, Western nostalgia tends to achieve new heights during times of national uncertainty. Consider the presidency of "California cowboy" Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, when the country was experiencing its worst recession since the Great Depression, IBM released the first personal computer, more than 100,000 people died from the AIDS epidemic, the Cold War was ending, and conservatism was on the rise. Reagan didn't have any red hats, but his slogan was "Let's Make America Great Again," which sounds awfully familiar. The American Cowboy Culture Association was created in the 1980s, and, of course, there was a resurgence of country music and Westerns — albeit completely whitewashed versions of the true Wild West.

Garrett-Davis said the resurgence of cowboycore is "almost always making a claim about America or the United States as a nation, even if it's in a fun, playful, ironic, or satirical way. There's both this appropriation of cowboy imagery and an appropriation of Native American imagery," Garrett-Davis said. "I'm psychoanalyzing here, but when things feel so unmoored, it makes sense that you would grab onto something that feels 'authentic.'"

It seems like that's happening. In January, for the first time in nearly two decades, a PBR event sold out three days at Madison Square Garden, attracting a record-breaking 42,257 fans.

'We've been making eight-second content for 30-plus years'

PBR’s massive uptick in social media followers didn’t happen by accident. A few years ago, their biggest audience was on Facebook, but the sport, with each ride lasting for a maximum of eight seconds, was built for short-form video content. It’s a spectacle, with thrilling, fast-paced content perfect for capturing short attention spans and TikTok virality.

The scoring is simple. Each ride is worth up to 100 points — 50 for the rider and 50 for the bull. Two judges score the rider, two judges score the bull, and each judge can award up to 25 points, with the score then tallied together. At the end of each event, the top 12 riders compete in the championship round; the rider with the highest point total from the entire event becomes the champion.

"We've been making eight-second content for 30-plus years," Ladner told Mashable. "It just took TikTok to catch up with us."

Ladner's strategy for audience-building and engagement focuses on riders themselves, not just highlights, and it works well. In one of PBR's most viral TikTok videos, the cowboys are doing seemingly regular things—leaning over a pole, standing with their arms crossed, laughing—to the tune of "Breakin’ Dishes" by Rihanna. Another popular video shows one of the cowboys stretching out for his turn on a bull with the song "Bounce When She Walk" by BeatKing and Oh Boy Prince in the background.

"We kind of flipped around our social strategy to 'let's just have fun with this' and 'let 'er rip,' honestly," Ladner says of the strategy he implemented in November. Now, the TikTok account leans into the knowledge that the cowboys are, for lack of a better word, really hot.

While Ladner says "our biggest influencers are our riders," not all cowboys are stoked about being on camera — they want to be riding bulls and playing on a ranch with their buddies. So Ladner adds that involving influencers outside the Western niche has been imperative to growth and expanding reach. And more often than not, Ladner says, those influencers are reaching out to him.

"We get a ton of inbound DMs saying, 'Hey, I'd love to come to the event, and I have a million TikTok followers,'" Ladner said. "If I can get a mommy blogger or a fashionista or a chef to come to our event, that's an audience that our paid media ads can't necessarily target with marketing messages that come off authentic."

While some might be worried about the co-opting of the country lifestyle, PBR isn’t. And they argue their fans, who they say aren’t conservative or progressive but simply American, aren't either.

"I've seen no measurable gatekeeping from our fans at all," Ladner said. "We've been doing this since 1992, and we've had a very loyal, diehard base since the jump. [The fans are] just glad these riders are getting their due."

The politics of authenticity, gender, and performance

Bull riding seems like an ultra-masculine spectacle. It appeals to this cathartic fantasy of toughness and risk as its polar opposite, tradwife content, continues to flourish online, playing out gendered performances of impossible ideals for the camera. But, at the same time, cowboy aesthetics have always played with gender. Look no further than Ryan Rash, a stock show judge who famously slaps cattle with glitter, wears fabulously flamboyant outfits and faux eyelashes, and posts a lot of pro-President Trump memes on his Facebook page.

These seemingly conflicting ideologies may be part of the point. Cowboy culture has never truly been a reality.

"Most of us are working office jobs, are working at a restaurant or whatever, and so there's some catharsis in imagining the life of picking up eggs and milking the goats and riding a bull and being in so, so much danger," Garrett-Davis said. "It totally makes sense that now, in this fast-paced time of really rapid change, we might yearn for a slower pace, a simpler life, and because of all the ways that the West is associated with this national identity, it's something that feels authentic to grab onto, even though its authenticity is very doubtful the closer you look at it.”

The American insistence on being born a nation on the backs of brave, ragged people of the Wild Wild West is itself a fantasy. The white man was not the hero of the story, and cowboy boots look just as great on the New York City subway as they do mucking a stall. Despite its lack of authenticity, there is a certain je ne sais quoi about our imagined Wild Wild West. A simpler life is appealing if you refuse to look any deeper at it. And maybe that escapism is good enough, at least for right now.

Whether for the purposes of creating a new identity, finding escape, or leaning into either the irony or sincerity of it all, the cowboy endures — more mediated than ever online, but just as mythic. For the increasing number of Gen Zers who are scrolling TikTok for the latest PBR clip or boot recommendation, cowboycore doesn’t have to be a relic or a remix: It can be both.

Gleason says that we're in a "renaissance" and "resurgence" of "interest in cowboy and country music and these authentic touch points with the history and heritage of America," describing it as the opposite side of the pendulum of "this ultra-woke culture sweeping the nation."

Yet somehow, adherents to both groups find solace in the cowboycore aesthetic. So the cowboycore aesthetic endures, pushed on by another season of political uncertainty and polarization. Whether it will hang on longer than eight seconds remains to be seen. "One thing I know for certain is that the pendulum swings," Gleason said. "The pendulum of politics, the pendulum of culture, they swing."

For now, it endures, pushed on by the seemingly perpetual push and pull of who gets to define Americana — and who belongs in the annals of its history.

Vicky