Old Town Road took off on the video-centric TikTok, soundtracking clips of teens shedding their suburban attire for cowboy hats and boots, and switching seamlessly between square dancing and hip hop moves. With Noah Cyrus, Diplo, Billy Ray Cyrus and YoungKio at the Stagecoach festival in California in April 2019. “Country music is evolving,” he wrote, finding a video of a cowboy riding a bull to accompany the song. When he posted the song there, his life would change dramatically. Nas had already amassed a 20K following on Twitter, with an account mainly known for memes and jokes. The song was made in a $20-an-hour studio, on a laptop with a beat found on YouTube (which illegally sampled Nine Inch Nails’ track 34 Ghosts IV). “It was great, by the way,” he quickly adds.įor better or worse, these questions will not stop any time soon. “You know, ‘What was it like working with Billy Ray Cyrus?’” he drones, rolling his large, hooded eyes. He is currently recording his first proper album (he considers 7 to be an EP), and after a year of talking about Old Town Road says he’s tired of answering the same questions. “You heard it?” he says when I point out that nothing on the internet ever truly disappears. Merely mentioning the song makes him cover his face in embarrassment, hiding his high-beam smile, and shaking his head. He took on a straight persona for those early songs, lewdly rapping that he “might go and fuck ya motha” on the unpolished and unmixed track Nasarati, formerly available on the rapper’s SoundCloud page. Because it felt like that’s what I had to do.”
“It was just me acting really hard,” he admits.
The track, Shame, saw Nas lean into the rough-edged, macho qualities of the rap styles he grew up listening to: Drake, Lil Uzi Vert and Rae Sremmurd. One day, while procrastinating over his course work, he wrote his first song. He slept on the floor of his sister’s apartment and was about to drop out of college, giving up on the computer science major he half-heartedly pursued at the University of West Georgia. Just two years ago, he was a silly, meme-loving 18-year-old who was still figuring it out.
“It was like the world was playing a prank on me.”Ĭorset: Zana Bayne. “Everything seemed like a dream or a movie,” Nas says of his whirlwind 2019, culminating in six Grammy nominations, including best record for Old Town Road and best album for 2019’s 7. The crossover hit was embraced by everyone from Rolling Stone magazine to teens on TikTok, prompting Lil Nas X to quickly release a version featuring country titan Billy Ray Cyrus, known to one generation for his 1992 hit Achy Breaky Heart, and another for being Miley’s dad. The key to this success has been his track Old Town Road, an infectious blend of hip hop and country, right down to lyrics such as “Ridin’ on a tractor/Lean all in my bladder” and “Cowboy hat from Gucci/Wrangler on my booty”. He is simultaneously a Gen-Z success story, red carpet fixture, Billboard record holder and, perhaps most surprising to Lil Nas X himself, a queer figurehead. In 12 months, he has gone from “the black cowboy with the song on TikTok” to a global superstar. Today, 20-year-old Lil Nas X (Nas to his friends) is a far cry from his teenage self, Montero Lamar Hill from Lithia Springs.