OTHING MAKES A PERSON FEEL more like
a lonesome cowboy than being forced to
stare down the open highway of the rest
of his life. Last year, the then-19-year-old
Montero Lamar Hill was doing just that,
having dropped out of the University of
West Georgia and sleeping on his sister’s fl oor.
Hill, who spent his entire life online and witnessed fi rst-
hand the way stars are born through the constantly shifting
world of internet content, passed these days making humor-
ous videos on Facebook and going viral on Twitter. But being
well liked online doesn’t pay your sister’s rent. By the end of
2018, she wanted him to move out and take care of himself.
Having grown up in the tiny town of Lithia Springs, Georgia,
Hill never envisioned himself as a pop star until he began exper-
imenting with rapping over beats he found online. He released a
few songs, to tepid online reception, but now he needed to think
big. The next song he would make needed to be his way out.
He spent $30 to download a beat made by
YoungKio, a producer in the Netherlands
(which prominently samples an instrumental
recording by the American rock band Nine
Inch Nails), and channeled both his Southern
roots and his feelings of solitude.
“I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road
/ I’m gonna ride ’til I can’t no more,” he sang, re-
cording on his own in an Atlanta studio on De-
cember 2, 2018. Later that day, he released “Old
Town Road” under the name Lil Nas X.
Within four months, “Old Town Road” was
the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100—and
it stayed there for a record-breaking 19 weeks.
Almost one year after its release, it has been
streamed more than a billion times on Spotify.A SELF-TAUGHT 20-YEAR-
OLD MUSICIAN GALLOPS TO
GLOBAL FAME WITH A SONG
THAT DEFIES CATEGORIESTHE
BUCKAROO’S
NEW BEAT
Lil Nas X signed a contract with Columbia Records, launched
his own clothing line with Wrangler (a nod to one of the song’s
lyrics), adopted some puppies and has been spotted hanging
out with celebrities from Rihanna to Oprah.
The story of how “Old Town Road” became the most domi-
nant musical force of 2019 is a mixtape of the fl outing of mu-
sical boundaries, the explosive potential of digital media, the
unfailing capacity of young people to surprise and disrupt,
and culture’s infi nite appetite for the new. It is also the Amer-
ican story of the self-made artist-entrepreneur, updated with
instantaneous global fame.
Lil Nas X’s campaign began as soon as “Old Town Road”
was released; he heavily promoted the track through self-cre-
ated memes—amusing images and videos that spread quick-
ly and widely online— on Twitter and Instagram, claiming at
one point that he made “more than a hundred short videos”
meant to amp up interest. He even tried to recruit country star
Billy Ray Cyrus for a remix, which came to fruition in March.
“I saw the power to make something bigger from social me-
dia because it’s done so often nowadays,” he explains. “I didn’t
want to miss my chance. I went for it.”
His timing was impeccable: As he was hustling, a new short-
form video-sharing app, TikTok, was catching fi re. Users could
record any kind of video—dancing, lip-synching, model-pos-
ing—set to its catalog of songs and reach hundreds of millions
of global users immediately. “Old Town Road” became an easy fi t
for its young Gen Z users, who created cowboy memes set to snip-
pets from the track. It spread faster than even Lil Nas X expected.
It helped that the song was a sugar rush of catchiness that
clocked in at just under two minutes. It was both a novelty in the
way he emphasized his own Southern accent to fl ex like a rap-
ping Johnny Cash but also a serious feat in semi-innovation: The
steely guitar riff from the Nine Inch Nails song that YoungKio’s
beat samples made way for the familiar hi-hat
snare drums that build the foundation of rap’s
“trap” sub-genre. “Old Town Road” fused to-
gether two adjacent musical worlds, wholly
aware of how humorous the concept was.
As the song climbed multiple music rank-
ings, Billboard removed “Old Town Road”
from its Hot Country chart, claiming that the
twangy song about a lone cowboy riding his
horse did not “embrace enough elements of
today’s country music.” The decision rankled
fans and provoked controversy, especially giv-
en that white country artists like Florida Geor-n
YOUTH
Lil Nas X
Mixing rap and
country on “Old
Town Road”by BRITTANY SPANOS
photograph by KAYLA REEFERGET AN INSIDE LOOK at Lil Nas X’s creative
process at Smithsonianmag.com/ingenuity