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The music industry has always subsumed niche
or local scenes—punk, grunge and hip-hop started
out small before they became pop phenomena—but
what used to require A&R savvy is now quantifiable
by anyone. “This is the democratization of the music
industry that people were hoping for when social
media first became available,” says Bill Werde, the
director of Syracuse University’s music industry pro-
gram and the former editorial director of Billboard.
As a true digital native, Lil Nas X understands this
intuitively. When he recorded “Old Town Road” last
fall, he was hoping it could be his way out of an un-
happy life. Born Montero Lamar Hill outside Atlanta
in 1999, Lil Nas grew up poor, living with one par-
ent or another—his mother and father split when he
was 6. As he spent most of his teenage years alone, he
began to live on the Internet and particularly Twit-
ter, creating memes that showed his disarming wit
and pop-culture savvy.
But while his posts earned him a devoted follow-
ing online, out in the real world, his circumstances
felt grim: he was in the process of dropping out of
college and frequently fighting with his parents. “It
was like, I’m able to go viral, but I’m not promot-
ing anything that’s gonna help me,” he says. “Until
music came along.”
A gifted vocalist since he was a child—his fa-
ther is a gospel singer—Lil Nas began writing and
recording songs in his closet. When, around last
Halloween, he stumbled across a banjo-driven beat
by the teenage Dutch producer YoungKio, he saw
an opportunity to combine trap—a Southern-born
hip-hop subgenre propelled by vicious bass and
crawling tempos—with country, which was expe-
riencing a surge of popularity on the Internet. (It’s
been called the “Yeehaw Agenda”—picture Sponge-
Bob Squarepants in a cowboy hat.) “Because it’s two
polar opposites coming together, it’s funny no mat-
ter what it is,” he says. Since then, he’s fully em-
braced the country aesthetic, performing in an im-
pressive array of brightly colored cowboy hats and
fringe, portraying an old-school Western outlaw in
the epic “Old Town Road” video and even designing
his own line for Wrangler jeans.
Like veteran songwriters, Nas had studied the
tropes of popular music: bold beats, catchy lyrics and
short length. And like the best digital creators, he
knew he had to turn that music into a movement. He
estimates he made more than a hundred short videos
to promote “Old Town Road,” plugging it into exist-
ing memes or creating his own. “People were like,
‘Where are these memes coming from?’ ” he says. “If
you see something going around the Internet, people
want to join in.”
Sure enough, the song was picked up by canny on-
line influencers, as millions of people went on to don
cowboy outfits and dance to the song on TikTok. “Old
Town Road”—boosted by the fact that Billboard now
includes streaming numbers in its chart positions—
began a renegade climb up the country charts.
Then something shocking happened: the song
BRIGHT
LIGHTS
With Keith
Urban and Billy
Ray Cyrus at
CMA Fest in
June; Lil Nas X
knew getting
Cyrus on a
remix would
“make people
go crazy”
JOHN SHEARER— CMA/GETTY IMAGES
