E
VENTUALLY, THERE WILL
come a day when Lil Nas X
runs out of new terrain, when
he has finally ridden so far
down the Old Town Road that
he can ride no more. This is
not that day.
It is early evening on a
Monday, and Lil Nas X, 20, is
backstage at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.,
getting ready for the MTV Video Music Awards. He
has just walked the red carpet in a silver sequined
suit, ruffled shirt and silver cowboy boots — a little
yee-haw mixed with the rock-star flash of Little
Richard and Prince.
Later, Vogue will opine that the look — from
designer Christian Cowan, whose clothes can also be
seen on the cover of Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy —
“may just be the most dazzling interpretation of the
boundary-pushing” men-in-lace trend. Lil Nas X’s
own evaluation is more succinct: “It’s a little disco
ball.” His voice is low and slow, with a bit of South-
ern syrup, and he’s tall (6 feet, 2 inches) but not im-
posing, his magnetism a mix of unshakable brio and
vulnerability. After the disco ball crack, he flashes
the slight smile that lets everyone around him know
that they’re in on a joke — and maybe a world, too —
of his own creation.
But right now he needs to ditch the disco ball and
get into his stage gear: a Tron-meets-laser tag light-
up ensemble requiring wires, battery packs, tape
and a team of four people to make it all work. The
process takes over 30 minutes, the majority of which
Lil Nas X spends checking his phone as his troops —
a 20-member dance crew, and a chunk of the Colum-
bia Records executive team — rally around him.
Back in March, chairman/CEO Ron Perry signed
Lil Nas X to his label after DM’ing him on Instagram.
(Lil Nas X wasn’t getting back to Columbia’s A&R
team, but he liked the look of Perry’s feed enough
to respond. He also liked the look of Perry’s hair,
which defies gravity in the rock-star tradition of
Rod Stewart and Robert Smith.) What happened
after that is modern pop-music history. Fueled by its
remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, Lil Nas X’s laconic
hip-hop-meets-country track “Old Town Road” shot
to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there
for 19 weeks, making it the chart’s longest leader
in history. Columbia is enjoying a bump in current
market share, up to 6.09% year-to-date from 5.67%
in 2018. Without Lil Nas X’s 2.32 billion on-demand
U.S. streams (according to Nielsen Music), the label
would be flat against last year.
No song has defined 2019 more than “Old Town
Road,” but tonight’s VMAs performance is intended
to shift attention to what’s next: Lil Nas X’s sec-
ond single, “Panini” (improbably named not for a
sandwich, but for an Adult Swim cartoon character).
MTV would have preferred he include “Old Town
Road,” but Lil Nas X says he “wanted to move on,”
making this a pivotal moment. He rode to fame as a
pop-music insurrectionist, rallying the support of a
generation operating, as he did at the start, outside
the sightlines of industry gatekeepers. Now Lil Nas X
is inside the gate and facing a much bigger stage.
When this year’s Grammy nominations are an-
nounced in November, he will be a strong contender
not only for best new artist but for record of the year,
maybe even song of the year. To win the hearts and
minds of Grammy voters, he’ll have to show he’s not
some internet-birthed curiosity, but a multidimen-
sional artist.
At the VMAs, he’ll execute stage one of that
transformation: Urban Cowboy to Pop Star With
Dance Moves. This is no small feat, considering that
prior to April 28 — when he and Cyrus joined Diplo
at Stagecoach for the first-ever live performance
of “Old Town Road” — Lil Nas X had never really
been onstage in front of an audience. “It’s not like
he got the chance to go play clubs and theaters and
put in his 10,000 hours,” says Adam Leber, who co-
manages Lil Nas X at Maverick with Gee Roberson.
Again, Lil Nas X is more succinct: “I didn’t know
what to go out there and do.”
Performance consultant KJ Rose, who toured as
a backup singer with Britney Spears, *NSYNC and
Diddy, stepped in to assist. “We had him in rehears-
als almost immediately,” says Leber. “He worked his
ass off.” Rose, who’s on hand again for the VMAs,
says she simply wanted to unlock Lil Nas X’s poten-
tial — to free him to “occupy his space.”
“She helped me get some confidence to go out
there and do a little two-step,” says
Lil Nas X.
The VMAs, though, require more
than a two-step, and Lil Nas X has
prepared for the past week and a
half, rehearsing with two chor eog-
raphers. Yesterday, at a full-tech run-
through, the results looked promis-
ing, if not perfect. “I didn’t know he
could dance like that,” Phylicia Fant,
Columbia’s co- president of urban
music, said at the time. “We went
from the scoot-scoot to...” — she ges-
tured to the stage, where Lil Nas X
was getting tape applied to his shoes
to help him with a few seconds of
moonwalking.
Tonight’s performance serves
as a preview for the sci- fi- themed
“Panini” video — for which Lil Nas X
wrote the treatment himself — and
it’s preceded by a fake newscast
celebrating the 3,162nd remix of
“Old Town Road” in the year 2079. It’s a smart wink,
the kind of detail he sweats. “Old Town Road” may
have seemingly come out of nowhere, riding a beat
Lil Nas X purchased online for $30, but he spent
a month fine-tuning the verses and melodies, and
he has crafted a new version of “Panini” for the
VMAs with a live drum breakdown, upping the rock
quotient of a rap song that interpolates the melody
of Nirvana’s “In Bloom.” Onstage, says Lil Nas X, he’s
hoping to achieve “a boy band meets current dance
kind of thing.”
It’s almost time to head downstairs. Stylist Hodo
Musa gathers everyone into a circle, where, hands
joined and heads bowed, Rose leads them in a prayer.
“Lord,” she asks, “let this man be a vessel for those
who are not heard and those who are not seen. Let
him step into the light of this moment. And let him
have fun.” A collective whoop goes up, hushed for a
moment as Lil Nas X holds up his hand. “I want to
pray,” he says as all eyes turn to him, “for the arms
and legs and bodies of these dancers.” And then an
amen, and that smile again, slight and sly.
A
SK LIL NAS X IF HE FEELS ANY
pressure following up the record-
breaking “Old Town Road,” and you’ll
get a simple answer: No. “I’m not
worried about anything,” he says over
lunch a few days after the VMAs. Sure, “Old Town
Road” has created an identity for him, but he’ll cre-
ate others. “As an artist building myself up, I’m going
to have to continue to make other moments,” he
says. “But it’s not something that I’m upset about or
anything. I mean, maybe when I’m out in public and
someone asks for a picture and they’re like, ‘Where
is your hat?’ ”
Anxiety is not his thing. Did he feel nervous at
Stagecoach? “I really don’t think I did.” (Leber,
on the other hand, “was panicked. He has never
done this and there’s 10,000 people.
This guy got onstage and it was as
if he had done this 4,000 times —
couldn’t be more natural — and got
offstage like it was nothing.”) How
about when he joined Miley Cyrus
at Glastonbury before a crowd of
over 100,000? “I felt the energy.”
Certainly, coming out as gay in June
(“some of y’all already know, some of
y’all don’t care” he wrote on Twit-
ter, pointing to the lyrics of his song
“C7osure”) must have stirred some
nerves? “Just like, rip the Band-Aid
off,” says Lil Nas X, though he allows
that it was “nerve-wracking” to come
out to his father earlier that month.
“It’s something I never probably
would have did if I was still living
with my parents. I have that indepen-
dence to do it, you know?”
In person, Lil Nas X operates at
a slight remove, and it’s hard to say
if he’s being observant or detached — his mask of
cool never drops. This is true even when he at last
admits that earlier this year, when “Old Town Road”
was picking up speed but hadn’t yet achieved escape
velocity, he was sleepless, and caught in a tangle of
worry and weed smoke.
He had only been making music since the summer
of 2018, while he was living at his sister’s house after
his freshman year studying computer science at the
University of West Georgia (he grew up in Austell,
outside Atlanta), hoping to create the next great app.
“The blueprint of something huge more than the
actual coding,” he explains. College was pretty easy,
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Ron Perry, chairman
Jen Mallory, GM
Phylicia Fant, co-president of
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Adam Leber
Gee Roberson
Zach Kardisch
AGENT
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