with the exception of his first F in math. “With math
I spent most of the year half- assing it just so I could
get by, not so I could exceed. I would smoke all the
time, and [then] the end of the year is coming and I
have to make up this grade, and the teacher is like,
‘Oh, no, we don’t do extra credit.’ ” He was supposed
to make up the course online. Instead, bored, “I
made my first song.”
Rapping over some beats he found on YouTube, he
started using the name Lil Nas X. “I was just trying
to fit into a certain spectrum,” he says. “Just like,
basic rap.” These tracks, collected on the Nasarati
mixtape, are full of expletive- laced boasts about
smackdowns, diamonds and luxury cars. On two,
he talks about having choppas in the truck, though
when I ask if he has ever owned a gun or a truck, he
dissolves into silent laughter. “I still ride in Lyfts,” he
says. “I haven’t got a license yet.”
Still, those two songs showed his instinct for
harnessing the power of the internet for his own
purposes: They’re titled “Kim Jong” and “Don-
ald Trump.” He had amassed a six-digit Twitter
following with this kind of thinking — pushing out
memes and threads that rode whatever was viral
at the moment (or about to be so), trying to be “on
the next wave before it’s even there.” He wanted to
“build and build my personality on the internet and a
bigger base — reaching wider audiences of all kinds.
Keep going until you actually find something you can
profit from, which I did, luckily.”
It happened once he stopped making “basic rap”
and began making music that matched his online
personality — specifically, a song rooted in an idea
that wasn’t at all basic, that mixed the funny meme
culture he loved with hip-hop bounce and country
gravel, that was short, to the point. He released “Old
Town Road” on SoundCloud and iTunes last De-
cember, then spent all his waking hours pushing the
track online, creating memes or laying search bait
on Reddit to jump-start interest. He’d smoke weed
anytime he came across a little, just to ease his mind.
“Because I’m always thinking: What if I’m not
promoting the song hard enough? What if this never
goes for me?” he recalls. “I was sick because of smok-
ing, not sleeping because I’m always promoting my
music. I was stressing so much more during that peri-
od because it was my first song to move at this height,
this speed. One wrong step and it can all slip up.”
When he discovered that the beat he had bought
contained a Nine Inch Nails sample, it felt like the
one wrong step he had been dreading. “The song
was nowhere near the real takeoff it was going to
have,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God — they find
out about this, they’re going to get this taken down
and I’m going to have to start all over.’ It was like a
race against time.”
W
HEN RON PERRY FIRST
reached out to Lil Nas X on
Instagram, he told him he’d
make “Old Town Road” the
biggest song in the world.
What impressed Lil Nas X more was that when
they first spoke on the phone, Perry understood
not just “Old Town Road” but the Nasarati mix-
tape, too. “Within those songs that to most people
all sound the same, he was able to differentiate the
things that made each their own,” says Lil Nas X.
More importantly, Perry didn’t want “the same
song over and over. With any label I just felt like
they would have said, ‘Hey, why don’t you make an
entire country trap EP?’ He knew from the start
that I had potential to be a great, versatile artist,
which I already saw myself as.”
Columbia gave him the creative control he want-
ed and helped sort out the publishing on “Old Town
Road.” (Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus
Ross have 50% of the original track’s publishing.)
The label also helped realize an idea Lil Nas X had
first floated on Twitter in December, the day after
he released the song: a Billy Ray Cyrus remix.
Initially, Columbia considered featuring a more
current country star, someone who would guarantee
country radio play. But Jennifer Mallory, Columbia’s
GM, says it made more sense to amplify the narra-
tive Lil Nas X had already created online — one that
caught fire in March when Billboard took “Old Town
Road” off of the Hot Country Songs chart, where it
had cracked the top 20. “It created a sense of curi-
osity around this track, so people wanted to go hear
it,” says Mallory. “And it created a sense of him as an
underdog, so people were rooting for him.”
Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s senior vp charts
and data development, emphasizes that it was
“100% a purely internal decision.” “Old Town
Road” was initially tracked on the country charts
because Lil Nas X had listed it as a country song
when he first uploaded it to iTunes and Sound-
Cloud. As it gained momentum, Billboard exam-
Gladys Tamez Millinery hat.
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126 BILLBOARD • SEPTEMBER 21, 2019