Lil Nas X

One Liner: The "Old Town Road" guy is still making insanely popular but mediocre raps

Wikipedia Genre: Pop rap, hip hop, country rap, trap, pop rock, pop

Home: Georgia

Poster Position: Headliner!
Both Weekends.  Saturday.

Thoughts:  I find it truly amazing to see that this cat has three songs with more than 1.3 billion streams.  Like, that is truly wild.  I thought "Old Town Road" was a fun tune, and my kids loved it back when jamming that and doing the flossing dance were things, but I don't understand the continued excitement about him at all.  Well, I get that he courts controversy and makes outrageous videos and gets viral attention for stuff, but these tunes are entirely unremarkable to me.

HIs first release was 2019's 7 EP, which was thrown together to capitalize on the popularity of his "Old Town Road" remix with Billy Ray Cyrus (but before he released remixes with people as varied as Diplo, Young Thug, the Walmart yodeling kid, and one of the dudes in BTS).  When I reviewed it, this is what I had to say: "I'm still so shocked that this album was nominated for multiple Grammy awards.  Including Album of the Year!  It's freaking 18 minutes long!  And the best song on it is a ridiculous one-hit wonder piece of badly written fluff with a hyper catchy chorus that leans on Billy Ray Cyrus to get it any sort of gravity!  One of the songs ("F9mily") sounds like a bad Fall Out Boy song (But has Travis Barker inexplicably drumming on it)!  One of the songs involves Cardi B dropping an entirely forgettable verse!  Here is the thing, I really enjoyed the Lil Nas X phenomenon - breaking the Country charts with his dumb song, all of his goofy tweets, his generally winning personality throughout the whole rise to fame - he seems like a genuinely good dude.  But this album is dudu.

Chris Rock!  Vince Staples!  Other famous-looking people I should probably know!  The beat is undeniable.  The lyrics are horrific.  I will not save this album for any reason."

So you liked it?!?!  His real name is Montero Lamar Hill (thus the name of his one album, Montero), and he is originally from a small town called Lithia Springs, Georgia.  His Wikipedia says that he was named after the Mitsubishi Montero truck.  Which is awesome.  While "Old Town Road" was decimating the charts, X came out as gay, which is purportedly the first time someone has ever come out at the time that they had the number one record.  He lived with his mom in Atlanta for a while before moving out of town with his dad, to another small Georgia town.  He enrolled at the University of West Georgia, but dropped out to work on his music, living on his sister's couch and working crappy jobs.  He started writing and recording in his closet, and came up with his name as an homage to the rapper Nas.  His first album was uploaded to Soundcloud, but later got pulled down because of copyright issues.

For "Old Town Road," he rather famously bought the beat for the song anonymously on beat-selling platform Beatstars from Dutch producer YoungKio for $30  The beat samples Nine Inch Nails' track "34 Ghosts IV" from their sixth studio album Ghosts I–IV.  He recorded at a "humble" Atlanta studio, CinCoYo, on their "$20 Tuesdays," taking less than an hour.  He then promoted the crap out of it on TikTok, making over 100 memes to promote the track, and it finally took off months later because of a #yeehaw challenge on TikTok.  It later gained controversial fame when Billboard removed it from the Country charts because it wasn't country enough, causing pundits to call that move racist.  Billy Ray Cyrus emerged from the ashes of his career to make the first remix, and that is when the tune really blew up, breaking Drake's record for the most US streams in one week.

His one album came out in 2021, named Montero, and of course it landed amid controversy. The video for the title track shows him grinding on Satan's crotch and it got the evangelicals all in a tizzy.  Which was, of course, the whole point.  Nothing on here is nearly as catchy as the "Old Town Road" business.  It's all kind of gently boring trap rap stuff (except for "Lost in the Citadel," which makes me think of all of these goofy Blink 182 wannabe bands) or R&B stuff like most rappers angle for these days.  Probably the best track is the one with Jack Harlow, "Industry Baby."  He has a bunch of other A-List guests here - Miley Cyrus, Doja Cat, Elton John, Megan Thee Stallion - but the key to the album is his extremely personal lyrics.  "Don't Want It" is a good example of that, rapping about having to smoke himself to sleep and taking too many shots.  While I just called the album "gently boring," and I stand by that, I just discovered that NPR named the title track as the 2021 song of the year.  Which is kind of insane.  I know the video was a hot button source of social media fire - including a lap dance for Satan - but the song isn't that interesting at all.  I guess this album is having more of a social impact on the world, and to LGBTQIA folks, than to me personally.  The title track is, just barely, the stream hit with over 1.49 billion streams.  Getting funky with Satan must have worked for marketing!

I mean, that's just dumb and funny.  I don't know why people get all up in arms about stupid stuff.  Other tracks have a lot of streams, but interestingly it goes that one, then "Industry Baby" with 1.47 million, "Thats What I Want" with 690 million, and then "Sun Goes Down" with 134 million.  Those tracks are all over the album, there is no real pattern to where the popular songs are in the track listing. A few songs on here are just bad - I do not enjoy the poppy enthusiasm of "That's What I Want" or the "Lost in the Citadel" one mentioned earlier.  But I also know that the lyrics on this album really aren't aimed for me.  When he's singing "Sun Goes Down" to his childhood self (and other kids who aren't sure about themselves), that isn't resonating much with me anymore.  The album overall is fine, but nothing that I need to keep forever.

I actually read an article somewhere, I can't recall where anymore, but maybe it was Rolling Stone, where a black gay man was talking about how vitally important this album had become to him, because it brought much needed representation to his self.  He talked about getting married to his husband and blasting on of the songs at the reception, embracing the joy it brought and the freedom of expression that had previously been missing in his world.  I'm glad that this music is doing that for folks.  It gave me a new perspective on it all.  I won't go see the show, but I'm glad that he's got a slot on the top line of this poster for all of the people who never saw someone rise that high before.