Wrangler On His Booty: Lil Nas X On The Making And The Magic Of ‘Old Town Road’

Magical things keep happening to Lil Nas X. Crazy, serendipitous things. Take last Sunday, just two days before his 20^th birthday: He’s sitting in the stands at L.A.’s Staples Center, when out of nowhere the ball in play falls into his possession. “Like literally, I was at the Lakers game, and the ball flew in my hands,” he says. “It was just a sign in a way. Or, at least, that’s how I felt. And I’m not even a superstitious person, but yeah.”

The next day he met an even bigger fate. Having already consumed the nation in a debate over race, genre and their unholy miscegenation over the last century in the music industry, his country-trap ditty “Old Town Road” topped the Billboard Hot 100. It wasn’t totally unexpected, especially after he released a twangy remix last Friday featuring another country disrupter, Billy Ray Cyrus. But in the aftermath of Billboard removing “Old Town Road” from the Hot Country Songs chart the week prior — while declaring that the song “does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music” — his success proves the gatekeepers comically incapable of reining him in as he hops genres, busts formats and breaks all the old-school taboos.

Every few years it feels like another artist emerges from Atlanta who challenges tradition and reinvents the sound of music. It’s something hip-hop heads and pop prognosticators have been hyper-tuned to over the last decade. What we’re still learning to grasp is how a generation of digital natives is reconfiguring the way songs are made, marketed, even manipulated online for mass consumption. Lil Nas X happens to be expert at all of the above — an Atlanta-based artist who’s an Internet baby, first and foremost, raised on a steady diet of memes. Among the last decade’s rotating cast of ATLiens, his blueprint bears more in common with Soulja Boy’s early social media sorcery than Future‘s modulated robocroon.