What Can Possibly Be Next for Lil Nas X?

It's Saturday morning, and Lil Nas X is spent. At an hour when many 20-year-olds are still sleeping off last night, he's under the hot lights of a studio in downtown L.A., fielding on-camera questions from his fans on the internet. He does everything that's asked of him, even delivers two line readings of the dictated script, but when the camera is off, he goes slack. “I'm sorry, I'm tired,” he says.

This is not a solitary, one-rough-morning kind of sleepy (although maybe it's that too). What it more closely resembles is the chronic exhaustion—that sadistic combination of isolation and vigilance and personal sacrifice—of the new parent, which, in a way, is what he is: Nas X's career as a celebrity is still in its infancy and must be tended to at all times. If he leaves it alone for even a second, he senses, something disastrous might happen.

You can't blame the guy for wanting to protect and grow the thing he's made, and you also can't blame him for needing a break from it. Nas X is living a year that is unimaginable to anyone on the sidelines. Today he's promoting “Panini,” the second single off his EP, 7, whose video, after two weeks, has been viewed more than 65 million times on YouTube. But when you consider that the track's predecessor is the record-shattering, genre-straddling juggernaut “Old Town Road,” a song that leapt out of the internet last spring to surpass such titans as Drake and Bieber and Swift—not to mention Elvis, Madonna, the Beatles, and all the rest—to become the longest-running No. 1 song in Billboard history (the “Official Movie” remix with Billy Ray Cyrus has more than 355 million views on YouTube), you understand how high the bar for Nas X has been set.

The meme-like appeal of “Old Town Road,” a two-minute PG-rated trap-country ditty—front-loaded with frontier imagery, delivered with an attitude of gently defiant individualism, and leavened by goofiness—managed to transcend America's combustible on-the-ground culture wars and prove irresistible to a shockingly broad audience: “Old Town Road,” it seemed, was one thing many people could agree on. Kids love it. Barack Obama loves it. My yoga teacher loves it. But of course, this being America, it was a whiff of scandal that ultimately tipped the song into the stratosphere.

In March, shortly after “Old Town Road” charted, Billboard declared it ineligible in the country category, a decision many regarded as a barely veiled Get off my lawn-style message from Nashville. As it happened, the remix with Cyrus was already in the works—a generous-spirited creative co-signing that doubled as a slick piece of business, since veteran Cyrus lent newcomer Nas X some institutional-country cred while gaining an injection of cultural relevance for himself (bringing new audiences to both in the process). When the remix dropped the following week, it shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and parked there. And then, having scaled those impossible heights and surveyed the view, Nas X came out in a series of tweets at the end of June, a glorious assertion of identity that transcended the petty ground wars playing out below him: Nas X is more than a song or a genre. Embedded in the runaway success of this apolitical bonbon of a single was a second, more radical statement, presented in the guise of indisputable fact: For 19 consecutive weeks in 2019, the most popular song in the world was a country tune by a gay black rapper.

Watch:

Lil Nas X Goes Undercover on Reddit, Twitter and Instgram

Swaddled in a black waffle-weave robe, Nas X beaches himself on a low-slung sofa in a dim corner of the studio, rests his chin on folded hands, and yawns. With the gentle din of the caterer unloading lunch in the background, and everyone (wardrobe, makeup, producers, publicist, P.A.) temporarily turning their backs to us, conditions are possibly too relaxing. Nas X flutters his eyes closed. And then, like a dragon that had momentarily forgotten about its gold, and its enemies, he blinks them back open and props himself up on his elbows, ready to go.

This time last year, Nas X was sleeping on the floor of his sister's house in Georgia—but actually he wasn't sleeping much at all. He had just dropped out of college to pursue music full-time, had zero income, and was “leeching off family members,” he says, to get by. Days and nights were spent online, promoting his music. “I was feeling very stressed and afraid for my health,” he recalls. “Just being in a place where you're not knowing exactly what's going to happen, how long it's going to take.”

On December 2, 2018, he posted a snippet of “Old Town Road” on Twitter and shortly thereafter threw it on SoundCloud. It wasn't quite as naive a gesture as tossing a penny in the well and making a wish—by design the song had broad appeal, and over the years Nas X had cultivated an online audience and some skill at marketing his work on social media—but it wasn't too far off. Still he was optimistic. “I thought it was definitely something that was gonna put me on another level of people knowing who I was,” he says. “It's something you can actually listen to as well as something you can laugh to.” He generated memes and worked comment threads to direct attention to the track, which soon found traction in the meme community. During this time, he says, “I'm sitting back looking at numbers but also promoting the shit out of it, 'cause it's moving so fast, but you want to keep the momentum going. You don't want to try to move on too quickly.”

After the song made its way to the social media video-sharing platform TikTok in March, Nas's life entered warp speed: hitting the charts, signing with Columbia, collaborating with Cyrus—all within a few weeks. In April he performed live, for the first time ever, with Cyrus and Diplo at Stagecoach, in front of thousands of fans. To go from anonymity behind a screen to major public debut seems a freaky leap, I say, but Nas literally yawns (again). “No, not really, just 'cause I had been building up to that moment. I knew it was coming. And even posting that first video, [where I'm] dancing to the song, was kind of breaking that mold of more confidence to do that, so it wasn't anything crazy.” And this is kind of the point: For Nas, who grew up on the internet—taking refuge in it, fucking around on it, finding community in it—the distinction between the online world and the quote-unquote real one is fluid, essentially nonexistent. A stage is a stage.

He remembers first going online at seven, logging on to “the big bad computer at the library—I'd be playing games and on YouTube. It was good times.” As a kid, he moved around a bit, living mostly with his father and various configurations of siblings and stepsiblings (Nas X is the baby) outside Atlanta. He'd always been a good student, but by 14 he was increasingly applying his aptitude toward figuring out the internet, he says, “seeing how people respond to certain situations and stuff, and seeing the things that become trends and go viral. Learning how the internet works is a lot how the world works, in a way.”

Nas X's familiarity with the tidal forces of virality—the way it thrusts you up and just as swiftly will knock you back down—prepared him for the inevitable confrontations to come. During the Billboard brouhaha, people wanted him to react. When, during a televised conversation, Kevin Hart appeared to be dismissive of the bravery required to come out as a gay black rapper, people wanted Nas X to be outraged out loud. But whatever his private feelings, he has publicly shrugged these things off. “I think just me, being a troll myself, helps [me] not really care too much about what commentators said. Because I know how I was when I was in that position. I had nothing going on and I was a hater, so I understand the position.” His strategy for slaying troll armies, he says, is simple: “The only way to fight it is to keep succeeding. It's the only thing. Because…people want to see you win, but not win too much.”

Of his decision to come out, which he did on the last day of Pride Month, Nas says, “I'm in a position where I can do whatever I do, kinda, so it's like, Why not? Who's gonna stop me? kind of thing.” It was also an effort to control his own story, to remain the sole owner of it, to retain the power. “One hundred percent. That's what I wanted to do. [The response] was overwhelming support, and it blocked out any negativity.” He's in a relationship now but admits, “It's kinda hard.”

Are you always surrounded by people?

“I feel surrounded but still alone, somehow.”

Kind of like being on the internet?

“Yeah, in a way. I feel like everything has changed but everything's the same.”

As we talk, his attention slides in and out of focus. Sometimes, when mulling a response, he taps soft codes on his left palm like it's a phone he's texting on, or repeats questions slowly, word by word, as if translating from moon language. He's tried meditating to center himself, he says, “but it just became me realizing that I was just trying to hurry up and open my eyes more than actually meditate.” Every now and then he has a day off, “but I don't end up relaxing,” he says. “I just end up on my phone.”

Personal relationships, diet, sleep—these things fall by the wayside, because right now Lil Nas X is on a mission. “I feel like I'll always be able to maintain, but my focus is definitely on building. My only thing I do think about is already reaching so many tippy-top moments. Of course you can always make bigger moments in different fields.” Music, he explains, is just the beginning of his story. “Of course I'm going to do other things. Acting, modeling, fashion—I want to get into the gaming world somehow, because that's an industry that's about to really blow up more.” Whether you're hunting big game or scrambling to survive, it can be hard to know when and if to put down your weapon, and Nas freely acknowledges that “enough,” for him, is an alien concept. “I don't think that's a real thing. Once you feel like you've had enough, you're just waiting to die.

“Even right now, with this song—this is my currency, with ‘Panini,’ ” he says. He pauses, considering the motor of his relentless drive. “I don't know. It's just fear, I guess.”

Fear of what?

“Fear that everything is going to go back to how I was.”

Caroline McCloskey is a writer living in Los Angeles. She wrote the June cover story on Seth Rogen and the October profile of DJ Harvey.

A version of this story originally appeared in the December/January 2020 issue with the title “Lil Nas X.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Michael Schmelling
Styled by Jon Tietz
Grooming by Miyako J. Beauty using Pat McGrath Labs and Scotch Porter
Prop stylist: James M. Rene
Production by Annee Elliot

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Originally Appeared on GQ