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Meet the young man behind "Old Town Road".
I'm a subscriber to Rolling Stone and I happened to read this bio/interview on Lil Naz X. I had no idea he was so young or that this was his first endeavor into music. Still unjaded by fame & fortune, he was living on his sister's couch when he recorded the song for a grand total of $30.
He had no background of being a street gangsta or abusing women, just a young guy with hopes of being a surgeon one day. I was extremely impressed and thoroughly enjoyed the article. I should probably listen to the song now. haha
Check it out:
Lil Nas X: Inside the Rise of a Hip-Hop Cowboy
Lil Nas X made the biggest hit of 2019 for $30. Now he just wants to keep on riding
On a sleepy Monday morning at the horse stables in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, Lil Nas X has got exactly one horse in the back.
Nas — real name Montero Hill — is the 20-year-old rapper and internet savant behind the unlikeliest hit single of this (or any) year: the hip-hop-country crossover “Old Town Road.” A few months ago, he was a college dropout living on his sister’s couch in Atlanta with a negative balance in his Wells Fargo account. Now, he’s crushed Drake’s single-week streaming record and had the Number One song in the country for five weeks straight, somehow fending off a new Taylor Swift song from the top spot. As he himself puts it, “Time’s been going pretty fast.”
The “Old Town Road” video currently has 66 million plays on YouTube, and it would probably have more — except Nas made it himself before he got famous, so it’s just the song playing over clips from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. Now that he’s a major-label recording star, he needs a real video, preferably with real horses.
That’s where Scott Perez comes in. A ruddy fortysomething in jeans and dusty boots, Perez has been the lead horse wrangler for such TV shows as Godless and Westworld. “You ever ridden before?” Perez asks Nas as he ambles into the corral, lanky six-foot-two frame in skinny jeans and shoebox-fresh Vans.
“Nope,” Nas says cheerily.
“Well — first time for everything,” Perez says. “We’ll get you on and let you ride for a while, just to make sure you’re comfortable. And if at any point you want to get off, it’s totally cool.”
“I got you,” says Nas, smiling.
If Lil Nas X seems good at rolling with the flow, he’s been doing it a lot lately. As recently as February, he’d barely left northern Georgia. In March, he flew to New York to meet with managers and sign his record deal. It was his second time on an airplane. (His first was to Texas, to visit his stepsister at the Army base where she was stationed.) A few weeks later, he traveled to L.A. for the first time, and learned “Old Town Road” had hit Number One on his 20th birthday. Recently, almost every day has been the most surreal day of his life, until the next day.
Which may explain why this morning, sitting atop a brown-and-white horse named Scout, Nas has the calm confidence of a man who always expected to be learning to ride a horse so he can shoot the video for his global smash. As he fiddles with the reins, a second trainer, Bobby Lovgren (Seabiscuit, War Horse), gives him some instruction, while Perez’s son Tristen — 12, precocious, and a big Lil Nas X fan — looks on.
Continued here:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-interview-new-album-836393/
Lil Nas X made the biggest hit of 2019 for $30. Now he just wants to keep on riding
On a sleepy Monday morning at the horse stables in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, Lil Nas X has got exactly one horse in the back.
Nas — real name Montero Hill — is the 20-year-old rapper and internet savant behind the unlikeliest hit single of this (or any) year: the hip-hop-country crossover “Old Town Road.” A few months ago, he was a college dropout living on his sister’s couch in Atlanta with a negative balance in his Wells Fargo account. Now, he’s crushed Drake’s single-week streaming record and had the Number One song in the country for five weeks straight, somehow fending off a new Taylor Swift song from the top spot. As he himself puts it, “Time’s been going pretty fast.”
The “Old Town Road” video currently has 66 million plays on YouTube, and it would probably have more — except Nas made it himself before he got famous, so it’s just the song playing over clips from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. Now that he’s a major-label recording star, he needs a real video, preferably with real horses.
That’s where Scott Perez comes in. A ruddy fortysomething in jeans and dusty boots, Perez has been the lead horse wrangler for such TV shows as Godless and Westworld. “You ever ridden before?” Perez asks Nas as he ambles into the corral, lanky six-foot-two frame in skinny jeans and shoebox-fresh Vans.
“Nope,” Nas says cheerily.
“Well — first time for everything,” Perez says. “We’ll get you on and let you ride for a while, just to make sure you’re comfortable. And if at any point you want to get off, it’s totally cool.”
“I got you,” says Nas, smiling.
If Lil Nas X seems good at rolling with the flow, he’s been doing it a lot lately. As recently as February, he’d barely left northern Georgia. In March, he flew to New York to meet with managers and sign his record deal. It was his second time on an airplane. (His first was to Texas, to visit his stepsister at the Army base where she was stationed.) A few weeks later, he traveled to L.A. for the first time, and learned “Old Town Road” had hit Number One on his 20th birthday. Recently, almost every day has been the most surreal day of his life, until the next day.
Which may explain why this morning, sitting atop a brown-and-white horse named Scout, Nas has the calm confidence of a man who always expected to be learning to ride a horse so he can shoot the video for his global smash. As he fiddles with the reins, a second trainer, Bobby Lovgren (Seabiscuit, War Horse), gives him some instruction, while Perez’s son Tristen — 12, precocious, and a big Lil Nas X fan — looks on.
Continued here:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-interview-new-album-836393/
7 replies
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