Before Lil Nas X social media numbers would explode with over 2 Million on Twitter and
3 million on Instagram to whom he would break that internet announcing on the last day of
pride that he was gay...
Before Lil Nas X would receive 5 Nominations for the 2019 Teen Choice Awards including
Breakout artist and Choice R&B & Hip Hop Song.
Before Old Town Road would become the number one song in the world currently going for
14 weeks straight and the music video would recruit some heavy hitter stars including
Rico Nasty, Vince Staples, Diplo, Chris Rock, HahaDavis and more...
Before Lil Nas X would shut down any talks about being a one hit wonder when he dropped
his follow up single Panini proving and would double down on his virality by hooking up
with the legend himelf, Gordan Ramsay for the Panini Remix...
Well they technically just made a panini together but they remixed the sandwich
The last half a year has been a whirlwind ride for Lil Nas X that could otherwise only
be scripted for a movie.
He went from making songs in his bedroom with just over $5 dollars in his bank account working
minimum wage jobs, to having the number one song in the world and performing in front
of hundreds of thousands of people of all ages screaming every word to his song.
Makes sense know knowing that he used to sit and study how to go viral and how to use the
internet as a marketing tool.
Most recently, Lil Nas came out as gay on the last day of pride month, and I have a
feeling the brave move will inspire so many kids out there who are feeling a similar way:
And before we get into the video we just want to say how happy we are for him at this channel
that he’s living his truth and we’re so proud of all of his incredible success.
He's also breaking down barriers and getting a lot more love than was previously expected
from the world of Country and Hip Hop.
We did a Before They Were Famous on Lil Nas X right as Old Town Road was blowing up and
he actually answered some of our questions via email…
I’ve got a feeling his inbox is a little bit crowded now a days but of course there
has been a ton on new info to update you guys on and that's what we do here.
What’s going on guys?
It’s your boy Michael McCrudden, here for you here with you an Updated Before They Were
Famous.
So much more information has come out since his break though and I've never seen someone
finesse the entertainment industry quite as flawlessly as Lil Nas X and ascend the ladder
to the top of the game as expertly as this man – in, well forever.
He will definitely make my list as one of the most famous people of 2019 probably nabbing
the number 1 spot.
As we do here, I’ve got a trivia question for you guys that I’ll answer a little later
in this video:
“Which band was sampled on Old Town Road?”
Place your guesses down below, now let’s get into the video!
Lil Nas X was born Montero Lamar Hill on April 9, 1999 in the Grady hospital in Atlanta Georgia.
Nas comes from a big family with 6 brothers, 5 of them his biological, and 4 sisters, 2
of them his biological.
He says that growing up around so many siblings they would fight all the time.
At around the age of 6 his parents split up and lil Montero was staying with his mom and
grandmother in the Bankhead courts public housing complex in Atlanta.
I looked this area up on YouTube and it appears it has since fallen on some hard times and
looks abandoned.
At around the age of 10, his dad won custody through what he referred to as a court battle,
and Nas moved to Austell Georgia to live with his dad.
At around the age of 14 he moved to Lithia Springs, Georgia, a small community with a
population of around 15,000 people.
Lil Nas told us that he lost contact with his mother shortly afterwards and still doesn’t
know what she is doing today.
But I have a feeling that she knows exactly what HE is doing, wherever she is.
It was Lil Nas’ father who inspired him to begin making music.
His dad was a warehouse worker, but was also a gospel singer with a beautiful voice and
growing up around that, Lil Nas was always interested in music.
In school, Lil Nas was academically gifted and was advanced in all of his classes, but
math was his favorite.
Luckily he gets to put that to use now adding up all of his streaming numbers… we've done
his The Rich Life and the kid is earning bank!
He attended Alfred Blalock elementary school, Lindsey middle school, and pebble brook high
school where he graduated at the top of his class.
But Before rapping on tracks, he was wrapping burritos, working at Taco Bell.
He also worked jobs at Six Flags and Zaxbys, all within the span of a year so that he could
put the money back into his music dream.
He says that it wasn’t just his dad’s musical abilities that inspired him, but the
fact that he helped pay for Nas’s phone bill, which was likely pretty high based on
his amount of tweets and instagram posts he was firing out at the time.
Lil Nas X has since stated:
“By paying my phone bill, he allowed me to promote my music heavier on the internet
through my twitter account.”
“My twitter mutuals helped me out a lot too.”
In his spare time, Lil Nas also loved watching cartoons, but before rapping, Nas loved to
play instruments.
He used to play the drums and Trumpet before shifting his focus into writing songs.
On coming up with his rap name, he told us:
“it was originally lil nas just to be ironic cause every new rapper’s name has lil lol.”
“Kinda got stuck with lil after building a small fanbase.”
“Added the x later on, standing for the amount of years until I feel like I will be
considered a legend”
In terms of his rap career, it all happened pretty fast and Lil Nas described it as:
“Honestly, I got bored last year and made a rap song.
People liked it.”
“I kept making them.
But I didn’t start taking music seriously until about my 5th song.”
His first ever online was song called Shame and his first mixtape was called Naserati.
Lil Nas put out close to 20 songs online before his big break would hit with Old Town Road.
But Lil Nas was no stranger to the internet.
He used to sit and study how to go viral and how to use the internet as a marketing tool.
In fact, there has been many rumors swirling around the internet that Lil Nas himself had
already gone viral pre OTR, but for different reasons besides music.
The internet recently found an old Nicki Minaj fan account called @NasMaraj that was allegedly
run by Lil Nas.
The account was running since October of 2014, and became a pretty large page growing to
over 100k Twitter followers through memes, viral tweet threads, choose your own adventure
games, and tweeting about Nicki.
The NasMinaj account was suspended for violating Twitter terms, so he a new account called
“NasMarai” was created, subbing the i for the j, and he had some pretty viral tweets
on there receiving close to 100 thousand RT’s on this:
As well as this one with close to 30k retweets:
The owner of the account was even interviewed by Buzzfeed after one of its memes went viral.
But it was eventually suspended for “tweetdecking.”
We’re still not 100% sure if it’s Lil Nas’s account but the dots seem to line
up pretty perfectly.
He's denied it but some online publications were able to trace these posts to his existing
Twitter page so it looks like the cats out the bag.
Either way, Lil Nas knew how to game the internet.
After high school, Lil Nas decided to attend college, getting accepted into West Georgia
University.
He attended classes for 8 months but dropped out to pursue his music career full time.
Although at the time, he wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to make it happen.
He would sit and dream about his success every night.
His dad wasn’t very pleased with Lil Nas’s decision to drop out of college, stating that
there are a million rappers in the industry and the chances of making it are one in a
million.
And while this is true, Lil Nas felt like he could be the one in a million.
He told us that he honestly never had a big inspiration, but that the internet as a whole
inspired him.
Besides Nicki Minaj fandom, Lil Nas spent his nights promoting his songs on Twitter
and making memes with his music in the background.
And he is an incredible meme maker.
At first, nothing was working.
He told Time magazine in an interview that he would:
“probably get three hours of sleep, staying up on the internet trying to promote my music
at my sister’s house before coming back home.”
“I would sleep on the floor – I didn’t want to come back home because I knew my parents
would be mad at me.”
At the time, his sister had just about had enough of Lil Nas and his music dreams.
He knew that if something didn’t happen soon then he would have to rethink his strategy.
One day, Nas stumbled across a beat on YouTube that sounded sort of like a Country song with
trap drums over top.
So he bought the beat from Young Kio’s online beat for 30 dollars.
Now THA, is a steal.
And the unique nature of the song, which was called Old Town Road, began to catch on through
the app Tic Toc with thousands of memes being made.
People would transform into cowboys when the beat dropped and the “horses in the back”
line was starting to be captioned everywhere.
On December 4, 2018 Lil Nas X posted a snippet of the song now titled “Old Town Road”
onto his Instagram.
People started to get curious about what sounded like a country trap song.
A week later Nas released the official song onto his Instagram using the app Triller with
the caption yeee haw
Videos also using the hastag yeehaw, which all have the song playing in the background,
had millions of views within a few months on Tic Toc and Twitter.
Then Justin Bieber posted a screenshot of the song and took it to the next level.
The song was streamed so much that it landed at number 19 on the Billboard Hot country
charts and it seemed like he was set for superstardom.
But Billboard removed the song from the country charts claiming that it didn’t embrace enough
elements of today’s country music.
Then the internet came to Lil Nas’s defense and the song was trending on Twitter a day
later.
But riding in on a horse came Billy Ray Cyrus with a fresh cowboy hat on and he reached
out to Lil Nas about hopping on the remix.
The remix was released onto YouTube and streaming services on April 4 and the audio has close
to 300 million views at the time of this recording.
The song ended up going number one in the world and becoming one of the most viral sensations
that we’ve seen in recent times.
Lil Nas signed a deal with Columbia and most recently he released his debut studio EP “7”
which includes the songs Panini and Rodeo with Cardi B. In our original conversation
with him, he said he wanted:
“To just keep making the music I feel like making, never want to be put in a box.
Get into acting, modeling and some other things.”
And he did just that, because the EP was charting on the country, hip-hop and rock charts.
And on the final song “Closure” he hinted at his announcement that would later come
on Twitter.
No more denying this guy.
And we have a feeling that he’s here to stay and will be around for
a long time.
I mean, Old Town Road even had a 9 Inch Nails sample on it.
And there you have your answer from the beginning of the video.
But as for the rest of the story, well you’ll have to wait and see because this is before
they were famous.
As always, my name is Michael McCrudden, be sure to check out some of our other bios and
let us know who is up next in the comments down below.