Several remixes of the song were released, the most popular of which featured country singer Billy Ray Cyrus. "Old Town Road" spent 19 weeks atop the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, becoming the longest-running number-one song since the chart debuted in 1958. He rose to prominence with the release of his country rap single " Old Town Road", which first achieved viral popularity in early 2019 before climbing music charts internationally and becoming diamond certified by November of that same year. The advertisers look likely to be beating a path to his door for a long time yet.Montero Lamar Hill (born April 9, 1999), known by his stage name Lil Nas X ( / n ɑː z/ NAHZ), is an American rapper and singer. On the evidence of Montero – an album from which you could excerpt pretty much any track and be rewarded with a hit – he needn’t worry. “Never forget me and everything I’ve done,” he sings, as if he expects his current flush of success to be fleeting. Instead, the closer is Am I Dreaming?, a troubled ballad featuring a wracked-sounding Miley Cyrus. You expect the album to collect itself and end on an optimistic note, but it doesn’t. These are about depression, loneliness – Void appears to be addressed to Lil Nas X’s stylist Hodo Musa, and appears to suggest theirs is the closest relationship in his life – and his grim adolescence, marked by parental abuse and struggles with his sexuality, and enlivened only by his life online, “stanning Nicki morning into dawn”. Out go the crowing and the guest appearances from Megan Thee Stallion, in come more bleakly affecting songs. It’s front-loaded with tracks that strut and boast, before the emotional temperature suddenly plummets. There is a real confidence about its variety – presumably bolstered both by his success to date and the fact that he can sing as well as he can rap – and a confidence, too, about its structure.
Frankly, it would be a fantastic album whether or not it featured Lil Nas X snapping “I ain’t talking guns when I ask where your dick at” on Scoop, or opened with a track berating a publicly straight man he’s been shagging on the quiet.Ĭover art for Montero. “Just stick to what you’re good at,” he advises a rival, witheringly, “I suggest you make another one like that”.
It seems appropriate that the aforementioned Taco Bell ad shows him performing That’s What I Want accompanied by a band staffed by multiple versions of himself in a nod to the video for Outkast’s Hey Ya! – not just because That’s What I Want’s breezy rhythm and acoustic guitar riff is audibly influenced by it but because Lil Nas X himself recalls Outkast’s André 3000, both in his ballsy approach to matters sartorial and in his disinclination to be artistically hemmed in. Song for song, Montero has more hooks – and stickier ones – than any other big rap album thus far released in 2021: the indelible chorus of That’s What I Want, the luminous tune at odds with Tales of Dominica’s disconsolate lyrics Dead Right Now, which is rich and luscious enough to get listeners checking the credits to see what 70s soul track it samples, only to discover it’s original.
The genre-hopping is unified by melodies. It hits an impressively eclectic sweet spot between hip-hop and pop, leaping confidently from trap beats and martial horns to grinding, distorted hard rock from music that recalls early 00s R&B to stadium ballads. What Montero proves is that he requires absolutely no special pleading. A cynic would say that Lil Nas X has been a beneficiary of the ongoing culture war that liberal voices would feel duty-bound to praise his work to the skies.