Since exploding onto the scene with “Old Town Road” in 2018, Lil Nas X has made it clear that he’s the real deal—not only a reliable hitmaker and Twitter savant, but also a boundary-pushing performer and veritable style icon. (It’s little wonder that we tapped him to help spread the word about Vogue World: New York on September 12.) But if you thought that you knew all there was to know about the 23-year-old by now, think again. Here, we round up some little-known facts about the Grammy-winning rapper.
1. His stage name was inspired by a “stan” account he once ran on Twitter
Born Montero Lamar Hill in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Lil Nas X lifted the “Nas” in his stage name from @nasmaraj, a Nicki Minaj fan account that he started on Twitter as a teenager. “I felt like [Minaj] was unique to the rap industry—somebody who is super talented but didn’t get all the credit because of her being a woman,” he told Variety of his young standom. “She’s super outspoken, she’s a boss and she goes after what she wants. I love all those attributes.”
2. Musical talent runs in his family
Not only is Lil Nas X’s father, R.L. Stafford, a gospel singer—he can be heard in the choir on the Montero song “Dead Right Now”—but the star’s brother, an emerging music producer, played an important role in his early career. “It’s insane ’cause we were together for the first five months of me making music,” Nas explained to Zane Lowe, before his brother (who goes by the name CloudJay) joined the military. “Boom, he leaves; two months later, I put out my first hit song.”
3. He loves a good self-help book
In an interview with GQ Style last year, Lil Nas X provided a long list of “self-discovery” books that he’d read and loved, including Keana Henson’s The Rose Effect: Eight Steps to Delivering the Performance of Your Life, Don Ruiz’s The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, and Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
4. The cover of his debut album has a layered origin story
The vivid artwork for Montero was inspired by artist John Stephens’s computer-generated Genesis II, a picture that Lil Nas X first encountered “in this guy who I was dating’s dorm room.” Its title refers to a chapter in the Bible: “I read it and it’s the final day of God making his work and he’s resting,” Lil Nas X told Lowe. It seemed fitting. “That, for me, it’s like, ‘Okay, I’ve been making this [album]. I’ve been creating this. This is the final day and it’s out to the world.’”
5. He cites a certain, ahem, trip as a formative creative experience
Lil Nas X worked with producing partners Denzel Baptiste and David Biral—together known as Take a Daytrip—on Montero during the pandemic, holing up in different Airbnbs. He revealed to WSJ. Magazine that trying psychedelic mushrooms for the first time (under his friends’ careful supervision) made him bolder and more honest in his songwriting. “I was able to open up a lot…I was able to write actual stories about my life and put it into my music. I actually did that for the first time.”
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