Lil Nas X

Montero Lamar Hill (born April 9, 1999), known professionally as Lil Nas X, is an American rapper, singer and songwriter.[4] He came to international attention for his country rap single "Old Town Road", which first achieved viral popularity on the micro-platform video sharing app TikTok in early 2019, and was Diamond Certified by November the same year.[a][5][6][7] The song reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 and remained there for nineteen weeks, the longest for a song since the chart started in 1958.[8][9][10][11] In June 2019, Nas X came out as gay, the only artist ever to have done so while having a number-one record.[12][13] "Old Town Road" earned him two MTV Video Music Awards including Song of the Year; the American Music Award for Favorite Rap/Hip Hop Song; and Nas X is the only openly LGBTQ artist to win a Country Music Association award.[14][15][16]He has been nominated for six Grammy Awards, the most for any male in 2019, including Record of the Year, Album of the Year and Best New Artist. Montero Lamar Hill was born in Lithia Springs, Georgia,[19] a small city outside of Atlanta, on April 9, 1999.[20] His parents divorced when he was six,[21] and he settled in the Bankhead Courtshousing project with his mother and grandmother. Three years later, he moved in with his father, a gospel singer,[21] north of the city in Austell, Georgia. Although initially reluctant to leave, he later regarded it as an important decision: "There's so much shit going on in Atlanta—if I would have stayed there, I would have fallen in with the wrong crowd."[22] He started “using the Internet heavily right around the time when memes started to become their own form of entertainment”; about when he was thirteen.[23]

He spent much of his teenage years alone, and turned to the Internet, “particularly Twitter, creating memes that showed his disarming wit and pop-culture savvy.”[21] His teenage years also saw him struggling with his coming out to himself as being gay; he prayed that it was just a phase,[24][25] but around sixteen or seventeen he came to accept it.[26] He began playing trumpet in the fourth grade and was first chair by his junior high years, but quit out of fear of looking uncool.[27]

Internet personality (2015–2017)
Hill said he began to isolate himself from "outside-of-class activities" during his teenage years. He spent large amounts of time online in hopes of building a following as an internet personality to promote his work, but was unsure what to focus on creatively. In a Rolling Stone interview he stated, "I was doing Facebook comedy videos, then I moved over to Instagram, and then I hopped on Twitter ... where I really was a master. That was the first place where I could go viral."[30] As of August 2019 Nas X has: 2.3 million followers on Twitter; four million followers on Instagram; “5.2 million subscribers on YouTube, and over 44 million monthly listeners on Spotify.”[31] He posted short-format comedy videos on Facebook and Vine.[22]

During this period, he reportedly created and ran Nicki Minaj fan accounts on Twitter, including one called "@NasMaraj", according to a New York Magazine investigation.[32][33] In 2017, this account gained attention for its flash fiction-style interactive "scenario threads" popularized on Twitter using dashboard app TweetDeck.[34][35][32] The investigation linked @NasMaraj to the practice of "Tweetdecking", or using multiple accounts in collaboration to artificially make certain tweets go viral. The @NasMaraj account was suspended by Twitter due to "violating spam policies".[32] After the suspension of @NasMaraj, New York Magazine's investigation concluded that he subsequently opened a new account with handle "@NasMarai", and that his current Twitter account at the time was a repurposed version of that "@NasMarai" account with a changed handle.[32] After media reports linked Nas X to the Minaj fan accounts, he called the reports a "misunderstanding", effectively denying having run the accounts.