In honor of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary year, we’re looking back at the top artists, songs, albums, and producers of “The Genius Era,” 2009 to the present.
Lil Nas X wasn’t supposed to have a second No. 1 hit. His first chart-topper, 2019’s “Old Town Road,” had all the makings of a good old-fashioned fluke. Here was a country-trap novelty whose extreme popularity—a record-breaking 19 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100—derived in part from its silly lyrical juxtapositions, its corresponding viral dance craze, and the presence of Miley Cyrus’ dad on the remix. Not to mention the “yeehaw agenda,” a celebration of Black cowboy culture that happened to bubble up around the same time.
Everyone knew Lil Nas X had been some combination of clever and lucky. The cynical move was to overemphasize the latter.
In the immediate aftermath of “Old Town Road,” Lil Nas X seemed to confirm this suspicion. Although his follow-up single, the low-key brilliant “Panini,” reached an impressive No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, the song made nothing like the cultural impact of its predecessor. Nas followed that with “Rodeo,” a vaguely Western-flavored “Old Town” callback featuring Cardi B on the regular version and the original Nas on the remix, and “HOLIDAY,” a more conventional hip-hop track that revealed a telling level of self-awareness: “Bitch, even if I started floppin’, there’d be fashion.” Neither cracked the Top 20.
Fortunately, this wasn’t the start of a flop era. Lil Nas X came back strong in March 2021 with “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name),” a banjo-inflected, quasi-Middle Eastern, reggaeton-ish pop oddity about thirsting over a closeted dude who parties a little too hard. It’s also a song about self-acceptance—Lil Nas X came out as gay midway through his “Old Town Road” chart run—and the second verse allows the singer-rapper to contemplate how his life has changed since he became an unexpected mainstream superstar.
A sign of the times every time that I speak
A dime and a nine, it was mine every week
What a time, an incline, God was shinin’ on me
Now I can’t leave
And now I’m actin’ hella elite
Co-produced by the duo Take a Daytrip, who also worked on “Panini,” “Rodeo,” and “HOLIDAY,” “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” is an unconventionally appealing piece of pop music that didn’t sound like anything else on the radio in 2021. But that’s not really why it’s the year’s top hip-hop song on Genius according to pageviews. A huge part of the song’s success is down to the gleefully blasphemous, conservative-baiting music video, which finds Lil Nas X getting banished from the Garden of Eden, descending into Hell on a stripper pole, and giving Satan a lap dance. Director Tanu Muino borrowed parts of the concept from FKA twigs’ “Cellophane” clip, but the playfully subversive end result is pure Lil Nas X.
To promote the song, Nas released 666 pairs of “Satan Shoes,” Nike Air Max 97s emblazoned with pentagrams and made with paint containing drops of human blood. Nike sued, bringing even more attention to the whole thing. As Madonna, Lady Gaga, and about a dozen ’80s metal bands can attest, accusations of sacrilege and devil worship are great for business.
The song itself has none of that demonic stuff. “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” gets its title from Lil Nas X’s real name, Montero Lamar Hill, and from the 2017 film adaptation of the novel Call Me By Your Name, a gay coming-of-age drama that Nas watched just before writing the song. The lyrics were directly inspired by a pandemic-era fling Nas had with a fellow artist. The song starts off simply enough, with Nas craving a little human contact after months of isolation.
I caught it bad yesterday
You hit me with a call to your place
Ain’t been out in a while anyway
Was hoping I could catch you throwin' smiles in my face
It gets a little deeper in the pre-chorus, where Nas worries about this man’s overindulgence in drugs and alcohol and his inability to be open about his sexuality.
Cocaine and drinkin’ with your friends
You live in the dark, boy, I cannot pretend
I’m not fazed, only here to sin
If Eve ain’t in your garden, you know that you can
Things turn “desperate” in the second verse, Nas admitted on an episode of the Genius series Verified, as the narrator hopes to take the place of drugs in his partner’s life.
I wanna sell what you’re buying
I wanna feel on your ass in Hawaii
I want that jet lag from fucking and flying
Shoot a child in your mouth while I’m riding
That last line is fairly explicit, especially for an openly gay artist addressing a same-sex partner, and that was very intentional. “Let’s normalize having these lines in songs the same way somebody might talk about fucking a girl or fucking a guy with opposite genders,” Nas told Genius. “I feel like that’s really important for representation in general.”
Lil Nas X wasn’t only looking to make pop radio safe for gay expressions of lust. He released “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” alongside an open letter to his closeted 14-year-old self, and it speaks to the song’s larger purpose.
“I know we promised to never come out publicly, I know we promised to never be ‘that’ type of gay person, I know we promised to die with the secret, but this will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist,” Nas wrote. “You see this is very scary for me, people will be angry, they will say I’m pushing an agenda. But the truth is, I am. The agenda to make people stay the fuck out of other people’s lives and stop dictating who they should be. Sending you love from the future.”
After “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name),” Lil Nas X didn’t have to wait long for his next chart-topper. In July 2021, he teamed up with rapper Jack Harlow for “Industry Baby,” which reached the summit of the Hot 100 in October. Both singles appeared on Nas’s debut album, MONTERO, which arrived in September and peaked at No. 2 on both the U.S. and U.K. charts.
Two years later, Lil Nas X remains a bona fide A-lister who’s placed 17 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. Five of those have gone Top 10, and three of those hit No. 1. He’s bigger than any one song, though “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” may well echo through everything he does going forward.
“It’s brought a new confidence out of me,” Nas said of “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” in an interview with Zane Lowe. “To be able to say, ‘You know what? I want to do this.’ And I don’t give a fuck who’s upset about it. I feel like the moment I put this snippet out of this song, I just started to see a shift in myself gradually. The world’s going to keep spinning. But I can do what I want in my own artistic career at all times or I’m going to fail, for me at least. That’s how I feel.”
