Trivia / Lil Nas X

• Acting for Two:
  • In the video for "Holiday", he portrays Santa Claus, a workshop elf, and two separate toy figures come to life.
  • In the video for "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)", he plays all of the on-screen characters except for Satan.
  • Portrays himself, an energetic talk show host named Montero, and an enthusiastic audience member with an afro in his sketch "The Montero Show".
• Approval of God:
  • Shortly after "Old Town Road", whose instrumental samples Nine Inch Nails' "34 Ghosts IV", began gaining traction online, Nas' manager reached out to NIN frontman Trent Reznor in hopes of clearing the sample. Trent approved, calling the song "undeniably hooky" and wanting Nas and his people to own the spotlight so much that he refrained from publicly discussing it at length and even turned down an offer to cameo in the music video.
  • Nas also performed a cover of Dolly Parton's "Jolene", which Parton herself enjoyed.
• Breakthrough Hit: And how! "Old Town Road" took him from just another SoundCloud rapper into superstardom.
• Executive Meddling: Billboard pulled "Old Town Road" off the Hot Country Songs charts after only one week upon determining that the song did not qualify as country.
• Trolling Creator: A staple of his online presence.
  • In response to the "Satan shoes" controversy, he put out a video in which he apologizes for the shoe...or not; just as he's about to do so, the video then cuts to the lapdance scene from the "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)" video.
  • Shortly after releasing the video for "Industry Baby", which includes a scene of him and a group of men dancing naked in a shower with pixelated censorship, he released an uncensored version of the video...which pretends to buffer right before the aforementioned scene and continues "buffering" for the rest of the song.
  • In a similar vein as the Satan shoes video, he took to Twitter to promote a response video to Boosie and T.I., who had made homophobic comments about the "Industry Baby" video, offering a presumable thumbnail and link...which went directly to the "Industry Baby" video.
  • For a while, it was common for detractors to spam "youngboy better" under Lil Nas X's tweets, in reference to a meme about the rapper NBA Youngboy. Then he dropped the single "Late to da Party", which contains a verse from NBA Youngboy himself.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Jack Harlow tweeted that "if [Lil Nas X] had asked [him] to be in that shower scene, [he] woulda been in that shower scene" in the "Industry Baby" video.
  • Nas asked Trent Reznor to appear in the "Old Town Road" music video, but Reznor declined as he didn't want to detract attention from Nas himself.
  • Nas attempted to get features from Drake and Nicki Minaj on Montero, wanting them respectively on "Dolla Sign Slime" and "Industry Baby", though neither ultimately happened.

---