With a cream colored hat and teeth adorned in diamonds, Lil Nas X is on the cover of Teen Vogue‘s June issue.
The way that the “Old Town Road” rapper looks on the cover is as if he’s smugly grinning at all of the backlash that he’s received lately since releasing the aforementioned song.
In the issue, the “Internet baby” opens up about fame, frenzy, and the virality of sound in what is his first ever cover story.
The Atlanta native, whose given name is Montero Lamar Hill, was initially an internet savvy meme-maker before becoming a viral sensation for his rap-country song that sent country purists and racists into a frenzy.
“I was always making memes, and now I have music,” Lil Nas X said.
The viral rapper didn’t begin making music until spring 2018, when he was a computer science major in college.
“I was doing good in school, but I didn’t want to do school anymore,” the rapper said. He dropped out of college in July 2018 and released his first EP, Nasarati, on Soundcloud.
Lil Nas X said that he first began creating music out of boredom, but after things began to come together, it was something that he knew he wanted to do.
“At first, I was just bored, like, ‘Hey, Twitter, I made a song,’” he said. “But I’m like, ‘Wait, this is really hard.’ Then I made another one, and it didn’t make any noise. I was overtrying. A lot of it was me trying to be something that people would like instead of making music that I would like. Around my fifth song, the melodies and flows were coming to my head with no effort. I was like, ‘This is something I want to do.’”