Man Of The Moment: Like A Supernova

In a matter of months, Lil Nas X has experienced the delirious spectrum of emotion that comes with overnight success – from the glorious highs of “Old Town Road”, including five Grammy noms, to the relentless demands of sudden fame

- Lil Nas X

It’s Saturday morning, and Lil Nas X is spent. At an hour when many 20-year-olds are still sleeping off last night, he’s under the hot lights of a studio in downtown LA, fielding on-camera questions from his fans on the internet. He does everything that’s asked of him, even delivers two line readings of the dictated script, but when the camera is off, he goes slack. “I’m sorry, I’m tired,” he says.

This is not a solitary, one-rough-morning kind of sleepy (although, maybe it’s that too). What it more closely resembles is the chronic exhaustion – that sadistic combination of isolation and vigilance and personal sacrifice – of the new parent, which, in a way, is what he is: Nas X’s career as a celebrity is still in its infancy and must be tended to at all times. If he leaves it alone for even a second, he senses, something disastrous might happen.

Nas X is living a year that is unimaginable to anyone on the sidelines. Today he’s promoting “Panini”, the second single off his EP, 7, whose video, after two weeks, has been viewed more than 65 million times on YouTube. But when you consider that the track’s predecessor is the record-shattering, genre-straddling juggernaut “Old Town Road”, a song that leapt out of the internet last spring to surpass titans such as Drake and Bieber and Swift – not to mention Elvis, Madonna, the Beatles and all the rest – to become the longest-running No 1 song in Billboard history, you understand how high the bar for Nas X has been set.