The Number Ones: Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” (Feat. Jack Harlow)

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

As I write this, Lil Nas X has been famous for about seven years. That's a large percentage of his life — the artist turned 20 the same week that "Old Town Road" reached #1 — but it's a short stretch of time by any other measure. In those seven years, Lil Nas X has lived a whole lot of life. You could make a multi-episode Behind The Music arc about those seven years. He is still a young man, and I hope his time in the public eye isn't done yet, but he has recently been in the proverbial dark fucking period. Before that turn, though, Lil Nas X scored a lot of triumphs. "Industry Baby" is his third Hot 100 chart-topper, which means it's one of those triumphs. The track is also about those triumphs. "Industry Baby" isn't the best victory-lap song you'll ever hear, but it's a good one.

Honestly, I'm just glad to write this column at a moment when things are once again looking up for Lil Nas X. His past few years have been rocky, and they threatened to get a whole lot rockier after one he had one strange, dark, well-publicized night in Los Angeles last year. When LNX first appeared on the global stage, he was so charming, and he showed such an innate understanding of fame in the social-media age. But the cold reality is that you can't have a halfway healthy existence when you're at his level of sudden fame. The experience chews people up and spits them out.

Nothing is certain at this moment, but Lil Nas X appears to be coming out the other side of one such crisis. Maybe he'll return to pop stardom, and maybe he won't. Maybe he'll find a level of sustainable cult success that doesn't involve that kind of overwhelming fame, or maybe he'll once again prove the world wrong. I honestly have no idea. His future is unwritten. This column isn't about that, anyway. It's about "Industry Baby," one of several moments in that seven-year run when he just seemed to have shit figured out.

In retrospect, Lil Nas X's run of chart-topping hits is so, so weird. "Old Town Road" is a homemade leftfield country-rap collision that went ultra-mega-viral and left the entire planet scrambling to catch up. "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)" is an insidiously catchy little melodic quasi-rap boosted by over-the-top shock value, largely thanks to a CGI-gloop-heavy video that ran wild with queer imagery and self-conscious sacrilege. "Industry Baby," by contrast, is Lil Nas X crowing about his accomplishments and rubbing his success in haters' faces. We've heard a million pop songs built on some version of that idea. It's an aspirational thing. At least in theory, you hear someone talking their shit, and you feel motivated to accomplish the things that you need to accomplish and then talk your own shit. It's pretty simple, but it's Lil Nas X, so it's not that simple.

When he made "Industry Baby," Lil Nas X was still working on his first album, trying to figure out what his star persona was going to be. He was already famous, which is advantageous in some ways and detrimental in others. "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)" was one response to that challenge, and "Industry Baby" was another. In order to present himself as a fully-formed pop figure, rather than the one-hit novelty that the historic success of "Old Town Road" seemed to guarantee, Lil Nas X recorded a whole lot of music. When he made "Industry Baby," he was stuck in that process, feeling frustrated and discouraged.

Lil Nas X recorded almost all of his Montero album with Take A Daytrip, the New York production duo who have appeared in this column for their work on "Montero" and the Travis Scott/Kid Cudi collab "The Scotts." Later on, Denzel Baptiste, one half of Take A Daytrip, told Billboard that the duo made the "Industry Baby" beat after getting some horn tracks from Nick Lee, a Juilliard-trained trombonist who has done a lot of work for people like Ariana Grande. The duo asked Lee for "something that sounds like a king is walking into a stadium or the Coliseum," and he responded with the trilling horns that we hear on the track and the brass riff that runs throughout. As a result, Lee got a songwriting credit.

Baptiste says that Take A Daytrip keep an "in-case-of-emergency folder if there’s a lull in our creative process," and they broke into that folder when they were having a bad day in the studio with Lil Nas X. Baptiste told Billboard about that day: "We were feeling uninspired, and Nas wasn’t feeling too good. Things were coming across the internet that turned his emotion 180 degrees. People were like, 'You fell off. You had all this momentum, and you stopped putting out music.'" But once he heard those horn tracks, Lil Nas X suddenly snapped to attention, and he came up with most of "Industry Baby" in a hurry.

The song is pure regal shit-talk. Denzel Baptiste tells Billboard that the pre-fame Lil Nas X played trumpet in his school band and that he's always drawn toward tracks with brass, and the thundering horns and deep syncopation of the "Industry Baby" beat recall HBCU marching bands, always an extremely cool influence on Southern-ish rap beats. The "Industry Baby" beat is simple but layered, and its horn-blasts and handclaps hit with a direct force that reminds me of something like the 2004 Yung Wun/DMX/Lil Flip/David Banner posse cut "Tear It Up," to name one marching-band Southern rap banger that I happen to really love. ("Tear It Up," Yung Wun's only Hot 100 hit, peaked at #76.)

Take A Daytrip and Nick Lee didn't make the "Industry Baby" beat by themselves. At some point, Lil Nas X sat down with Kanye West, who was mid-meltdown at the time. He played a bunch of his tracks for West, and West especially liked "Industry Baby." So West went to work on the track with Ojivolta, a New York production duo who did a lot of work on his 2021 album Donda. West and Ojivolta helped layer more sounds onto "Industry Baby," making it sound even bigger.

As far as I know, the original Take A Daytrip version of the "Industry Baby" beat has never leaked, so I don't know exactly what Kanye West and Ojivolta contributed. But all three of them got songwriting credit on "Industry Baby," and West is listed as the track's co-producer. At the time, this seemed like one final gasp of pop relevance for West. Writing about Katy Perry's Kanye collab "ET" in this column in 2023, I said that West would be in the column again, "but only as a producer." I was talking about "Industry Baby" there, and as it turns out, I was wrong. Against all odds, Kanye West, the artist, will be in the column again, so I don't need to use this space to comment further on his endless flameout. I'm not looking forward to the moment when I'll have to get into that saga again, but it won't be today.

Anyway! "Industry Baby"! Lil Nas X doesn't quite sing over that beat, and he doesn't quite rap, but the energy is pure rap shit. The beat mostly sounds like a Take A Daytrip track to me; those guys are great at making bright, catchy, layered tracks that can function as both rap and pop. The hook is a smooth singsong with stadium-shaking potential: "And this one is for the champions!" On his one verse, Lil Nas X hypes himself up in real time: "Need to get this album done! Need a couple Number Ones!" He invokes Waka Flocka Flame's 2009 Atlanta anthem "O Let's Do It," brags that he's "a pop n***a like Bieber," and uses his sexuality as the basis of one great punchline: "I don't fuck bitches, I'm queer/ But these n***as bitches like Madea." The cadences are just slightly awkward, but every "yuh" hits hard. ("O Let's Do It" peaked at #62. Waka Flocka's highest-charting single, the 2010 Wale/Roscoe Dash collab "No Hands," peaked at #13.)

When Lil Nas X mentions all of the things that he needs to get done, he says, "Need a plaque on every song/ Need me like one with Nicki now." He refers, of course, to past and future Number Ones artist Nicki Minaj. Before ascending to pop stardom himself, Lil Nas X was part of Nicki's berserk fan army the Barbz, perhaps the most feared collective of online stans. You'd think that Nicki Minaj would be eager to work with a former Barb who became a star himself, but LNX and Nicki have zero songs together. Later on, Lil Nas X claimed that he sent "Industry Baby" to Nicki Minaj as a possible collaboration but never heard back from her. That's crazy! Instead of Nicki Minaj, Lil Nas X got a verse from ascendant pop-rap entity Jack Harlow. So now, we talk about Jack Harlow.

Jackman Thomas Harlow, one of Lil Nas X's generational peers, grew up comfortably middle class in Louisville, Kentucky. (Céline Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" was the #1 song in America on the day that Harlow was born.) Harlow's mother liked to listen to rap around the house, and young Harlow was into it. My favorite Harlow story, as relayed in a 2017 feature in Louisville magazine: At 12, Harlow asked his mother how he could become the best rapper in the world. If this were my son, I would've sweetly and lovingly told him to get the fuck out of here, he'll never be the best rapper in the world, what the fuck is he talking about. That's not what Harlow's mom told him. Instead, she gave him the Malcolm Gladwell line about how he needed 10,000 hours of practice. Then she did the math: He'd need to rap for four or five hours every day for the next six years if he was going to be great by 18. Harlow said, "OK."

I don't know whether Jack Harlow actually committed to five hours of daily raps for the remainder of his childhood, and he certainly never became the greatest rapper in the world. He did, however, come a lot further than a gawky white kid like him could justifiably expect. Harlow formed a rap group with some friends, and he started recording mixtapes while playing high-school soccer. Local real estate developer Gill Holland had a record label, and he released Harlow's EP The Handsome Harlow in 2015, when Harlow was 17. Harlow kept putting out mixtapes, did some regional touring, and eventually signed to super-important Southern rap figures DJ Drama and Don Cannon's Atlantic imprint Generation Now, which also had former Number Ones artist Lil Uzi Vert on its roster. Harlow became a viral sensation partly because of cognitive dissonance. Here was this nerdy, awkward-looking white kid who'd taught himself to convincingly deliver Drake-style chest-puffed flexes.

Harlow wasn't a gimmick, exactly. He had real charisma, and he could really rap. Those things mattered. The cognitive dissonance wouldn't have been enough if he didn't actually have the goods there. Harlow didn't seem nervous or embarrassed to be a gawky white rapper, and he didn't approach his career as a Lonely Island-style joke. He just charmingly talked his shit, and it worked. Early in 2020, just before the pandemic, Harlow released a sleek, catchy single called "Whats Poppin," and it became a viral hit and put Harlow on the Hot 100 for the first time. Later in the year, Harlow dropped an all-star "What's Poppin" remix with Tory Lanez, right before Lanez got arrested for shooting Megan Thee Stallion in the foot, and with former Number Ones artists DaBaby and Lil Wayne. Everyone rapped their asses off on the remix, which got as high as #2, only kept out of the top spot by a different DaBaby song. (The "Whats Poppin" remix is a 9.)

"Whats Poppin" eventually went diamond, and it turned Jack Harlow into a full-on crossover star. He released his debut album Thats What They All Say in December 2020. It went double platinum, and a few of its tracks hit the Hot 100. (The biggest of them after "Whats Poppin" was "Tyler Herro," an invocation of the Miami Heat player turned Bam Adebayo punching bag that peaked at #34.) Harlow was part of the same XXL Freshman Class as past Number Ones artist Polo G and future Number Ones artist Latto. He showed up on tracks with stars like Eminem, Chris Brown, and Big Sean. Somewhere along the line, he stopped looking like a nerd, and his broccoli haircut became the default hairstyle for gen-Z boys. Not even just white boys, either! In the future, historians will be able to look at yearbook photos full of broccoli-haired high-school kids and know instantly, without checking, that those pictures were taken between 2021 and 2026. Jack Harlow is the reason for that.

All's to say: Jack Harlow was in exactly the right career space to jump on someone else's song, making both the track and himself bigger than they might've otherwise been. I think Harlow is a both a gifted artist and a profoundly silly one, but the "Industry Baby" verse is him at his best. He and Lil Nas X make sense together, and there's a fun Genius video where the two of them proclaim their mutual fandom. "Industry Baby" gets some of its juice from the pleasing contrast between LNX's droning singsong hooks and Harlow's playful precision. On this track, Harlow is in world-conqueror mode. His verse is long and technically complex, but it doesn't feel overworked. He comes off like he's just casually popping shit.

My kids were really into "Industry Baby" when the song was popular, so I heard it about a million times while driving them to school. Years later, I would not be shocked to learn that I sometimes spit the entire Jack Harlow verse in my sleep. I think it's my favorite Jack Harlow verse, honestly. There are lots of fun, flashy little punchlines in there. "It's too late 'cause I'm here to stay and these girls know that I'm nasty/ I sent her back to her boyfriend with my handprint on her asscheek," followed by a few crisp handclaps, just for emphasis. "OG's so proud of me that he choking up while he making toasts" — that's a nice image. "I don't clear up rumors/ Where's y'all sense of humor?/ I'm done making jokes 'cause they got old like baby boomers." I'll probably get depressed when I hear similar punchlines about Gen X, but let's let the boomers eat that one.

Harlow's verse gets too wordy sometimes, and a few of the lines are a little forced, like the one about how his time is coming sooner like Oklahoma. But he switches up flows two or three times, and at least a few of his lines are both slick and verifiably true, like this one: "I didn't peak in high school, I'm still out here gettin' cuter." Since there's a public record of high-school Jack Harlow, we know that's an absolute fact. Harlow's kicker — "all these social networks and computers got these pussies walkin' 'round like they ain't losers" — slightly flips the hook from Rowdy Rebel's 2014 Bobby Shmurda collab "Computers," and it gets truer every day. (Rowdy Rebel doesn't have any Hot 100 hits of his own, but he guested on Pop Smoke's posthumous track "Make It Rain," which peaked at #49 in 2020. Bobby Shmurda's biggest hit, 2014's "Hot N***a," peaked at #6. It's a 9.)

"Industry Baby" is a pretty short and simple song. It's mostly hook, and Lil Nas X's one verse is way shorter than Jack Harlow's guest-spot. All of this works to the song's advantage. It's got an infectious fuck-the-world energy, and it showcases two people who intersected at just the right moment. Just as importantly, it serves as the basis for a very, very fun music video. Director Christian Breslauer, whose work will appear in this column again, goes for the kind of over-the-top big-budget spectacle that we don't see in too many pop videos anymore. You could read the whole thing as an example of proudly transgressive Black queerness or the American carceral state if you wanted, and maybe it is that, but it's also a live-action Looney Tunes situation.

In a teaser that came out shortly before the "Industry Baby," Lil Nas X built an Eddie Murphy-style comedy bit, using heavy prosthetics to play multiple characters, out of the moment that Nike sued him for the Satan sneakers that he sold in conjunction with his "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)" release. In that skit, a judge sentences Lil Nas X to "five years in Montero State Prison." In the video itself, that scene leads straight into the vision of Lil Nas X, hanging from the ceiling like 50 Cent in the "In Da Club" clip, in a prison cell, surrounded by his Grammys and plaques. Pretty soon, he's dancing in the shower with fellow inmates, all their junk pixelated out. It's pretty funny.

It keeps going. The prisoners all wear pink jumpsuits, and the only one who seems to not be gay is Jack Harlow, which we know because we see him hooking up with a female guard. Harlow passes Lil Nas X a book with a hidden pickax, which leads him to escape in a Shawshank Redemption parody. He punches out a guard who's distracted because he's getting too turned on watching the "Montero" video, and then he hits a button with a giant "do not push" sign. They should honestly stop putting those "do not push" buttons in prisons. It's a design flaw. At one point, Jack Harlow sits in an electric chair and Lil Nas X flips it on, which seems like a rude way to repay him for that pickax, but Harlow doesn't appear to mind. Then Harlow drives a bus full of rioting escaped inmates while more of them dance on the roof. The entire spectacle is pure top-shelf pop-star silliness.

"Industry Baby" debuted at #2 when it came out in July 2021, and then it hung around the upper reaches of the Hot 100 before finally sneaking through and claiming a week at #1 in October, just in time for Lil Nas X to release his Montero album. The LP, a sharp and fun pile-up of pop styles, debuted at #2 and eventually went double platinum. Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow performed "Industry Baby" together on a bunch of big stages — the VMAs, the Grammys, Glastonbury — and the song went platinum seven times. Another single, the strange and effective electro-pop-folk yearning song "That's What I Want," reached #8. (It's an 8.)

Lil Nas X smashed through a lot of taboos while establishing his pop-star persona, but the extended Montero album cycle seemed to set him up for a serious run. Fate had other plans, and Lil Nas X still hasn't released a second album. He toured behind Montero for a while, and he kept releasing stray tracks. In 2022, for instance, he reached #32 with "Star Walkin'," a song recorded for something called the League Of Legends World Championship; please don't make me learn what that is. Right at the top of the year in 2024, Lil Nas X returned with "J Christ," the single that was supposed to mark the beginning of a new LP cycle. But that song went back to the shock-value tactics of "Montero," and you can really only do that once. "J Christ" felt like a distant echo, and it debuted at #69 and then disappeared.

After "J Christ," Lil Nas X appeared on "He Knows," a single from Camila Cabello, someone who has been in this column a couple of times. "He Knows" peaked at #27, and Lil Nas X hasn't been back on the Hot 100 since then. For a while, he was posting his tracks on SoundCloud, which was either part of a conflict with his label or which was unsuccessful viral marketing made to look like part of a conflict with his label. For a long stretch of time between 2024 and 2025, he continued to tease Dreamboy, an album that still has never come out, and he released a string of pretty-good singles that never quite caught on. In videos posted online, he also talked about the fragile state of his mental health. Even in career purgatory, Lil Nas X could've been one hit away from a full-on comeback. Instead, he went the other way, getting himself arrested in about the most spectacular fashion imaginable.

Last August, LAPD responded to calls about someone walking down Hollywood Boulevard in nothing but underwear and cowboy boots. That somebody was the seemingly very inebriated Lil Nas X. The artist was eventually treated for a possible overdose, but only after police claimed that he attacked three of them and put one of them in the hospital. I find this account to be deeply dubious, but you know how cops are. Lil Nas X was charged with four felonies, and he faced some serious prison time. He spent what he called a "terrifying" weekend in jail before posting bail, and a judge eventually granted him a mental health diversion, agreeing to drop the charges and wipe his record. The episode was some dark shit, but things are looking up.

Last month, Lil Nas X posted a video message about his treatment for bipolar disorder. He looked happy and healthy, to the point where he made jokes about his diagnosis: "Black, gay, bipolar — I'm living life on, like, extreme hard mode!" He also talked about how he's just starting to work on new music, though he isn't ready to fully jump into that, and he mentioned Dreamboy, so maybe that album will come out one day after all. I'm just starting to hear distant rumblings about Lil Nas X's new music being good, too. That doesn't mean that he'll ever return to pop stardom, but it certainly could happen. The comeback story writes itself. Personally, I'd love to see Lil Nas X return to prominence, if he can find a way to do that without putting himself in further danger. During the past seven years, he's proven himself to be a fascinating pop figure over and over, in tons of different ways. Maybe he'll even be back in this column one day.

As for Jack Harlow, he's been on a weird little journey of his own lately. We'll get into that another time, since Harlow will definitely be in this column again.

GRADE: 8/10

BONUS BEATS: On a 2023 episode of their rebooted TV show, Beavis and Butt-Head commented on the "Industry Baby" video, which led to an extremely funny exchange about shower hygiene. I don't want to build it up too much, but there's a Beavis moment in there that has taken me out more than once. Here it is:

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I'll turn my readers to consumers when you buy the book.