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8:21 · 1,524 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- He spent his teenage years making memes and built an audience on Twitter before music, which is the skill the whole story rests on.
▶ 00:01:05
- He dropped out of college, moved out and slept on his sister's floor, turning bedroom closets into recording spaces.
▶ 00:01:23
- The beat came from BeatStars, made by YoungKio, built on a banjo sample from a Nine Inch Nails track, and he bought it for under 50 dollars.
▶ 00:01:42
- He self-released it in December 2018 and listed the genre as country, which was a deliberate move to avoid competing inside an oversaturated hip hop category.
▶ 00:02:01
- At under two minutes the song is built to be replayed, which matters in a streaming era where plays are the whole measure.
▶ 00:02:22
- The first video was a montage of Red Dead Redemption 2 clips, riding a western meme wave that was already running.
▶ 00:02:41
- He posted on Reddit asking what his own song was called, which is search engine optimisation disguised as a question.
▶ 00:03:00
- It charted on the Hot 100, Hot Country and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop at once, and radio was ripping audio from YouTube to get it on air before the industry had decided what it was.
▶ 00:03:39
- Billboard quietly removed it from the country chart, which the video treats as exposing who is allowed to work in which genre, noting that country borrows from rap without losing its label.
▶ 00:03:56
- The chart strategy exploited a real rule: remix plays count toward the original song's position, so each new version refreshed the number one run and held off releases by several major artists.
▶ 00:05:49