The 2020s File Feature
Scoop
Scoop — Lil Nas X Featuring Doja Cat (2021) "Scoop" was released as part of Lil Nas X's debut studio album Montero, which arrived on September 17, 2021, thro…
01 The Story
Scoop — Lil Nas X Featuring Doja Cat (2021)
"Scoop" was released as part of Lil Nas X's debut studio album Montero, which arrived on September 17, 2021, through Columbia Records and CMDWN. The album had been one of the most anticipated major-label debut records of the year, given the extraordinary commercial and cultural impact Lil Nas X had generated with "Old Town Road" in 2019 and with subsequent releases including "MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)" and "Industry Baby," both of which preceded the album's release and built anticipation for the full project. "Scoop" benefited from this context while also functioning as one of the lighter, more playful moments in a collection that otherwise operated with considerable emotional and thematic seriousness.
Doja Cat, the Los Angeles singer and rapper whose own 2021 had been defined by her breakout commercial success and the consolidated stardom she had achieved across multiple high-profile collaborations, was an ideal collaborator for "Scoop." Doja Cat's Mercury-Phonogenic single "Kiss Me More" featuring SZA had occupied the upper reaches of the Hot 100 for much of 2021, and her commercial profile meant that her presence on a Lil Nas X track guaranteed crossover appeal and additional streaming traction. The two artists shared a sensibility for playful, self-aware pop that made their pairing feel natural rather than merely strategic.
Production on "Scoop" contributed to the song's upbeat, frivolous energy, featuring a bright, bouncy arrangement that set it apart from the more dramatic sonic landscapes of the album's prestige singles. The track was built for a different kind of listening experience than "MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)" or "Industry Baby," more suited to carefree playlist placement than to the kind of intensive cultural analysis that those singles generated. Within the album's sequencing, this tonal contrast served an important function, providing relief from the emotional weight of the surrounding material.
Montero debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 in its first week, an exceptional performance for a debut album that demonstrated the sustained commercial power Lil Nas X had accumulated since his breakthrough. The album generated multiple Billboard Hot 100 entries simultaneously during its first week on the chart, reflecting the streaming behavior of a large and engaged audience that consumed the entire album rather than gravitating only to its lead singles. "Scoop" was among the tracks that charted alongside the album's more prominent entries during that debut period.
The commercial backdrop included Lil Nas X's extraordinary history with the Billboard Hot 100. "Old Town Road" had set a record by spending 19 consecutive weeks at number one on the Hot 100, a record that surpassed all previous marks for chart longevity at the summit. That history gave every subsequent Lil Nas X release a context of expectation and scrutiny that most debut albums do not carry, and the overall performance of Montero was assessed against that unprecedented backdrop.
Doja Cat's verse and hook contributions brought her distinctive combination of singing and rapping to the track, her fluid movement between vocal modes having become one of the most immediately recognizable stylistic signatures in mainstream pop during 2021. Her ability to deliver comedic and flirtatious material with genuine craft rather than mere performance distinguished her collaborations from straightforward feature appearances, and "Scoop" demonstrated that capability in a compact format.
The music video for "Scoop" fit the playful tone of the track, featuring visual humor and the kind of internet-aware absurdism that Lil Nas X had made a consistent element of his visual output since "Old Town Road." His understanding of how visual content circulated on social media platforms, and his ability to construct images that would be screenshot, shared, and discussed beyond the platform on which they first appeared, had become a significant competitive advantage in an industry where visual identity often determined whether audio content broke through or disappeared.
Critics reviewing Montero as a complete work noted "Scoop" as one of the album's more immediately accessible and enjoyable moments, a track that demonstrated Lil Nas X's range without demanding the same level of interpretive engagement as his more statement-oriented material. Its presence in the album reflected a sophisticated understanding of how to sequence a debut record for an audience with diverse appetite, including both those seeking emotional depth and those seeking uncomplicated pleasure from their pop music.
02 Song Meaning
Meaning and Themes of "Scoop" by Lil Nas X Featuring Doja Cat
"Scoop" operates as a deliberately light, flirtatious track in which both artists perform mutual attraction with wit and playfulness rather than sincerity or emotional depth. The song belongs to a tradition in pop and hip-hop of the come-on as entertainment, where the process of pursuing romantic or physical interest is treated as a game to be enjoyed rather than a vulnerability to be carefully managed. Both Lil Nas X and Doja Cat were well suited to this register, having each established public personas in which humor, self-awareness, and an ironic relationship to their own sexuality were central features.
For Lil Nas X, "Scoop" provided a platform to express a mode of queer desire that was playful rather than confrontational. Much of the surrounding album material engaged seriously with the politics and personal costs of his public coming out and with the ways in which his identity as a gay Black man intersected with racial, religious, and commercial expectations in American culture. "Scoop" offered an alternative register: queer joy as uncomplicated pleasure, attraction as fun rather than politics, romantic pursuit as comedy rather than statement. This tonal range was an important part of Lil Nas X's artistic project on Montero, which sought to demonstrate that queer experience included lightness as well as struggle.
Doja Cat's participation extended the song's range and added a complementary perspective. Her verse approached the flirtation from a position of confident self-presentation, articulating attraction on her own terms and maintaining the humor and specificity that characterized her best feature work. The dynamic between the two performers suggested a mutual recognition of each other's appeal and a shared delight in the performative aspects of romantic pursuit. Neither artist appeared to be entirely serious, and that mutual knowingness gave the song its particular charm.
The ice cream metaphors and food-related language woven through the song's title and lyrics drew on a long pop tradition of using consumable things as stand-ins for physical desire, a metaphorical framework that simultaneously makes explicit content accessible across platforms and adds a layer of playful absurdity to what might otherwise be too direct. The "scoop" conceit transformed attraction into something lighthearted, a request and an offer that could be interpreted at multiple levels of literalness and that neither artist seemed interested in resolving into a single meaning.
Within the Montero album context, "Scoop" served a structural purpose as emotional counterweight to the surrounding tracks. Songs like "MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)" and "That's What I Want" engaged with desire and longing from positions of complexity and longing; "Scoop" offered desire as simple fun. That contrast made the album feel complete rather than tonally monotonous, demonstrating that the range of queer emotional experience Lil Nas X was documenting included comedy and pleasure as well as vulnerability and aspiration.
The song's commercial placement alongside one of the most popular and versatile artists of 2021 in Doja Cat also carried its own implicit meaning about Lil Nas X's position in the industry. The willingness of a mainstream crossover star like Doja Cat to appear on the record signaled a form of normalization, a recognition that Lil Nas X's queerness was not a limiting factor in his commercial relationships but simply a feature of who he was as an artist. For listeners attuned to the cultural politics of collaboration and visibility in pop music, that context added significance to what the song's content presented as pure lighthearted enjoyment.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging