In the earliest days of his career, the twenty-two-year-old musician Lil Nas X was a poster child for success on TikTok, after the platform helped propel his song “Old Town Road” to unprecedented ubiquity. Lately, he’s grown into something more old-fashioned: a music-video star. Pop culture is more visual than ever, but the traditional music video—in all its cinematic, big-budget glory—has been overtaken by bite-size, off-the-cuff material tailored for rapid consumption on social media. Still, the extravagant music video has become the most effective way for Lil Nas X, a master of visual iconography, to make a splash. In March, he released a video for a new single titled “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” which begins with a voice-over: “In life, we hide the parts of ourselves we don’t want the world to see. . . . But here we don’t. Welcome to Montero.” Lil Nas X, born Montero Lamar Hill, was using his given name for a fantastical underworld of his own making, a pastel-colored utopia where everyone could fly a freak flag. Rendered in C.G.I., the video follows Lil Nas X through a baroque, Boschian netherland, populated by outrageously costumed clones of the artist, and crackling with sexual charge.
For Lil Nas X, who revealed in 2019 that he is gay, “Montero” signalled a new and emphatically libidinal phase in his art. At the end of the video, the singer, dressed in nothing but a pair of briefs and thigh-high boots, slides down a never-ending stripper pole and lands in a version of Hell, where he performs a striptease for Satan. As part of the rollout for the video, Lil Nas X announced a collaboration with a company called MSCHF, which designed a limited-edition run of satanic-themed Nikes, each allegedly containing a drop of human blood in its sole. The video was raunchy, sure, but it was too absurdist to be as salacious as its naysayers made it out to be. Nevertheless, after the release of the video and the sneakers, Lil Nas X was decried by Christian pastors, Fox News, and even the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem. (“We are in a fight for the soul of our nation,” she tweeted.) The critiques only affirmed Lil Nas X’s intuitive ability to create a major moment in pop culture. “Montero” the song—a hand-clappy fusion of hip-hop and flamenco with lyrics about Lil Nas X’s desperate longing for one man—was almost beside the point. “Old Town Road” lived in a psychedelic alternative universe, bridging the familiar with the futuristic. “Montero” positioned Lil Nas X in pop music’s present-day reality, which is not nearly as fun.
The frenzy of attention around the “Montero” video seemed only to fuel Lil Nas X’s taste for provocation. In July, he released the music video for a new single, “Industry Baby,” another ambitious visual feast, this time with a mischievous eye trained on the institution of prison. The clip features Lil Nas X as an inmate at Montero State Prison, a place where the prisoners wear bright-pink uniforms, and sometimes nothing at all. Riffing on Black male sexuality in the context of incarceration, Lil Nas X performs an energetic dance routine in the showers with his fellow-inmates. The song, which nods to some of the hip-hop pumping out of Lil Nas X’s home town of Atlanta, contains a triumphant horn arrangement and a swaggering chorus: “This one is for the champions.” It also has a forgettable guest verse by Jack Harlow, the faintly charming, cocksure white rapper du jour. (Near the end of the video, Lil Nas X escapes the prison when one of the guards is distracted by watching the video for “Montero (Call Me by Your Name).”) Not since Lady Gaga in her early days of stardom has an artist so fully taken advantage of the music video as a receptacle for camp, comedy, social commentary, and ostentation. And as with Lady Gaga there’s some cognitive dissonance involved in the pairing of such over-the-top videos with otherwise unremarkable pop songs. Since “Old Town Road,” Lil Nas X has yet to produce a song that feels worthy of such pomp.
He may never need to. In today’s pop ecosystem, music is often a vessel for stardom and charisma, not the other way around. And Lil Nas X’s uncanny understanding of the Internet’s attention economy has seldom failed him. In 2018, he was a college student in Atlanta reportedly managing a popular Nicki Minaj fan account on Twitter. He began recording songs, and promoting them by attaching them to memes that were already going viral. After dropping out of school, he recorded “Old Town Road,” a rudimentary country song filled with hip-hop Easter eggs, not necessarily because he was interested in inverting genre tropes but because he’d noticed that “country trap” was trending online. As anyone with a pulse knows, his strategies worked: his remix of “Old Town Road,” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, became the longest-running No. 1 song in history, a track with a miraculous ability to transcend cultural and generational divides.
“Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” on the strength of the music video, also shot to No. 1, and helped transform Lil Nas X from a one-hit wonder into a full-fledged pop star. It underscored his savvy, although to characterize him as a marketing genius, as many have done, ignores his burgeoning artistic talents. The song, along with “Industry Baby,” turned Lil Nas X into an icon because of his unrestrained expressions of queer sexual desire. Unlike some of his most successful contemporaries—such as Frank Ocean or Tyler, the Creator—Lil Nas X refuses to participate in the game of coyness when it comes to his sexuality. (“I’m queer, ha!” he says on “Industry Baby.”)
But his new, full-length album, also called “Montero,” is not the bawdy romp that fans might have anticipated. If those singles were about Lil Nas X’s desires, the album is largely about the disappointment arising from passions left unfulfilled, or the melancholy that floods in once you’ve got what you want. Lil Nas X has refuted the assumption that he’d never have a hit after “Old Town Road,” but the accomplishment comes with a host of new demands and stressors, and it has not granted his every wish. Even the album’s most cheerful and peppy songs are backlit with innocent yearning: “I want someone to love / That’s what I fuckin’ want!” he shouts on a track called “That’s What I Want.” Co-written by Ryan Tedder, the song is a whirligig of whoops and claps that seems designed for the wedding dance floor. Like much of this mostly wholesome record, it is hardly an expression of demonic lust or sexual debasement.
“Old Town Road,” at the peak of its popularity, generated a heated discussion about the boundaries of genre. Initially, Lil Nas X had classified the song as country, but as it gained velocity Billboard removed the song from its country chart, arguing that his label had not promoted it as a proper country track. At the time, the decision seemed strange, especially given how stylistically broad the country charts were becoming. “Old Town Road” assumed such cultural force that these distinctions now feel irrelevant, but the success of the song helped fuel an evolution in the crossover between hip-hop and country. “Montero”—a pop-rap album that shares almost no DNA with country music—is less interested in musical innovation. It’s genre agnostic, a blur of hi-hats, guitar flourishes, and midrange trap beats that make you wonder whom, exactly, the record is intended for. It’s an awkward vehicle for Lil Nas X’s charisma. It points to the insufficiency of the album as a format for the modern pop star.
The back half of “Montero” takes an unexpected turn toward the morose and the introspective. On one song, “Void,” Lil Nas X pens a letter to an old friend to let him know that the exuberance of his public image is all smoke and mirrors. The song is spare, with a bleary electric-guitar line but not much else; in the open space, Nas is able to use his vocals to mark the contours of his emotions more delicately than on his other songs. “I spent inordinate ’mounts of time / Trapped in a lonely, loner life / Looking for love where I’m denied,” he sings mournfully in a half whisper, as if in a confessional booth. We’ve experienced Lil Nas X as an Internet troll, a hypersexual provocateur, a pop star with a Warholian visual sensibility, but “Montero” shows something different: a human being. ♦
