Hip-hop artists like Young Thug sometimes toyed with wearing dresses to illustrate their free spirits, but Lil Nas X made a not-obvious choice to put gay love and desire at the center of his craft.
It was virtuoso trolling, and everyone from Nas to Noem seemed to get what they wanted out of it (publicity, laughs and fundraising - Nas directed fans to charities like the Bail Project for every track on “Montero”).īut the fact that a rap-aligned gay Black artist - let alone one who’s also such a country fan that he covered Dolly Parton’s “ Jolene” - could pull this off atop the charts was startling. Somehow thinks that Satanic worship should be mainstream and normal.” Kristi Noem, who said, “This is outrageous, disgusting and perverted and on #PalmSunday no less. If Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion sent right-wingers sputtering with “ WAP,” “Montero” finished the job for Republican politicians like South Dakota Gov. The clip, where Nas frolics in a Y2K-era digital Eden before dropping down a stripper pole to Hell, scandalized the Christian right and needled Nike’s lawyers with a blood-injected shoe spinoff. When he began this album’s long rollout back in March, the Luciferian lapdance of “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” did exactly what he hoped for.
#LIL NAS X GAY OR STRAIGHT TV#
In contemporary TV shows like “ Pose,” fashion lines like Hood by Air and Telfar, Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator’s candor about same-sex desire, and the queer rap underground of Le1f, Mykki Blanco and Cakes Da Killa, the strains of art that Lil Nas X absorbed have circulated above and below ground for generations. He’s making music videos essential again.”įrom Little Richard’s barely veiled appetites on “Tutti Frutti” to Sylvester’s celestial disco and the first waves of house music, to ballroom and vogueing culture percolating up through Madonna’s hits, Lil Nas X comes from a long tradition of Black queer music creating and remaking popular culture around it. Artists can get caught up in the industry where videos are just a way to sell music.
He has such a sense of humor, but he makes you examine your assumptions. “That’s why he’s so important right now, it’s so joyful and visually lush. “So often, we see subversive work like this not be pleasurable,” Kuhn said. While foregrounding the Black male body - nude and dancing, cheekily pregnant or resplendent in a wedding dress - he makes his subversiveness look delightful, and his aesthetic bounty feel radical.