The track kicks off with perhaps its subtlest in‑joke: a gently strummed guitar line that, if not exactly country, could qualify as Tex‑Mex, suggesting for just a few seconds that LNX has put his 10-gallon hat back on to troll the Saving Country Music crowd again. In the lyrics of that last mini-hit, Lil Nas X dropped a concise career statement of purpose: “Pop star, but the rappers still respect me.”
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37, 2020), a loopy, thumping, Christmas-themed if not exactly sleigh-belling record, with Lil Nas X playing an E’d-out Santa in its music video. 5, 2019), which Montero didn’t realize borrowed its melody from a Nirvana song he’d probably never heard performing “Rodeo” at the 2020 Grammys with his rap-veteran namesake “Big” Nas, a version that Lil Nas X later released as a spooky, “Thriller”-like remix and issuing the stopgap single “ Holiday” (No. While its cover image did show him in cowboy gear, riding a horse, the mini-album only included one other country-adjacent track, the Cardi B–showcasing “ Rodeo.” He then spent the next year and a half showing how far he could flex: approximating a digital-pop/alt-rock sound on the follow-up hit “ Panini” (No. Critics including Slate’s Carl Wilson pointed out back in summer 2019 that 7, his debut EP, found Lil Nas X switching up genres on virtually every track. However, the mere fact that the song’s pre-chorus refrain, “Cocaine and drinkin’ with your friends/ You live in the dark, boy, I cannot pretend,” finds the male vocalist addressing a “boy” (one living “in the dark,” no less) makes the song more matter-of-fact queer than even “I’m Too Sexy” or “Vogue.” However kitschy the song seems, Lil Nas X says it was inspired by an actual, lustful relationship with another man, one with his own self-destructive tendencies, last year during the height of the pandemic.Īfter all the kerfuffle in 2019 over the country bona fides of “Road,” Lil Nas X telegraphed almost immediately that he wasn’t interested in proving a point to Nashville. Truthfully, the video and the marketing for “Montero” are more ostentatiously gay than the song, many of whose lyrics-“Romantic talkin’? You don’t even have to try/ You’re cute enough to fuck with me tonight”-are as all-purpose as, if more foulmouthed than, prior generations of hits. 1 hits, from “ Dancing Queen” to “ I Will Survive,” “ Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” to “ Vogue,” “ I’m Too Sexy” to “ Believe,” the LGBTQ-adopted message was either accidental, implied with a wink, or made all-purpose for the straight world.* And most of the other, more “out” hits that typically make pride playlists, like “ Y.M.C.A.,” “ You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” “ It’s Raining Men,” “ Relax,” and “ Finally,” fell short of the No. Lil Nas X’s intent with this new single was made clear the day before the song and its trolling video arrived, when he posted a soul-baring, deeply moving letter to his younger, more fearful, deeply closeted self on Instagram.Ī post shared by Lil Nas X is therefore arguable that “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” is the most openly gay song ever to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and it’s certainly the first such song to debut on top. This comes less than two years after his momentous coming out on the last day of Pride Month 2019.
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And while he is definitely leaning into the LOLz, Montero also seriously sees “Montero,” his purposefully self-titled single-paired with a parenthetical allusion to Call Me by Your Name, the gay coming-of-age novel turned award-winning film-as an emblem of his uncloseted freedom. (You can play it in your browser now!) As cheeky-literally-as twerking is as a metonym for Lil Nas X’s current hit, it has also emerged as a symbol of gay pride and even protest. Lil Nas X is leaning hard into this symbolism, upping the ante with the release this week of, I kid you not, a “Twerk Hero” video game. Lil Nas X’s climactic twerk-cum–lap dance for the Prince of Darkness himself in the song’s music video has drawn the lion’s share of media coverage since it dropped two weeks ago.