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Because the Chateau Marmont was closed, and the Sunset Tower Hotel stopped serving food 15 minutes earlier, and the food at SoHo House wasn’t even that good anyway, Lil Nas X and I ended up eating lunch in a mostly empty Jewish deli in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. Free from the shackles of celebrity respectability — who would recognize him here, among all these khaki pants? — we got increasingly silly, eventually conducting a brief conversation entirely in fart noises. At one point, our server, assuming we were on a date, chastised the singer for looking at his phone. We sat in a booth beneath a series of framed portraits of sandwiches, overstuffed with cuts of meat. “It looks like somebody got bored and just murdered any animal and skinned it alive,” he said, disgusted. Minutes later, my pastrami sandwich arrived.
He told me an embarrassing story. Two weeks earlier, Nas performed “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” the first single from his forthcoming album, on “Saturday Night Live.” The song is about one man’s lust for another, and its stage performance — derived from the song’s video, in which the singer gives Satan a lap dance — was an all-male leather orgy, diluted just enough to be shown on broadcast television. A stripper pole, flanked by demons, stood in the middle of the stage. Dancers in studded collars gyrated around one another, tracing fingers down glistening chests or pumping their bodies between the singer’s legs. When they turned around, slits cut into the top of their tight vinyl pants showed off juicy slices of butt. At one point, one of them took a lascivious ice cream lick out of the side of Nas’s neck, the singer biting his lip in satisfaction. All of this was a far cry from how audiences had been introduced to Nas three years earlier, as a spindly teenager in a cowboy hat who’d just dropped out of college and, somehow, ended up releasing the biggest song in the world. It was in the midst of this success, with his “Old Town Road” in its 17th-straight week as the No.1 song in the country, that he came out as gay. Now, in 2021, he had achieved the unthinkable, a feat only dreamed of by some of his peers who had gone from anonymity to the top of the charts — he made another hit song, and a brazenly gay one at that.
But in live TV, as in sex, something always goes wrong. In the final minute of the “S.N.L.” performance, Nas was grinding on the stripper pole, thrusting with all his might, when he felt a sudden, unexpected breeze. The crotch of his pants had ripped. His mouth formed a perfect “O” of shock, as he awkwardly covered his private parts. For a sheepish few seconds, you could see him calculating what to do next. He grabbed his crotch and, for the remainder of the performance, held on for dear life.
“When you slip on a banana peel,” the writer Nora Ephron liked to say, “people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.” Nas wanted the laughs — and the views, the clicks, the attention — for himself. The next day, he devoted three TikTok videos to his plight. In one, he compared it to an episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” wherein SpongeBob, too, rips his pants in front of everyone. That Monday, he showed up at “The Tonight Show” in a kilt. He tweeted, “Stop asking me why I’m wearing a skirt I will never trust pants again!”
The ripped pants, it turns out, weren’t even the worst thing to happen to him that night. Aside from the wardrobe mishap, the show felt amazing. He had performed on freakin’ “S.N.L.”! He felt great. He felt like hitting on someone. So he shot his shot, sending a message to someone he had been chatting with online. The target respectfully knocked that shot out of the air: This person was so flattered by the attention, but they had a boyfriend. Nas respected the honesty; a lot of people just throw themselves at him. “I was like, Damn, you’re that loyal?” he told me. “I love it. You forget sometimes that people are, like, really loyal, and it’s like, I want to do that.”
Still, it was a punch to his ego. He tried to remind himself that “no matter what I do or accomplish in this life or whatever, I’m never going to get everything I want.” Desires are aroused, wishes are made, but life trundles forward anyway, indifferent. In the past, he would cry himself to sleep over this sort of thing. But, he told me beatifically, something inside him had changed. “I was like, hold on,” he said, with the confidence of a person who has just realized that we’re all, like, specks on a spinning rock in an endless space ocean. “We’re not doing this this time.” He left the “S.N.L.” after-party and went to his hotel room to get a hold of himself. He gave himself a pep talk in the mirror: You had a great performance! Don’t let this one disappointment ruin everything! Be grateful, Lil Nas X! Be here and now!
Before here and now could start, though, Nas had to use the bathroom. He sat down on the toilet and promptly fell asleep. But by the time he woke up and made it into his bed, it was with a full, steady heart and an empty bladder.
I was impressed by this story, by his easy introspection, by his willingness to show embarrassment. I envied his emotional regulation, his self-awareness. I thought, in ways that he probably hadn’t yet, about what could have caused this change he described. Maybe it was the adrenaline of the show, or the past two years of living as an openly gay man, or some new wisdom unlocked by his recent birthday, setting him on a path of being open to rejection and growth. But maybe it was the bottle of tequila he told me he drank that night, too.
Somehow, I remember precisely where I was the first time I heard Lil Nas X: in the back seat of a friend’s car, speeding toward upstate New York for a girls’ weekend that we would spend sliding back to a version of adolescence, stoned on the power of our own giddiness. But first, we had to get there, and somewhere along Interstate 87, someone turned on “Old Town Road.”
Could anyone have it made it through 2019 without hearing “Old Town Road,” an international anthem of defiance (“Can’t nobody tell me nothing”), tenacity (“I’m gonna ride till I can’t no more”) and travel plans (“I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road”)? Listening to the song felt like ingesting amphetamines, happiness clomping through my brain in spurs. The song was both absurd and earnest, its opening sounding exactly like the swaggering steps of a cowboy swinging open a saloon door. I had climbed into the back seat that spring afternoon still covered in the frost of a winter funk, but I emerged — after a long car ride, some light emotional processing and no fewer than five listens to “Old Town Road” — goofy and loose, fun drummed back into me.
Two years later, I found myself back in a car listening to Lil Nas X — with Lil Nas X. He and I were cruising around in his moderately fancy car rental, bass burping out of the speakers, butts jiggling in the leather seats. Now 22, Nas buzzes with an energy that borders on euphoria, as if he can’t wait for the rest of his life. It’s hard not to describe him in youthful terms. He is baby-faced, in the sense that his eyes take up the same amount of real estate on his face as they might on a newborn’s. He is friendly and approachable but blessed with some unreachable cool and slightly too much handsomeness, like a prom king. He reminded me of a modern-day Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
He wanted me to hear two new songs from his album in progress, which he played at the thunderously loud volume enjoyed by people who still have all their wisdom teeth. One was called “Industry Baby,” with lyrics asserting his intended longevity: “And this one is for the champions/I ain’t lost since I began, yuh/Funny how you said it was the end, yuh/Then I went did it again.” (If “Montero,” released in April, has staked out a claim as the party song of the summer, then quotes from “Industry Baby” seem destined to litter the Instagram captions of the pictures posted the morning after: “I don’t [expletive] bitches, I’m queer/but these niggas bitches like Madea.”) Nas’s eyes were on the road, but his body was in the club, dancing to his own victory march. He mouthed along with all the words, pumped his arm, pointed a single finger up into the air, slapped the dashboard for rhythmic effect. This music hadn’t been released yet, so the car windows stayed rolled up, but the air blasting from the speakers was propulsive enough that I still felt as though I had wind in my face.
In between new songs, the first few seconds of “Montero” played, a classic speech-before-the-song wherein Nas welcomes listeners to his musical universe, a place where people no longer have to hide themselves. This is the difference between the Nas of “Old Town Road” and the one heard now, both in musical approach and in self-depiction: The new one is really, really gay. Coming out, for Nas, was a recalibration. He wanted to be not just a pop star but a visibly gay one, a figure built on that Gen Z tendency to heighten a sexual identity into an exaggerated shtick, but one founded on a genuine pride and comfort. (When I first told him I was a lesbian, he limped his wrist in approval — an offensive gesture meant to mock gay men, reappropriated into a convivial meme.) After years of hiding himself, there was now no mistaking it: He was trying to be, all at once, a hitmaker, a huge pop star, an out gay man and a sexual being.
This wasn’t the first time he’d driven around listening to his own music, but it was one of the first times he had done so legally: He finally got his license in May. Afterward, he posted a screenshot of an “article” from ABC News to his social media feeds, cleverly photoshopped to seem authentic: “Congrats are in order as Lil Nas X makes headlines again this week as he becomes the first gay person to earn a license. ‘You go sissy’ fans are saying.” In the past, he would veer into the street, surrounded by what he figured were more experienced drivers, worried that everyone would discover his big secret, that he was an impostor. Now he tooled confidently down Sunset Boulevard, his lyrics — “I told you long ago, on the road/I got what they waitin’ for” — ringing in our ears.
If names can mandate our fortunes, then what other choice was there for Montero Lamar Hill — an R.&B. song of a name, as velvety as the hairs above Ginuwine’s lip — than to become a star?
His mother named him for the Mitsubishi Montero, a car she wanted but never came her way. She liked to tell him the story of his delivery: During labor, she vomited so hard that she didn’t even realize she had given birth until she heard him cry.
As children, he and four of his siblings would choreograph their own musical performances for fun. He would stand near the front, the youngest but the hungriest, crooning Usher or whomever else was on the radio, always the star.
His parents split up when he was 6. Nas and his siblings moved to the Bankhead Courts, a dire public-housing project in Atlanta, with their mother and maternal great-grandmother, whom they referred to as their grandmother. In Bankhead, Nas was an honor-roll student who once had the highest math score in the state on a standardized test; his older brother, Lamarco, described him as the golden child, their grandmother’s clear favorite. The five siblings were tight with one another and with their grandmother, all six sleeping in the same bed every night. They had no money, but scarcity begot ingenuity: Nas and his siblings were architects of their own fun, making up their own intense rules for Uno or faking a manhunt in the neighborhood. “We were that poor family on the block, but everybody liked us because of our energy,” Lamarco told me. “We always brought the vibes.”
If Nas is the musician of (and now a provider for) the family, Lamarco is the comedian and the protector. His face is a softer version of his brother’s, but his Southern accent, unlike Nas’s, is still perfectly preserved. There was a point, he told me, where it felt as if he’d chosen the street life while Nas chose the book life, but now he spends his time the way any sibling of a celebrity would: cracking jokes with Nas’s team, hanging around the snack table at video shoots, proudly taking pictures of his brother on sets. When I asked him about his first memory of his brother, he paused for a while. “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “I just remember, out of nowhere, just having a good time.”
He has an unassailable conviction, the kind that only comes with being your grandmother’s favorite, that he can do anything he puts his mind to.
After an extended custody battle, the brothers begrudgingly moved in with their father. The move took them, as Lamarco put it, from “hood county to nerds county” — which is to say Austell, a well-to-do suburb just north of Atlanta, and then Lithia Springs. This was a crushing blow. Their mother had become addicted to drugs — Nas wondered aloud to me if the big move catalyzed her problem — and their grandmother was the plinth of their lives. Nas became sullen and insolent. His father, who had by this point married and had more children, was a gospel singer, and church became a bigger part of Nas’s life at the same time as his romantic thoughts about other boys did — along with a growing interest in gay porn. He thought his same-sex attraction was a test, something God put in front of him to prove his devotion. But he would watch the porn anyway, feeling the darkest shame afterward, “like I just laid in mud and ate poop.” He dreamed of running away, even ending his life.
He had two sources of comfort. The first was a Nintendo DSI, a game console that he won in a school contest; it had a camera and a voice recorder that he used to create content. The second was Nicki Minaj. It’s the age-old connection between gay men and divas: Some men fall for Cher and others for Whitney Houston, but if you were a Black, closeted teenager in the South with a defiant spirit, a pugnacious personality and a deep appreciation for colorful wigs, then Nicki Minaj was your woman. As a teenager, Nas was a steadfast member of the Barbz, a collective of cutthroat, obsessively loyal Nicki Minaj fans. He felt personally responsible for her professional protection, like a soldier in the army of the woman who helped him figure out who he was. He would spend every waking hour online, tweeting as @nasmaraj — Maraj is the diva’s real last name — dedicating himself to making content that either uplifted her work and denigrated others’ or promoting himself as an internet personality. (And then, when he first hit it big and fans figured out his internet past, he denied every part of this, not wanting people to know he was gay.)
Eventually, he gathered hundreds of thousands of followers and learned how to game social media by “tweetdecking” — coordinating with other users to make tweets (often content stolen from smaller accounts) go viral. He would post things like a photo of a sad-looking dog, grabbed from Google Images, with a caption that said this was because no other dogs showed up at his birthday party. (There was a whole BuzzFeed article about that one, in which he was quoted as “Nasiir Williams.”) But in 2018, Twitter suspended his account, removing years of his work. Around the same time, he broke up with a secret boyfriend and failed a class during his first year at the University of West Georgia. Then his grandmother died — and he thought, with everything else going wrong, that maybe he would die, too. He worried himself into hypochondria, convinced that his life wouldn’t go on much longer.
One day, procrastinating over math homework, he wrote a song called “Shame” and promoted it on his new Twitter account. People liked it, so he made a few more songs, most of which received positive feedback from his internet friends. (It was around this time that he decided on his moniker: “Nas” from his alias, “Lil” because that’s just what rappers did and, later, X, the Roman numeral 10, to denote the number of years that he expected to elapse before he became a legend.) The contentment he got from making music was like nothing else, so perfect it almost felt holy. “I have this feeling like: You know what? This is mine. This is for me, and I commit myself to it,” he said. He was always so impatient, never able to settle on one thing. This was different. His father and stepmother, though, gave him an ultimatum: music or school. He decided to drop out of college.
He started attaching his music to his viral tweets, suspecting that was the way to make it pop off. One day, his mind scanning the internet like a Google algorithm, he noticed an emerging theme: Country trap videos — collisions of hip-hop beats and country tropes — were gaining popularity. What if he wrote a country-themed banger that was also funny and told a story? In 2018, he bought a $30 beat on YouTube, wrote some lyrics — “Cowboy hat from Gucci, Wrangler on my booty” — and posted it, like his other songs, to SoundCloud that December. He named it “Old Town Road” because it sounded like a “real country place” and deluged the internet with memes attached to the song, hoping one would go viral. He even, famously, posted “What’s the name of the song that goes ‘take my horse to the old town road’” on a part of Reddit dedicated to helping people track down earworms. The song spilled over to TikTok, a new barometer for whether a song is a hit, and caught fire. “A lot of people like to say it’s like a kid accidentally got it,” he told Joe Coscarelli, a culture reporter for The Times. “No, this is no accident. I’ve been pushing this hard.” In March, the song charted on Billboard’s Hot 100, Hot Country and Hot R.&B./Hip-Hop charts at the same time. When Billboard removed the song from its country list, citing an edict that this song about horses did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music,” fans protested at the perceived racial slight — was the message that Black people didn’t belong in country music? — which only brought more attention.
Nas felt that he had written a bona fide country song and wanted one of the genre’s legends to join him. Months earlier, he tweeted that he hoped to get Billy Ray Cyrus on a remix. (He knew of the country singer from “Hannah Montana,” the Disney Channel show starring his daughter, Miley.) Cyrus was excited to do it. “I think it was No. 19 at the time,” he told Rolling Stone in May 2019. “I thought maybe I could help him drop the 9.” A week after their collaborative remix dropped, in April, “Old Town Road” became the No. 1 song in the world. It ended up topping the Billboard 100 for nearly five months in a row, longer than “I Will Always Love You” and “Macarena.”
And at the center of all this was a 19-year-old man finding his fame sea legs. The flight to Los Angeles for his first professional recording session was only his second time on a plane; when he landed, as his executive-producing team Take A Daytrip once put it, he didn’t even know to want In-N-Out, asking instead for Chick-fil-A. He was also developing a deep sense that he shouldn’t hide his sexuality any longer. First he came out to his sister, who was not surprised. He told Lamarco over a smoke session, though his brother was so high that he responded, “Me, too,” until he realized that Nas was serious. Hardest of all, he told his father, who wondered if it was just the devil tempting him. Nas was empathetic — it hurt to hear, though he knew that’s how his father was raised — but informed him that it wasn’t. (They are very close now.) After performing at a Pride concert during the Glastonbury Festival in Britain — “People were waving their pride flags, and it was just so much excitement; I was like, Oh, my God, this is it” — he came out to everyone else.
I asked Lamarco what he thought his grandmother would say if she could see them now. The brothers live together in Los Angeles, where, when Nas is not off being famous, they play video games and Lamarco runs “twerking class,” offering his brother tips on how to improve his moves. (“I just know how I would want to get twerked on,” he told me.) She would be turning over in her grave, he said, but in a good way.
The vocal producer Kuk Harrell and I squinted at each other, standing in the blindingly bright kitchen of his Hollywood studio space, the afternoon sun magnifying the intensity of a room where everything was either stark white or ocean blue. We were trying to think of the last African American male pop star. Not the lead singer of a boy band. Not someone who mostly presented as a rapper. We paused for several moments, considering.
Harrell is the type of person you would want to get stuck in an elevator with: He’s so cheery and encouraging that he would easily uncover whatever secret talent you harbored, unknown to even you, before the doors reopened. And because he has produced for, among many others, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Mary J. Blige, Usher and Celine Dion, he would have lots of good stories to pass the time. Harrell was working on his first song with Nas, having received a call one day from Ron Perry, the chief executive of Columbia Records, who told him that he needed to take Nas to the next level. Lil Nas X was a real artist, Perry argued, and he needed to work with legit people.
Nas’s songs after “Old Town Road” were more than respectable; “Panini” was nominated for a Grammy, and “Rodeo” went double platinum. But now, in the making of his first full-length album, he was still trying to dodge what the rapper Q-Tip once called the “sophomore jinx.” (Not a sophomore slump — slumps can be cured with Red Bull — but a jinx, which feels otherworldly, out of your hands.) Nas released an 18-minute EP in 2019, but he spent the pandemic hunkering down and working on the album. He rented Airbnbs around Los Angeles and moved producers in with him, creating a music camp where, for fun, they would counsel each other on their love lives or play a “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”-style quiz show about who had the top single on a particular date in history. (With Nas as the host, the answer was almost always Drake.) One of the rentals closely resembled the set of the film “Call Me by Your Name,” inspiring the first single.
The members of Nas’s team whom I met were young: the 22-year-old Nas, a 26-year-old manager, a 30-year-old publicist. (“Whoa, aging gracefully” was Nas’s response to hearing that I was 29.) Take A Daytrip, the production duo consisting of Denzel Baptiste and David Biral, both 28, spent most of March and April with Nas, who was frustrated that he couldn’t immediately come up with another world-stopping hit. So Biral and Baptiste encouraged Nas to be vulnerable, making it feel as though they were just bro-ing out at a fun, low-stakes sleepover where there just happened to be a tricked-out music studio. There, Baptiste and Biral said, they discovered Nas’s natural musicality, his ability to memorize and build upon melodies and beats they introduced to him. Biral described the singer’s inspirations and the way he flits between genres the same way you might describe a bear reaching into a stream of salmon: “Nas is such a good internet kid,” he said. “You see things a mile a minute and you’re just getting small bits and pieces of information, but he’s really sticking his head in.”
Harrell and I were struck by how difficult it was to answer that question about Black American male pop stars. (The Weeknd and Drake, both Canadian, were out on a technicality.) “It’s been a while since we had an African American male with a unique voice out front,” he said. To him, Nas was rare in the fluidity with which he moved between genres (flitting between pop and hip-hop and country and ballads), distinctive in his voice and remarkable in his meticulousness, even as a new artist.
Nas strolled into the studio wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt-and-bucket-hat set, in robin’s-egg blue, the shirt uninterested in any button above his sternum. Last August, one of his producers, Omer Fedi (who is 21), put together a beat that made Nas feel “nostalgic,” and it eventually turned into today’s ballad. It was supposed to evoke two people sitting in a room together singing over one guitar, culminating in an orchestral swell worthy of the final scene of a movie — Nas had “Titanic” in mind. He drank a cup of Throat Coat, and we walked toward the backyard studio, which was lit like an aura portrait, a kaleidoscope of neon pink with minor notes of green and blue. The room smelled, trendily, of Le Labo Santal 26, and in the middle was an enormous television screen playing looped footage of soothing, high-definition nature scenes.
The vocal takes for the song had already been recorded once, but Nas wanted to tighten some parts up. Harrell played the track so they could determine what they needed to focus on. It was a duet, and while Harrell had been cagey about confirming the other performer’s identity, stans had spent weeks tweeting rumors of a collaboration with Miley Cyrus. Nas tapped one Timberland boot and mouthed along with the song, like a theater actor marking his performance. Some sections still felt contrived: Next to his duet partner’s, Nas’s voice sounded flat and uncertain, a half-step behind. But when he reached the bridge, his voice now breathy and rasping, there was a touch of pop-punk’s emo sneer, webs of emotion at the back of his throat.
“Is your vision to be softer than the O.G.?” Harrell asked him.
“Um, not necessarily,” Nas responded. “I just want it to sound … better.”
Later, when I asked Nas if he was a perfectionist, he told me that he worked to ensure that what he was doing was his best — “and my best is perfect.” Baptiste and Biral, for their part, agreed with Harrell about Nas’s attention to detail. Just look at his tweets, they said — as deftly written and pored over as haikus. He writes them the way he writes his songs, pacing and structure and impact all top of mind, within tight constraints. (The way Bach might’ve felt about counterpoint or Minaj feels about wordplay, Nas feels about capitalization, punctuation and rhythm, always knowing when the proper use of a period would ruin the joke.) He also has an unassailable conviction, the kind that only comes with being your grandmother’s favorite, that he can do anything he puts his mind to. Most artists draw confidence from their experience, but “ ‘Old Town Road’ was, like, the 13th song he ever made,” Biral said. “It came out of nowhere. In the last two years of working with him, we’ve realized how much he’s willing to learn, and then how much he’s willing to dedicate to getting good at something. And when he has his mind set on something, he will not give up.”
The line that Nas and Harrell had their minds set on in the studio that afternoon was “Oh, never forget me,” an aching croon. Perfection is achievable in the modern studio, if you run through a single line 25 times to get the best intonation of each word or phrase, then Frankenstein various takes together to get a rendition flawless enough for the radio. This was the kind of precision Harrell was pushing Nas toward — and, lest his artists get discouraged by this process, Harrell is equal parts coach and cheerleader, providing immediate, gushing feedback after every attempt or two.
The first word of the line was three measures long, plenty of time for a singer to lose his way or fade out before finishing the note. Nas warbled through a few reps of the line, cracking before he could complete it. Then he growled in frustration and swore loudly, dejected. “That vibe is insane,” Harrell said, encouraging. “That’s the vibe.”
The entire process — getting to a completed line that both Harrell and Nas were happy with — took about an hour. Then came the next line, on which Harrell wanted Nas to sharpen the final syllable of “ev’ry.” “Cut it quick,” he instructed, parroting the desired note. Nas tried it again, this time cleaner, smoother. But Harrell still wanted another: Soften it; don’t stress too hard. Nas paced around the vocal booth listening to the playback, holding his hands together in front of himself like a choirboy. He told Harrell that he wanted to start this next line softly, then get strong half a millisecond in. Harrell understood the minute change immediately. “His ear is so sick,” he said to no one in particular.
When Nas began recording the next line, he heard a whistle in his headphones and ran some vocal trills to prove it was not just in his head. Harrell adjusted, but Nas flubbed the line anyway. “Ugh,” he moaned into the mic, placing two finger guns to his temples and firing them.
“It sounds great,” Harrell said. “You’re definitely capturing all the emotions.”
“I get tired quickly,” Nas explained. “I think it’s laziness manifesting as tiredness.”
“Because you’re digging in,” Harrell said with all the devotion of a pastor. “You’re digging in. I love how you keep going for it until you get what you have to hear.” This was, apparently, exactly what Nas needed: He hit a high note, and his voice spilled out surprisingly strong and clear, coming through like a punch. This is what he had been building toward: this unbridled emotion, messy and searching but true. Harrell made him sing it a cappella, almost as if to prove what we just heard.
You’re nobody until you’re part of a conspiracy theory — and Nas, if you listen to some corners of the internet, is part of an evil, far-ranging effort to emasculate the Black man. In this he joins a lineage of many visibly queer Black men, from James Baldwin to Little Richard, whose sexuality has been seen as a siege on the purity of Black masculinity, already under so much duress. Biral and Baptiste, who are Black, told me that some artists have intimated to them that Nas is part of an “agenda” to feminize Black men.
Nowhere has this allegation weighed more heavily than with “Montero,” a song whose music video is a purposefully provocative sendup of the eternal damnation that Nas, and countless gay people, have been promised. In it, Nas is seduced by a serpent and brought in front of a tribunal for judgment, where he is killed by a flying butt plug. He then descends into hell via a stripper pole and ends up grinding on the devil, his face lavish with pleasure of the highest perversion. Lyrically, he describes, in lurid detail, how he wants to have sex with another man: “I want that jet lag from [expletive] and flyin’/Shoot a child in your mouth while I’m riding.” (As Susan Sontag said, “Camp is a tender feeling.”) He kills the devil, removing his horns and placing them atop his own head, suggesting that just because you are sentenced to hell doesn’t mean you are sentenced to suffering.
So when Nas performed “Montero” on television once again — this time at the BET Awards on a Sunday night in late June — I was less interested in the performance itself than in the reactions immediately after. The BET Awards are hokey but necessary, like a family reunion, attendees on their best behavior. They celebrate sex, money and excess with the same gusto as they do the church; this year’s ceremony opened with a collaboration between the gospel singer Kirk Franklin and the rapper Lil Baby, playing a song they did for the soundtrack of “Space Jam: A New Legacy.” When Nas’s performance was announced, I wondered if his appearance was merely a dutiful one — whether he was, like Whitney Houston in the 1980s, a Black artist with huge crossover appeal, facing whispered allegations of abandoning his race to reach the peak of pop, coming back to the fold to prove that he hadn’t been lost to the white mainstream.
“Montero” uses a scale often found in flamenco and Middle Eastern music. Nas, resplendent in glitter eye shadow and a gold lamé miniskirt (remember: “I will never trust pants again”), embraced this heritage by recreating, on the BET Awards stage, Michael Jackson’s Egyptian-themed video for “Remember the Time.” I assumed the homage to Jackson, replete with a dance break, was strict enough to prevent any real departure from the theme. But the final moments of this show, too, held a surprise, as Nas leaned over and made out with a male backup dancer.
One potential point of comparison here might be the infamous kiss between Britney Spears and Madonna at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards. (The kissing also included Christina Aguilera, but her part was written out of history when the camera cut away to capture Justin Timberlake’s reaction.) Where those three aimed to titillate, though, Lil Nas X wanted to demonstrate: This is what having a gay pop star could actually look like — at least one version, anyway. (The queer rapper Tyler, the Creator also appeared that night, staging himself amid a bizarre and terrifying windstorm in a performance so uncomfortable and avant-garde that the playwright Jeremy O. Harris called it unassailably gay, ingenious and daring. There, perhaps, was another version.) Most of the audience reactions, though effusive and cheering, were of women, as if the network knew who might show discomfort.
Gay pop stardom is nothing new, but a pop stardom in a position to include overt sexuality might be. Nas is a bouillabaisse of his forebears: the wholesome sex appeal of a George Michael, the glitz of an Elton John or a David Bowie, the disruption of a Le1f or a Sylvester, the emotion of a Frank Ocean. He also follows in the path of artists like Salt-N-Pepa and Lil’ Kim and his idol Nicki Minaj, all of whom made rabid sexual attraction to men into something interesting enough to sing about, as well as Janelle Monáe, whose “PYNK” was a lively song about one woman performing oral sex on another.
Nas’s project, though, is to move past the mainstream and publicly acceptable practice of queerness, which is often so divorced from actual sexual pleasure that it can feel neutered. It’s one thing to accept a gay person, as many do, by ignoring what we do behind closed doors. But it’s quite another to embrace gay people as sexual beings, who can also enact an identity — just as straight people so proudly, publicly and lucratively do — in part through sex itself. Unlike many of his predecessors, Nas’s claim to his sexuality is explicit. He does not, say, sing love songs with elided pronouns. This is a man who has sex with other men. Even within the queer community, to have a young, strong, Black man openly identify as a bottom — a feminized position that’s often the target of misogynistic ire — is rare, a subversion of both power structures and social codes. It’s one thing to claim it; it’s another to brag about it: “I might bottom on the low,” he has sung, “but I top shit.”
It makes sense to me that a celebrity like Nas would have a history with both the judgment of the church and the crueler corners of the internet, transgressing the former to find solace in the latter. There’s a defiance in him, the kind that forms in response to being told your entire being is perverse. He spent the days after his BET performance battling homophobes online, his anxiety clear in his higher-than-usual number of tweets. “We are 4 months in and people are still acting surprised that I am being gay and sexual in performances of a song about gay and sexual” stuff, he tweeted the next day. “Like the song is literally about gay sex what y’all want me to do play the piano while baking a cake?” In a follow-up tweet, he promised to mind all the anxiety over a kiss when he eventually has sex with a man onstage.
There is a contemporary understanding of Black male identity that is condescending even as it intends to be caring: It posits that to be Black and a man is to be, exclusively, in constant danger. Attempts to complicate Black masculinity — like the once-constant rendering of Black men wearing flower crowns, as though this were a shocking juxtaposition — often seem built on those same stereotypes. Some people seem to enjoy defining what a Black man should or should not be. On Nas, though, masculinity turns expansive. His identity is capacious enough to accommodate fantasy. Grazing all six of his abs might be a hand adorned with white nail polish. His chest might be bound by a corset. Last Halloween, he dressed up as Minaj, complete with a blond wig, cinched waist and false breasts. He knew it would make people uncomfortable. (An internet native, he measures this in terms of “losing followers.”) Drag on Black men is typically done for laughs or else so clearly fixed in a queer space that it doesn’t much infringe on mainstream gender politics. But something about a cis Black man dressed in women’s clothing purely for fun was too close for comfort, especially when his music sits near hip-hop. Nas ended up having to defend himself to people like the rapper 50 Cent, whose own exaggerated masculinity is rooted in big muscles and having survived being shot. “What makes Lil Nas X so extraordinary is how brave he is at being so outwardly gay within the urban music world,” Elton John said to me in an email. “That’s where he’s truly groundbreaking.”
“It was liberating,” Nas told me of the Halloween costume, “in the sense of, I know a lot of people aren’t gonna like this, and I’m going to do it anyway, because this is what I want to do right now, you know?” He was used to the condemnation. If anything, it allowed him to be more vulnerable in an artistic sense — to, say, make that music video off the spite of people who condemned him to hell. Provocation and vulnerability are two sides of the same coin. The academic GerShun Avilez terms this “queer contingency,” the simultaneous vulnerability and empowerment wrought by upending gender-based social standards. This position — of never being quite right — opens up a world of ingenuity, just like the limitations of Nas’s childhood did.
The tweets kept flowing. Nas responded to someone who said he could “just be a gay male and show up to the BET Awards with a suit and tie.” Someone else accused him of overcompensating for his insecurity about his sexual identity. He responded to a video in which a Black gay man essentially called him embarrassing and over the top. Nas had spent too much time hiding out on Nicki Minaj forums and praying that God would take the gay away to be embarrassed by himself any longer. Now he was angry but resolute: “you’re right i am insecure about my sexuality. i still have a long way to go. i’ve never denied that. when you’re conditioned by society to hate yourself your entire life it takes a lot of unlearning. which is exactly why i do what i do.”
Outside the Chateau Marmont, which we agreed had real “murder vibes,” the conversation inevitably turned to the occult. Nas told me he was deep into numerology. When he started to get famous, he said, he saw the number 66 everywhere. He’d see a license plate with the numbers together. He’d get seated in a restaurant at Table 66. It felt like a joke that everyone in the world was in on except for him. “Like, did I accidentally join the Illuminati or something?” he said, parking the car.
He wanted to show me what the number meant, so he pulled up a Blogspot page bloated with internet chum. “Sixty-six is a message from your angels to put your faith and trust in the benevolence of the universe,” he read. “Your daily needs are continually met.” He scrolled further down the page. “Angel No.66 asks you to balance your physical, material and spiritual lives, focusing on your spirituality and living a conscientious and purposeful lifestyle.” He trailed off. Angel No.66 also suggested that matters regarding the family and home were harmonious, and encouraged people to love fully. Nas realized that he had become so focused on his career that he was out of balance. The universe, he felt, was giving him advice.
Now he has been seeing the number 79 — proof, he said, that he was on the right path. According to his blog of choice, 79 indicated that he was headed in exactly the direction he should be: “Angel No.79 brings a message from the angels to continue listening to your spiritual practice and/or career path and your Divine life purpose.”
He knew all this sounded crazy, but it was no crazier than anything else that had happened to him over the past few years. Forget the highs of his career — he had never even seen himself coming out of the closet, having pledged to himself at 14 that he would die with that secret. Now he was a verifiable gay superstar, living publicly in ways that many people haven’t been able to before and hoping that others could follow in his steps. We finished reading the Blogspot, and Nas turned on the car. The little screen in the car’s console came alive and told us the temperature: 79 degrees.
Stylist: Hodo Musa. Hair and makeup: Widny Bazile.
Shikeith is an artist and a filmmaker in Pittsburgh. His work focuses on the experiences of Black men within and around concepts of psychic space.
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