Lil Nas X Gives the Devil a Lap Dance
Montero (Call Me By Your Name)
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Lil Nas X, the twenty-one-year-old music superstar who broke out in 2019 with the song Old Town Road (which was literally the longest-running #1 single ever), just hours ago debuted his newest single MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name). The internet has exploded with love, boners, and anger.
MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)’s release has been long-awaited, as Lil Nax X has been using a sample of the song on his TikTok for months, but the entire piece is much more nuanced and interesting than many might have assumed.
Starting with the title. Montero is Lil Nas X’s legal name, and Call Me By Your Name comes from the book and film by Andre Aciman of the same title. If you have read it or seen the movie, I recommend both, but I preferred the book. Generally speaking, CMBYN is 21st-century gay canon. The phrase “call me by your name” is brought to life during a sex scene between Elio and Oliver (to be clear, both of these are men). It’s a beautiful, if sometimes confusing, expression of intimacy and romance that I won’t even begin to try and explain here; just read the book. The point is, Lil Nas X’s manipulation of CMBYN is a confrontation of the self and unspoken desires. It is gorgeous.
In the official music video, directed by Tanu Muino & Lil Nas X, we enter “Montero,” which the narrator describes as a place where we take the parts of ourselves we don’t want to see and let them flow freely. It’s a world where quiet shames, passions, and pleasures are not only confronted but embraced. Right from the get-go, we’re dropped into a place almost like the garden of Eden, but instead of eating the apple, Lil Nas X - in an Eve-adjacent role - fucks the snake. Yes, I said what I said. He fucks the snake.
It doesn’t stop there. Frame-by-frame, we are taken through a lush and opulent magical world where desire is threatened with punishment, but the threat is always confronted, dismissed, and dominated.
In the final act, Lil Nas X is banished to hell by a jury of future-Roman denim-clad senators (?). As he descends into the underworld, he does it on a stripper-pole, in thigh-high black leather heels and a red wig that I deeply need in my drag bag.
Approaching the devil, one might assume that Lil Nas X would bow in deference, but instead, he rides him like a rodeo bull. Lil Nas X takes power from the devil by seducing him and all of us. Spoiler alert! He kills the devil altogether by breaking his neck and taking his horns and wearing them himself.
This entire situation is amazing. Like. AMAZING.
It’s sexy, daring, silly, and a total fucking serve. It really can’t be expressed how brilliant and dangerous it is either. This is a queer queer queer GAY song/video, and Lil Nas X is one of the top musicians in the game right now. He is a gen-z mega-star and using the hell out of his platform to show his true colors (of which there are many).
When he came out publicly as gay in the summer of 2019, Old Town Road was taking the world by storm. This was a 19-year-old Black man, at the top of the Country charts, coming out of the closet. That in-and-of-itself is stunning, but now, almost two years later, he continues to demand freedom by leveling up his flamboyance and telling the metaphorical devil to go fuck himself. Or, I guess, that he is going to fuck the devil…
Horny and brilliant as it is, Montero (Call Me By Your Name) is beautiful. Here is what Lil Nas X wrote about the piece via his Twitter.
PLEASE WATCH LIL NAS X’S MONTERO (CALL ME BY YOUR NAME) NOW
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