The night that “Holiday,” the infectious lead single from Montero, the upcoming self-titled album from Montero Lamar Hill – the rapper/musician/social media impresario known as Lil Nas X – debuted, the artist checked himself into a hotel.
It was November 2020, 18 months after his country/hip-hop anthem “Old Town Road” took over the world and changed his life. Was he a one-hit wonder? Did he have what it took to make a full-length album? Was his past success a fluke? The world was anxious to see. So was he. In fact, he was terrified.
“The night before it came out, I was in my shower. I was like, ‘Oh god, I feel like I’m making a really bad decision,” he says, burying his face in his hands. “I was just like…what’s happening?”
To celebrate the track’s release, he had a small gathering with friends, but his focus kept shifting to comments about the track on Twitter. “I was seeing some nice things,” he recalls. “But I was seeing a lot of fucking negativity too.” So he checked the charts. “And I was like, ‘Oh shit. This is not even in the top 200. Oh god. What the fuck did I do wrong?”
So, not knowing what else to do, with nowhere else to go, he checked himself into a hotel. He had scheduled rehearsals for his performance on the premiere episode of Amazon’s “Holiday Plays,” a multi-episode Christmas special, starring Miley Cyrus, the next day. “I told my manager, ‘I don’t want to do it. Let’s cancel it. Let’s get rid of it. There’s no point. Nobody’s really fucking with this song.’ I was crying. I was upset with myself. I felt like I’d…” He pauses, grasping for the right words, eventually settling on: “failed myself, almost. I was crying like a crazy person. You know one of those times where you cry so hard your fuckin head hurts? It was like that.”
The next morning, he spoke with Ron Perry, the Chairman and CEO of Columbia Records. While he doesn’t recount the conversation in detail, he shares the one thing he took away from it: “We talked about how it’s hard for artists who just had true success to get that back immediately,” he recounts. “I eventually got myself the fuck up and said, ‘No, we got this. Let’s stay fuckin strong.” He went to his rehearsal. By his own description, he “went crazy on TikTok,” promoting the song until it became a fixture on the For You page.
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After four months, “Holiday” was certified platinum. “That song is a reminder that I have the power to make any situation better.”
Releasing this album’s second single just as the world begins to see the light at the end of the long tunnel of quarantine, it seems that Nas is also afraid of taking any more time out of the spotlight. “I never want to take a break again,” he adds, emphatically. “I feel like I never really need [them[ anymore because I’m finding joy and finding a happy life in what I’m doing now.”
This moment — the release of his sensual (and inescapable) single “Montero (Call My By Your Name),” the quick rise to the top of the charts, being social media’s main character– feels “almost déjà vu-ish” for him. The young man is, again, on a rocket ship. But this time, he has the power to steer it. And just like a rocket, his greatest strength–and weakness–is that he refuses to stop.
Clapping for emphasis, he says it again: “No. More. Breaks.”
I met Lil Nas X a few days after the release of his single and the accompanying visual, “Montero (Call My By Your Name).” The song, about a young man the rapper dated during quarantine, features lines like, “I wanna feel on your ass in Hawaii/I want that jet lag from fuckin’ and flyin’/Shoot a child in your mouth while I’m ridin’,” and a video that sees the artist, clad in patent leather boots, rides a stripper pole to hell, where he grinds on a stoic-looking Satan before killing him. It left me, quite literally, speechless. Here’s a young gay black man, doing whatever the fuck he wants, and losing absolutely nothing for it. It was something I, like so many other LGBT Black people, have always wanted to see.
The past few days have been a whirlwind for Nas: the song garnered 46.9 million US streams and sold 21,000 downloads in its first week. An accompanying product, the “Satan Shoe,” a collaboration with the art collective MSCHF, sold its inventory of 666 pairs within minutes of release. Just as quickly, Nike sued MSCHF, barring them from shipping any of the product. A backlash began to form: Videos of pastors deeming Nas a “satanist” circulated the internet. Governor Kristi Noem, of South Dakota, dedicated multiple tweets to the rapper, even as her state struggles with one of the worst COVID outbreaks in the country. In response to one of the rapper’s clapbacks, she tweeted, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
Shirtless in a dressing room at Hubble Studios in Los Angeles, Nas paces around a large coffee table, adorned with an oversized bouquet of flowers from Beach House, the dream-pop-duo. He occasionally checks himself out the mirror above my head, and I notice, amused, that he’s wearing the infamous “Satan Shoe.” His energy is all over the place, but he finds an engaging focus as he recounts his past seven days: “I just know that if that moment in the hotel didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have been able to make it through this week,” he says. “It’s been a lot of shit thrown at me. I’ve been pretty good with, like, handling the comebacks or whatever, but I know for a fact that 2020 me would’ve crumbled. He would’ve crumbled.”
Nas is excited to talk about his personal growth, and he credits a big part of that growth to his new hobby: Reading. “I’ve spent quarantine doing a lot of internal learning, which has helped me a lot,” he says. “It helped me create this moment.”
His favorite genre is what he calls “self-discovery” books, and he’s proud to rattle off the titles he’s read: The Rose Effect: Eight Steps to Delivering the Performance of Your Life, by Keana Henson, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Don Ruiz’s The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, and, his favorite, Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
“It teaches you to block out the things in your life that you don’t really care about,” he says. “Like, if I read a negative comment or whatever, I get to decide, is this important to me? Is this true? Is this not true? If it is true, then how do we make it untrue? If it isn’t true, then why the fuck do we care?”
Nas talks a lot about confidence: “Finding confidence”; “Discovering confidence.” “I’ve been rebuilding my self confidence to a whole new level,” he says. “I’m learning more and being more attuned to the universe.”
As he tells it, many of quarantine’s earlier months were spent “killing off” his jealousy. One of his last major public appearances before COVID-19 forced the world into lockdown was the 2020 Grammys, where he arrived on the red carpet in a custom-made, fuschia BDSM cowboy suit by Versace. That night, despite taking home the statues for Pop Song and Music Collaboration of the Year, one thing stuck with him: His loss for Record of the Year. Looking back on that night, he recalls his thoughts as Billie Eilish took the stage: “Damn, but how? I have the biggest song. That isn’t fair.”
Months later, Nas, in lockdown — “literally in the house by myself” — turned 21. Forced to do take a break (something that he hates), he was able to look back on that night with perspective. “I put all that energy I was feeling onto her,” he says of Eilish. “It became jealousy that wasn’t warranted. You have the longest-running number one song, why the fuck are you jealous about this award?” he thought. “We are already so blessed. Even if you don’t have these things, you’re here. You’re still alive. You exist. You shouldn’t have any reason to be jealous.”
Lil Nas X, whose father, R.L. Stafford, is a “literal gospel singer,” grew up going to church in Bankhead, a neighborhood west of Downtown Atlanta. “It was never super bad,” he says. “It was just kind of boring for me.” By the time he reached his late teens, any lingering sense of belief had waned. He says that living “deep into the internet” first challenged his belief in Christianity. As he grew older, he also grew determined to live true to himself as a young gay man, and he found that Christianity, as least as it was presented to him, didn’t allow him the space to do that: “That was one of the main reasons why I never wanted to be gay,” he says. “I even thought, ‘If I have these feelings, it’s just a test. A temporary test. It’s going to go away. God is just tempting me.”
He can’t pinpoint, exactly, where this belief came from. Like most gay people, he can readily recall instances of homophobia from middle and high schools, but for the most part, “it was never really talked about, but it was always around me, constantly.”
I kept thinking back to Nas’ buzzword: Confidence — I wondered: How can you have confidence in your work when you’re not even comfortable being yourself? How can you create honest work if you’re in the closet? “This is a superstar’s journey from being a boy to being a man,” says Hodo Musa, Lil Nas X’s stylist (and close friend). “It’s like when you have something special that shines so bright inside, but you need time to finesse, the time to work on it, so you can see it for yourself.”
After coming out to his family, friends — and later, from his perch as “Old Town Road” was atop the charts, his fans — he’s been able to reach new, unapologetic, creative heights. He’s creating work that feels, for the first time, honest, and he hopes that growth is apparent in his work for Montero the album: “I feel like a lot of the success I’ve got already, a lot of people like to dismiss it,” he says. While he can’t pinpoint an exact reason, he muses, “Maybe my older music doesn’t seem mature enough to be counted.” But now, he wants to stand defiant before his haters: “I feel like I’ve earned mines, y’know?”
It also seems like he’s found a greater purpose in the work he’s producing. When it comes to grinding on Satan, the intent seems to be a reclamation of power, of fighting all the things he was afraid to be before. “It’s rebellious on many, many levels for me…That I never want to portray too much feminine energy…That I have to keep it very safe and PG-13. And that even, as a gay artist that I have to be…” After searching for a word, he settles on, “Respectable.” At the start of his career, he feared that, as a gay artist, he wouldn’t be “allowed to be really sensual or anything… Like I’m gay but i’m not ‘gay’… Like, I’m gay but I have to make sure you feel like I can be straight-passing too.”
Nas has grown bolder with his style. “I’ve grown to love more of what a look can be than the actual fashion itself,” he says. “Fashion is one of those things that I can use to feed that part of me that loves to step into new areas.” He credits Hodo with challenging him to push boundaries with his expression on red carpets and in life, a charge that she doesn’t take lightly. When crafting a look, they hope to create something that feels “authentic,” that allows Nas to “shine.” “We play with textures that normally men don’t do,” Hodo explains, citing staples of his past looks, like big shoulders and crop jackets. Listing designers with whom they’ve worked in the past — Pyer Moss, Christian Cowan and Christopher John Rogers — she notes that it’s been “very intentional” to work with brands led by up-and-coming, queer or black designers. “When you align yourself with people like that,” she says, “then you do magic. Good things happen.”
This new-found bravery has inspired him to demonstrate this rebellion in the studio and his growth has become apparent in his craft as well. “It’s almost like being around a completely different person these days,” says Denzel Baptiste, one half of the producer duo Take a Daytrip, who has worked with Nas since his 2019 single “Panini.” “Everything that we’ve learned over the years, about [what it was like] growing up as a kid in Atlanta who was hiding so much of himself from basically everyone. That kind of sets your personality in a certain way: You learn to live with a level of discomfort as a baseline. Through these years, we’ve been able to see him grow as a musician and as a person and really be himself more.”
This confidence has extended into his personal life, too. Halfway through our interview, Nas abruptly stops to find his phone. He darts across the room and finds his iPhone on a folding chair, hiding under a Pyer Moss t-shirt. After confirming that whatever needed to be checked was okay, he turned to me, apologetic. “Sorry,” he says. “I have a date tonight.” It’s his second, with the same guy, in as many nights, he tells me. “I feel super comfortable now. Like, last night at the movies, we were holding hands and all that cute movie stuff.” Just shy of 22, this marks a huge moment of growth for him: “Even asking guys, ‘Yo, are you into me?’ Or some shit like that. That was never going to happen before, because it was like, ‘What if they say no?’ But now it’s just like, ‘If they say no, then shit, okay.’”
Here he is, a young gay black man, days shy of his 22nd birthday, with a single atop the Billboard charts, talking openly about going on a date with another guy. Despite the singularity of his existence, the younger fans who’ve shared stories of coming out because of him on TikTok, or older LGBT fans, like me, who wish that they’d had a figure like him in their youth, he is not, he tells me — despite my insistence — looking to be anyone’s “role model.”
“At first I felt a sense of responsibility,” he says. “But now I kind of just don’t care. It’s not my job. Of course I want to spread good ideals, but I’m not nobody’s parents. At the end of the day I’m just doing me, and hoping everybody else is following the lead, and doing themselves.”
Nas, less weighed down by his own insecurity, feels ready to stake a permanent place in pop stardom, and every story of his personal growth, his “internal learning,” his relationship-building leads us back to his upcoming album Montero, due this summer. He promises a body of work that is more than a series of tracks; He describes it as a collection of “moments.” Asked to list his inspirations, he catalogues the biggest stars of his lifetime: Drake, Beyonce, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Jay-Z, Kanye West: artists that have, in his telling, “managed to create moments over and over and over again.” When he looks at them, he thinks: I can do that. “I’m definitely flexing my ass off on a lot of the album,” he says. “I’m definitely rapping more, I’m definitely dead ass like, ‘Oh, I did this, I did that, fuck you, fuck you.’”
But his album is much more than rap; one gets the sense that speaking in terms of “genres” in a form of code-switching for him, and that he acknowledges genre because he has to, not because it comes naturally to him. It figures: this is the antiquated language of music charts and radio play that he and his generation of artists are in the process of destroying. When asked to explain what to look forward to in his future work, he speaks, instead, of personalities and feelings: “You’re getting vulnerable Nas. You’re getting Happy Nas. You’re getting Nas in Love. You’re getting Simp Nas. You’re getting bad bitch Nas. You’re getting hood nigga Nas. You’re getting all of it, y’know?” Spreading his arms wide, he continues, “You’re getting all of me. I feel so free. For the first time in my life, these last couple of months, I’m just like, ‘I can do whatever.’”
There have been many articles, tweets and videos attempting to detail Nas’ rise, his career, the impact of his coming out, the release of “Call My By Your Name,” the backlash, his triumph. Thousands of words, forming a cerebral attempt at understanding why the sight of a 21 year old twerking on Satan caused such a stir.
My brain isn’t able to produce those words. I think, instead, of gay black youth across the world, people who have felt invisible, unheard, like they don’t exist, seeing another young gay black person ride Satan all the way to the top of the charts, expressing his romantic and sexual desires in all of their smutty, unabashed glory. This is simply a level of artistic expression (and financial success) that has rarely, if ever, been granted to an openly gay, black artist.
I spent 2019 and 2020 travelling the world, interviewing and photographing queer people of color for my book, Queer Love in Color. Amongst their stories, one thing kept coming up: A feeling of invisibility, a sense that pop culture and media have ignored them out of existence.
“Working on my book,” I told Nas, “I found that almost everyone I met had never seen an example of a gay black person in pop culture who was truly affirmed by the world —”
“Yeah, that’s never happened,” he says, interrupting me. “But it’s going to.”
I have to admit, I was worried about Nas. We’ve placed an insane amount of pressure on the kid: Politicians have called him out by name, he’s received death threats, and gay people across the world have lived vicariously through his clapbacks, projected themselves onto his image of carefree winning. There is a certain powerlessness that can come with finding yourself with so much success so quickly. And it seems like Lil Nas X is hell bent on getting his power back. “Part of my plan is to make sure people know I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want when I want to, and if you’re mad at it, I’m going to laugh in your face.”
Two years ago, on April 9th, 2019, Montero Lamar Hill turned 20. He received the best birthday gift: The Old Town Road Remix, released just a few days earlier, had reached the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100. To honor the occasion, Columbia Records gathered his team in a conference room for what he calls a “cake meeting,” his de facto birthday party.
We’re a week shy of his 22nd birthday. It’ll be his second time marking the passage of another year of life with a song atop the Billboard 100. He might actually be able to have a party, of some sort, this year. (“COVID-safe, of course,” he notes.) It’s clear that he has a lot to look forward to, but what’s he’s most excited for is seeing what doors he can open for the artists that come after him: “I know right now there’s a shift happening in this younger generation, and that this video is going to be a part of them standing up. This song is going to be a part of that. I will too.”
The Summer 2021 issue of GQ Style is out on newsstands and via the GQ Style app on Thursday 13 May.
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