The Remarkable Emotionality of Lil Nas X’s 'MONTERO'
Lil Nas X's debut album 'MONTERO' subverts grandiose expectations, relying heavily on epic emotional stories about growing up queer—and all the romance, heartache, and anxiety that come with it.
On the eve of his long-awaited debut album MONTERO, just minutes before the 15-song project named after Lil Nas X’s real name was set to be unleashed onto the world after weeks of chrysalis gestation, the Grammy-winning, openly gay, marketing and musical genius that is Lil Nas X was once again deftly showing the world both ends of his artistic and musical spectrum.
On one end was THE MONTERO SHOW, a highly stylized, 90s-era sensationalist daytime talk show with Lil Nas X playing the role of host, guest, and audience. The ten-minute sketch was packed with absurdist humor and sly surrealism as Lil Nas X counted down his favorite videos to date, already a tall order for someone who not only has no bad music videos but has had two consecutive visuals go viral, causing outrage from both Christian conservatives and homophobic industry peers. When the countdown’s number one spot goes unfilled, he explains that it’s because his favorite video is dropping along with the album, and that it’s all coming to term right this second.
The video for “THAT’S WHAT I WANT” oscillates to the other side of the Lil Nas X artistic spectrum and, premiering in tandem with his debut album, reflects the thoughtful, emotionally attuned star beneath all of the CGI satanic lap dances and nude shower choreography. There is no longer a need for deflection or trying to control the narrative, the story is his, and it’s all here in every beat of the record and every frame of his newest video. This is the most open and vulnerable Lil Nas X has ever been, confirming him—as if anyone was still wondering—to be one of the most important musicians of his generation.
In less than three minutes, the self-written treatment for “THAT’S WHAT I WANT” reveals more about who Lil Nas X is than any of his videos have before. It opens with the supernova pop star rocketing into the earth’s orbit and crash landing on a football field, to little fanfare, in the middle of a game already in progress. As he’s hauled off to the locker room, he spots a boy on the field and wonders if he might have “the G or the B” in LGBT. “These days are way too lonely, I’m missing out, I know,” he sings. In the locker room, he spots the boy from the field and, in a rush of passion, they begin kissing on beat with the song’s lovelorn exclamation of a chorus. “I want…someone to love me!/I need…someone to need me,” he sings as they throw their clothes to the ground, ripping a condom rapper off with their teeth.
It’s hard not to be stricken by the sheer magnitude of the moment. For months, Lil Nas has been (literally) dancing around more straightforward depictions of queer love, opting for outrageously sexy visuals, garnering huge media attention while affirming that his sexuality is inextricable from himself and his art. But aside from a lap dance here and a shower scene there, none of these visuals had yet pushed the envelope by doing something seemingly simple but undoubtedly difficult for someone whose career has been inundated with constant backlash: kissing, touching, and fucking another boy. Though Lil Nas ended his performance at the BET Awards last June with a kiss, this is different. Seeing him be unapologetically romantic and loving while being backed by a song about how he, like all the rest of us, truly just wants someone to love, is incredibly moving. There’s a reason he waited to release this video and this song at this moment, he knows that all eyes are watching, including those who may be watching from under the covers and logged into an incognito window late on a school night. He particularly wants those people to see that there is someone out there just like them. This is a bold, joyous expression of Black queer love and sexuality; it’s a rewriting of his own history, allowing him to live out the cinematic fantasy of the conventional high school romance, without real-life worry having violence or verbal aggression enacted towards the participating parties. It’s a glorious fantasy.
But like most fantasies, it doesn’t last forever. After diving deeper into film references with nods to Brokeback Mountain, the video keeps in line with that film’s plot when Lil Nas discovers that the boy he’s been seeing has a wife and family at home. As brave as he can be to live fully as himself, the same reality isn’t afforded to everyone. Heartbroken, he gets drunk, smashes bottles, and collapses on the floor. In the last scene, a church choir sings over the introduction to the final chorus while Lil Nas walks down the aisle in a Christian Cowan wedding dress, hair long and face streaked with black mascara under his veil. When handed a guitar by the priest, Lil Nas rips into the final chorus. “It don’t feel right when it’s late at night and it’s just me and my dreams/So I want…someone to love me!/That’s what I fucking want!” Looking straight into the camera, eyes filled with tears and face darkened by mascara, we finally see Lil Nas X for who he is—guitar in hand, he’s ready to let us in on his own terms: through the music.
The video for “THAT’S WHAT I WANT” is a perfect companion to MONTERO, a stunning full-length debut that builds on everything Lil Nas X has done to date while peeling back layers of self-made superstar artifice to detail the deeply emotional person at its core. Anyone who expected MONTERO to be a well-deserved, braggadocios victory lap would be surprised—most of the record shirks the radio-ready style of massive hit singles “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” and “Industry Baby” in favor of highly personal epics that continue Lil Nas’ streak of genre-hopping excellence. Of course an artist whose ascension to fame was built on challenging the industry’s ideas of genres guidelines and who gets to participate in them would settle for no less than 15 different musical styles on his debut, it’s just a wonder they all meld together so seamlessly. That’s all thanks to Take A Daytrip, the hit-making production duo responsible for Lil Nas’ 2019 single “Panini,” who worked closely with him in the studio for two years on each song, earning executive producer credits. It’s clear from interviews and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the recording process the three are not only very close but have a fundamental understanding of how to play to each other’s strengths while encouraging them to go further—whether it be lyrically or within the production.
The result is a batch of truly singular, endlessly fascinating work that isn’t afraid to go deep and go dark. On the album’s first non-single, “DEAD RIGHT NOW,” Lil Nas bounces between multiple different perspectives as he recalls detractors who spent a lifetime telling him he’d never amount to anything—doubtful admonishments from his father and cruel, jealous voicemails from a mother struggling with sobriety—who are now calling to get a piece of the fame and fortune that his years of relentless hard work afforded him. Over a horn-laced trap beat, Lil Nas admits that there’s a disheartening but gratifying sensation in not picking up the phone. “You know, you never used to call/Keep it that way now/I treat you like you’re dead right now.” It’s immediately clear that nothing on this record will be off-limits.
There are single-ready tracks peppered in throughout MONTERO, like the invigorating “SCOOP,” which includes a feature from Doja Cat and an irresistible strumming bassline, where Lil Nas admits to his equal proclivity for headline-causing antics and internet-breaking pictures (“Understand, I’m just trying to be the daily…scoop!”). There’s also the album’s most by-the-numbers, conventional track “DOLLA SIGN SLIME” which is aided by a fantastic Megan Thee Stallion verse but never reaches beyond run-of-the-mill radio fare, especially when sandwiched between two of the album’s most marvelous songs. The first, “LOST IN THE CITADEL,” is a stunning queer breakup song that begins with a low, droning synth and unfolds into a stadium-ready take on late 90s/early 00s alt-pop. The second, “TALES OF DOMINICA,” ruminates on what it’s like to grow up with a perpetual sense of anxiety due to the environment you were subjected to and how it follows well into adulthood.
“TALES OF DOMINICA” is the first song in a trio run of darker, deeply melancholic songs that generously reveal glimpses into Lil Nas X’s psyche. “SUN GOES DOWN” begins with chords reminiscent of Samantha Ronson’s “Built This Way,” a song anyone in the modern world will immediately remember from Mean Girls—highly appropriate as Lil Nas X uses “SUN GOES DOWN” to talk about what it was like for him in high school, with zero reservations. “I wanna run away/Don’t wanna lie, I don’t want a life/Send me a gun, and I’ll see the sun,” he sings as the flourishes into an opening. It’s an admittance that’s so raw and courageous it’s hard not to be taken aback, holding your breath until there’s a moment to exhale: “I’m happy that it all worked out for me/I’m gonna make my fans so proud of me.” The video for “SUN GOES DOWN” finds Lil Nas revisiting and rewriting his own history, allowing himself to live a teenage experience he never had. It’s an extraordinary visual of joy, one that doesn’t just allow himself to reclaim his own experience but strives to give an ounce of hope to Black queer youth who are struggling with their identities, finding it hard to see a future for themselves that holds true happiness.
The candor with which Lil Nas X talks about his flirtation with suicidal ideation is both frightening and extremely necessary. The Trevor Project estimates that every 45 seconds, at least one LGBTQ youth attempts to take their own life, with queer youth being three times more likely to contemplate suicide than their heterosexual counterparts. In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music released this week, Lil Nas told Lowe that even while he was experiencing the massive initial success of “Old Town Road,” he began to feel the familiar pall of anxiety. “The entire time I was making music I felt I was going to die for some reason,” he said. “I guess I tried to ignore it until it went away. And then that's when I found belief in the universe, for sure.”
The album’s most vividly affecting run of songs concludes with “VOID,” a stunningly vulnerable track and arguably MONTERO’s best song. There’s no one else here, no features or theatricalities, just a tender but forlorn Lil Nas X singing about life and love, seemingly to his friend and stylist Hodo Musa, who’s named in the song several times. The second verse finds him lapsing into a passage of plaintive sorrow, the culmination of all of the record’s increasingly vulnerable emotionality so far. “See, I’m getting tired of the way I’ve been living/I’d rather die than to live with these feelings/Stuck in this world where there's so much to prove/Every win gives you more room to lose/It's too many ups and downs on the ride/I spent inordinate amounts of time trapped in a lonely, loner life/Looking for love where I'm denied.” These lines are delivered with outstanding emotional grace, the beat eventually falling back and letting Lil Nas’ voice and timbre take hold before he ascends back into a falsetto. It’s staggering, and a reminder that not only is Lil Nas X a charming pop star and rapper, but he’s also a burgeoning vocalist who has never gotten enough credit for how well he uses his instrument. “VOID” is an exquisite album centerpiece, the kind that any artist would be lucky to have on their debut, but one that few are truly introspective enough to pull off.
The album’s coda begins with “LIFE AFTER SALEM,” a desperation-laden, 90s acid grunge rock song that should send Nirvana fans flocking to this record if they know what’s good for them. On MONTERO’s final track, “AM I DREAMING,” Lil Nas X closes the album by teaming up with Miley Cyrus, a full-circle moment after Billy Ray Cyrus threw his support behind Lil Nas when he was an industry upstart three years ago, helping him revolutionize the scene. “AM I DREAMING” feels like a study of that moment and everything that has happened since. Over the song’s final bars, Lil Nas and Cyrus sing together, their voices intertwining and melding beautifully with one another. “Oh, never forget me,” they ask in tandem, until Miley’s voice falls away over the last syllable to leave Lil Nas X front and center with one final plea: “…And everything I’ve done.” The song and album conclude with the sound of a body splashing into water while thunder roars overhead.
When asked by Lowe about what these final moments of the album represent to him, Lil Nas expounded with the following:
“Let’s say you’re, like, on a sinking ship…you’re dying basically. And you’re having all these thoughts about what everybody’s going to feel. You can’t even settle in your own death, your mind is like, ‘What’s everybody going to think? Am I going to be remembered? Am I going to be loved?” And then at the end, it’s like, death. It’s the end of the album. Once you see the album cover, it’s like a continuous cycle…because I feel like once we’re gone here, we’re doing something next, somewhere else.”
It would be easy for Lil Nas X to stay at surface level, treading water and collecting plaques by releasing singles and albums that follow the same formula of his biggest successes. But his ambitions are far beyond the title and the material, being the best is worth nothing to him if there isn’t the potential for love, for a connection to something beyond industry domination. His antics are never just to stir controversy and use it as free promotion, they’re a tactic being used to spread a message as far and as wide and to as many people as possible in hopes that it will reach someone who needs it, even if they have to hear it talked about with venom-laced disgust on FOX News or around their family dinner table. He knows that self-discovery is often done in silence, especially for young people, and that not only is there very little representation and accurate depiction of queer joy—and specifically Black queer joy—but that there is even less representation of Black queer heartbreak and the constant struggle for self-acceptance in a world stacked against you in every way. He knows that these emotions, both the joy and the pain, can’t survive in a vacuum. They need to breathe, and be shown to the world and ourselves. Otherwise there is no healing. Otherwise there is no room for love to grow.
“I feel like [openness about queer issues and sexuality] is really important for representation in general, and this is gonna open more doors for one day when somebody [releases something like] this, it’s like, ‘Oh, that person said that and I didn't think about it,” Lil Nas X told Genius when discussing “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name).” If that song was the ignition to the fire that got people to pay attention, MONTERO the album is the fuel that keeps the flames roaring when he knows the world is listening. This is the time for an unabashedly queer, highly emotional record that traverses a landscape of sounds and experiences, never once holding back even for a moment. There has not been a mission statement like this released from an openly queer man at such a high echelon of fame, maybe ever. If there’s one broad message that should be taken from MONTERO, it’s that there is no reality where Lil Nas X is going away.
“Gay artists, in general, are swept under the rug no matter how much they’ve contributed,” he told Lowe. When Lowe then suggests that audiences sometimes only accept and appreciate an artist’s queerness on the listener’s terms, Lil Nas nods in agreement. It’s something he’s experienced repeatedly in only the three short years since exploding onto the scene. Gatekeeping is the music industry’s bread and butter, and anyone who dares to defy the norms is quickly shut out. He said it best on “HOLIDAY,” a buzz single from late last year that was eventually left off the finished version of the record: “Nobody tried to let me in, nobody opened doors/I kicked them motherfuckers down, they didn't have a choice.” It was never enough for Lil Nas X to transcend music genres alone, he needed to be pop culture. His destiny was nothing less. MONTERO is proof that Lil Nas doesn’t just know how to play the game, but that he’s good enough at it to rewrite the rules. This is his carefully crafted, sparkling utopia; a place of safety, potent emotion, and lived-in experience that’s just waiting for its like-minded inhabitants. MONTERO will be their guide.