The Art of the Shitpost: Lil Nas X is Turning Outrage into Success
In Japanese martial arts, there is a concept called kuzushi. In fighting styles like judo, it means knocking an opponent off-balance and using their own momentum against them.
In the world of pop music, the American genre-blurring artist Montero Lamar Hill, better known as Lil Nas X, has been employing the same philosophy surrounding the promotion of his latest single, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” The video and promotional materials in support of the release find Mr. Hill leaning on satanic imagery from pentagrams to demons, much to the chagrin of some of his more outspoken critics. Notable public figures such as South Dakota’s Governor Kristi Noem and career outrage-crafters like Candace Owens have weighed in on how the song and accompanying video signify the “fight for the soul of our nation.” With every response Lil Nas X offers, it’s more and more clear that the machinations of social media outrage and virality are where he finds himself at home and where pot-stirring reactionaries are merely visitors.
Through his promotion strategies and zinger response tweets that seem to only bolster his fan base and record sales, Lil Nas X is operating on a level of social media literacy and manipulation that is unheard of. Mr. Hill’s approach to responding to critics both exposes the posts of reactionaries peddling outrage as a ploy for engagement and relevance, while also illustrating that the concepts of virality and outrage can be recontextualized as powerful methods of self-promotion. In real time we are witnessing Lil Nas X stunting and redirecting outrage initially manufactured against him to further the position of his art and career.
After all, this deep into the digital age, and in consideration of the rhetoric at play when opposing digital narratives collide, who hasn’t become at least marginally familiar with the prevalence of filter bubbles and feedback loops? With platforms algorithmically spoon-feeding us exactly what we want to hear, clashing narratives and ideologies inevitably lead to outraged engagement. When viewed from outside these bubbles, some of the topics of contention seem wholly ridiculous, wasted energy in pursuit of a fleeting sense of moral superiority. When our online hangout spaces become so detached from reality in the name of ideological bias, it’s no wonder that we have public representatives concerning themselves with Satanic Panic they believe is being perpetuated by a gay, Black popstar while refusing to address devastating problems that are actually affecting their constituents.
In the case of Lil Nas X, his social media mega-literacy is informed by the days from before he was a household name. Precursing the ubiquity of the record-breaking hit “Old Town Road,” Mr. Hill was a die-hard Nicki Minaj stan with a considerable following on twitter, running a tweet-decking account that constantly chased virality in the name of furthering Ms. Minaj’s music and popularity as well as general internet notoriety. Surely, the posting tactics and engagement-gaming strategies developed in Lil Nas X’s more youthful years created a rock-solid foundation that has acted as a powerful boon for his pop music career.
Returning to the outrage at hand, reviewing the visual content of the accompanying video for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” is imperative in understanding the source of many of Lil Nas X’s loudest critics’ grievances. The YouTube post currently sits at over one hundred and sixty million views, but for those that are unfamiliar or merely in need of a refresher, the video begins with a monologue from Mr. Hill, setting the scene for the audience:
“In life, we hide the parts of ourselves we don’t want the world to see. We lock them away. We tell them no. We banish them. But here, we don’t. Welcome to Montero.”
From there we are introduced to the main character played by Lil Nas X, sitting under a tree in an Eden-esque setting strumming a guitar. This character is seduced by a snakelike figure also played by Lil Nas X which lands the main character of the video in chains in front of a panel of judges and audience, all played by Mr. Hill himself. Casting budget aside, the video continues as it initially appears that the main character is ascending towards an angelic figure. Just when it seems he would break through into the heavens, a pole to rises from below while Lil Nas X quickly grabs it, switching both his trajectory and dress. Now donning a scant outfit of thigh-high leather boots and patterned shorts with an accompaniment of long red braids, Mr. Hill dances on the pole as the scene hints at the destination that awaits him at the bottom of his ride.
Here, the sauciest and most contentious moment of the video arrives, as Lil Nas X walks through the gates of hell towards a devil on a throne who is again played by Mr. Hill. The focal point of the short film subverts the audience’s expectations of some sort of condemnation or confrontation, as Lil Nas X’s main character swings his legs over the demon and begins dancing in his lap. The steamy sequence is capped by Lil Nas X standing over the devilish figure and snapping his neck, while he subsequently dons the horned headpiece the now-deceased devil wore, sprouting wings and eyes becoming aglow as he places it on his head. Surely this ending sequence symbolizes a rejection of his most vitriolic critics, a rebuking of oft-religious casting of gay people as inherently sinful.
Certainly, there is a whole truckload of visual imagery being employed by Mr. Hill in this short film, but for the purposes of our discussion, it is simply necessary to understand that there is biblical imagery being recontextualized in the name of celebrating Lil Nas X’s identity, instead of its typical religious fundamentalist weaponization to cast gay and queer people as hell-bound sinners. To quote Mr. Hill on this very concept, as he released “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” he wrote to his 14 year old self, “this will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist. You see this is very scary for me, people will be angry, they will say I’m pushing an agenda. But the truth is, I am. The agenda to make people stay the fuck out of other people’s lives and stop dictating who they should be.”
Surrounding the release of the song and video, Lil Nas X also collaborated with Brooklyn design collective MSCHF to create a variant of Nike Air Max ’97s, referred to as “Satan Shoes” and adorned with a pentagram, featuring other demonic design choices as well as the incorporation of a drop of human blood. It becomes quite easy to see how public figures searching for content to react, pontificate, and virtue signal before found what they had believed was an easy target to vilify while stoking the fears of their fanbase and followers.
What these critics didn’t count on, or perhaps just failed to consider, is that aforementioned social media mega-literacy that Mr. Hill carries with him from his tweetdecking, “Super Bass”-spamming past life.
While Lil Nas X’s haters create divisive narratives on social media platforms, Mr. Hill’s responses, often reclaiming the narrative while not taking his critics’ words with any sort of seriousness, operate in a sort of corrupting and de-corrupting cycle. To put it more simply, while Mr. Hill’s reactionaries create hate and division out of thin air, Lil Nas X’s playful and zinging responses suck the wind right out of the critics’ sails. In an article from Holmesglen Institute of Melbourne’s Samuel Duncan, we’re introduced to the idea of our use of social media viewed through the lens of Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s concept of play. That is, the freedom and spontaneity of “playing” is a reflection of our true and unfiltered selves. Huizinga noted that when play becomes decoupled from freedom and fun and becomes serious, it has become corrupt. Duncan’s article focuses on the world of sports and how related controversies and immediate responses to said controversies breed social media animosity, although it is quite evident that these machinations are at play in the world of music as well. The concepts of corrupt and non-corrupt play can be extrapolated to both the content Lil Nas X has produced and released as well as the knee-jerk reactionary activism that his loudest critics employ.
Specifically, we can consider the puffed-up outrage by pundits like Candace Owens as a perfect example of corrupt play in the social media world. If you’re still reading this piece, I am confident that I don’t have to explain how a tweet that reads, “We’ve turned George Floyd, a criminal drug addict, into an icon. We are promoting Satan shoes to wear on our feet. We’ve got Cardi B named as woman of the year. But we’re convinced it’s white supremacy that’s keeping black America behind. How stupid can we be?” is a whole mountain of bad-faith crafted outrage bait. Here, besides exhibiting quite an insurmountable amount of internalized racism, we find Ms. Owens corrupting the “play” of social media, sowing negativity and hatred that Johan Huizinga would certainly agree offers a heaping dollop of the seriousness that turns free, constructive, and healthy play into inherently divisive corruption.
Lil Nas X’s refusal to take this criticism with any sort of seriousness, responding simply with “call me by your name outsold,” offers a twofold reclamation of the narrative of outrage. Firstly, he is entirely sidestepping the moral positioning that Ms. Owens is preaching, while also poking fun at the overt seriousness of her moral pontifications. In short, his chaotic and playful responses to tweets like this one and that of South Dakota’s governor once again position Mr. Hill at the helm of the narrative despite the reactionary takes seeking to turn the content of his art against him. Much like the idea of kuzushi, Lil Nas X sucks the momentum from the misplaced criticisms and turns the table on his detractors, succinctly stopping the disparaging remarks in their tracks.
Sure, there will definitely be those who agree that Mr. Hill is destroying the moral and cultural fabric of America, but it is hard to argue with his response to Governor Kristi Noem’s twitter decree that the release of the Satan Shoes signified “a fight for the soul of our nation,” as he fired back, “ur a whole governor and u on here tweeting about some damn shoes. do ur job!” This response is even harder to push against when we consider that Ms. Noem’s South Dakota displayed one of the most ineffective responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in all the U.S. Even his more serious responses to criticism can be characterized as reclaiming the narrative of outrage, as he wrote to one such critic, “there is a mass shooting every week that our government does nothing to stop. me sliding down a cgi pole isn’t what’s destroying society.”
Worth noting is that figures like Candace Owens and Kristi Noem’s condemnation of satanic imagery was nowhere to be found when white popstars like Billie Eilish employ it. I wonder what that’s about?
Via Samuel Duncan, Johan Huizinga’s ideas of play and its corruption offer a powerful framing for why Lil Nas X’s social media presence and strategy has been so effective. Mr. Hill is reclaiming the seriousness of social media play through his playful and tongue-in-cheek responses, zeroing in on the corruption at hand and illuminating its nefarious workings, as well as the simple reality that it’s just not as deep as critics are making it out to be. When a gay artist such as Lil Nas X reclaims demonic imagery that has historically been used to threaten and punish queer individuals, it’s almost comedic to see how that point is entirely lost on critics that detest him for simply being himself. Almost.
I have no doubt that Lil Nas X will be met with similar criticisms for the entirety of his time as a public figure, but as he put it quite succinctly, they can stay mad. Montero (Call Me By Your Name) debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at #1, a peak Lil Nas X had not known since the release of his career-spawning hit “Old Town Road.”
