Lil Nas X Should Go Much, Much Further
Offending Christain conservatives is way too easy. Next time, offend us all.
Lil Nas X’s new single, Montero (Call Me By Your name), was never really about the music. It was all just the pretext for one of the most complex, masterful acts of online trolling that I’ve ever witnessed. Everything was engineered to upset a certain subset of the population: the song’s music video features a thousand-mile pole slide from the heavens into the fiery depths of hell where Lil Nas X proceeds to give Satan a lap dance; and for promotion, Lil Nas X sold six hundred and sixty six pairs of “satan shoes” that allegedly contain drops of human blood.
Predictably, everyone from the Governor of South Dakota to conscious rappers weighed in to express their dismay. And Lil Nas X made mincemeat of their tired, 80’s-style pearl clutching by responding to them on twitter with precise and satisfying jabs. And in turn, all the good liberals clapped along, ogling at another conservative owned by FACTS and LOGIC.
In a smart piece for The New York Times, pop music critic Jon Carmanaica tracked the contours of Lil Nas X’s hypermind trolling, writing “What ‘Montero’ has caused — or rather, what Lil Nas X has engineered — is a good old-fashioned moral panic (or at least the performance of one), the sort of thing that had largely been left behind in the 1980s, but is tragically well-suited to the country’s current cultural discourse polarization. The song, the video, the shoes — they are bait.” He goes on, “The true art here isn’t the music (that said, it’s one of Lil Nas X’s better songs) or the video: it’s the effortlessness, the ease, the joy of his reactions to the reactions. It’s the sense that he is playing chess to everyone else’s lame checkers moves — he is simply faster, funnier and on firmer, more principled ground than his adversaries, who are at best, comically flimsy.”
The words that catch my eye here are “polarization” and “true art.”
“Polarization” is central here because as the chasms between our cultural and political factions grow further and further apart, all public reactions to today’s trending topics begin to take familiar, predictable forms. Of course, the conservatvie Christains will gasp at the invocation of satan. Of course, the liberals will call them stupid bigots who don’t understand the role of art in society. Polarization means increasingly extreme, narrow views, but also, it means increasingly predetermined responses to world events.
And “true art” stands out because Carmanaica notes that the true virtuosity at play here is not the song itself (it is, by all accounts, fine) or the video (campy and well done, yet also, fine) but the way that Lil Nas X understood the polarized reactions he would inspire and how he trolled them to boost his brand. Lil Nas X manifested the absurd predictability of online outrage and further exposed it with every quip, meme, and new contribution to his trolling cannon (my favorite is his “apology” video which successfully skewers the tired trope of online apology). And that, in and of itself, is a contribution; if we can witness how Lil Nas X understands the absurd outrage of the collective hive mind, we can laugh at these toxic online dynamics and eventually disempower them.
But I want art that doesn’t just expose dynamics of public response and taste, but cuts right through them: changes, warps, destroys opinions and social mores and makes the readily available camps of opinion harder to discern so we have to, you know, think. What I want is a Lil Nas X song and video that doesn’t just provide a venue for dunking on backwards conservatives. No, that’s way too easy. I want something that makes my affluent, white, MSNBC-watching parents uncomfortable. Something that makes me uncomfortable. Because, if we’re being honest, satan/gay/anal is level-one provacative. And I know that offending the evangelical crowd was the intention here, but I don’t find it interesting or novel or challenging.
In 1992, Irish singer Sinead O’ Connor shocked the world when she ripped a picture of the pope while saying “fight the real evil” on SNL in protest of the Catholic Church’s inaction on sexual abuse. Everyone, from NBC to Madonna to Joe Pesci who hosted the following week, condemned the act as unseemly and offensive. This was an act of transgression that had a real cost to O’ Connor and genuinely ruffled feathers across the political spectrum. Now just imagine the same action taking place today (for sake of clarity let’s pretend that our current pope is not a liberal hero). The liberal establishment would defend her protest, the conservative populace would yell blasphemy, and the whole scandal would take on the familiar rhythm of polarized outrage.
Provocation is a tough pursuit in 2021. In Kill All Normies Angela Nagle tracks the strange story of how the alt-right became the new transgressive vanguard after an unlikely coalition of media figures, activists, academics and corporations came together in the 2010s to assert multiculturalism and sensitivity as the new dominant, cultural values. She writes of the alt-right in 2016:
This was unlike the culture wars of the 60s or the 90s, in which a typically older age cohort of moral and cultural conservatives fought against a tide of cultural secularization and liberalism among the young. This online backlash was able to mobilize a strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls whose dark humour and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz. What seemed to hold them all together in their obscurity was a love of mocking the earnestness and moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity running right through from establishment liberal politics to the more militant enforcers of new sensitivities from the wackiest corners of Tumblr to campus politics.
We find ourselves in a strange moment where white teens seeking rebellion, who once would have turned to rock or hip hop for a sense of vanguardism, find conservatism instead. Transgression became untethered from liberalism and thus transgression became something entirely else than what Sinead once enacted.
This all got even worse in the Trump era. As establishment media expressed universal dismay at the barbarity of candidate and then president Trump, anti-trumpism or liberal anti-establishment sentiment lost its youthful, rebellious vigor. It’s hard to proudly proclaim “Fuck Trump” when America’s private school parents are saying the same thing every night with Rachel Maddow. It is because of this elite-capture of liberal values that when I think of today’s most provocative cultural figures, they’re not leftist culture workers challenging the establishment; in fact, such a project feels near impossible in a time when everyone from Coca Cola to Ellen is rushing to align themselves with Black Lives Matter.
No, when I think of provocation, I (unfortunately) think about Kanye and his MAGA hat. Now that was provocative. It was provocative in the sense that everyone was talking about it, but more importantly in that it inspired complicated, nuanced conversations about the relationship to Blackness and the Democratic party, mental health and celebrity. There were sides to Kanye's MAGA hat debate, but it was a bit fuzzier than your everyday controversy. This is not to say that Kanye becoming an arm in the Trump outrage machine for a period of time was a good thing, but it’s worth considering the strange result of what happens when the dominant culture aligns itself closely with inclusivity and liberalism. It makes certain expressions of conservatism, somehow, edgey.
Ultimately though, conservative transgression is not our answer for how to rock the cultural boat, because it sits atop an oxymoron: conservatism is inherently regressive, traditional, hierarchical. Any provocation that gestures towards it only does so to circle back to a past status quo. And yet, it’s worth considering this strange update in our culture so we can better execute a true egalitarian transgression that ruffles norms across the board. '
Transgression is not just good because upsetting the status quo is exhilarating. Transgression serves a vital social function. In a recent talk for the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, Bill T. Jones, the choreographer and artist, said something that really stuck with me: “The artist is the freest person in society.” This maxim is vague, but to me, it means that an artist is the least tethered to laws, norms and conventional wisdom. They are also always challenging. And there is a public purpose to this. The gravity of group consensus is unbelievably powerful and can be unbelievably dangerous, so artists are our moral barometer, checking and changing the temperature to see our reactions. And in 2021, in our time of polarization and online outrage, artists cannot just focus their provocations on one side, but the whole system that enables such polarized, warped and narrow group coherence. Swatting at the obviously backward and ignorant is not upending this dynamic, but playing right into it. This is not the “freedom” I believe Jones was speaking of; that is just another pleasurable performance for your respective niche. So keep on keeping on Lil Nas X, but let’s make all of them squeam next time.