More than any working pop star, Lil Nas In hints and pushes. In a speech that may or may not have much to do with said music.
That's why, for Lil Nas X, a song is an excuse. He's less a rapper or singer than a meme creator with a seven-figure budget. Music is the fourth or fifth most important part of his presentation, the basis of missives on X (formerly Twitter), TikToks and Instagram posts that matter just as much, and probably more.
Or, as the hook of his new single “J Christ” muses: “Is he about to give them something viral?”
That would be the goal, of course, but the best viral content emerges raw from the ether, a little awkward and novel enough to raise eyebrows. With that Lil Nas X became famous. It's the story of “Old Town Road,” his breakout song, which went from TikTok curiosity to bar mitzvah anthem in just a few months in early 2019.
The irritating “J Christ” tries to reverse engineer that kind of success. It's all about planned virality, mood boards, and line items. First, it's a concept (Lil Nas The result is elegant but not artistic, shiny but dull, hyper-stylized but lazy. Being the smartest pop star is a lot easier than being the smartest online comedian, and the tropes of it are wearing thin.
In the video, which vividly and at times beautifully speaks of cheap shock, he is a Christian figure: another comeback king! – dancing through various fields of evil in an uneven sequel to a beloved original: “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” Lil Nas fight theatrically. with the temptations of new fame, culminating in an erotic dance to Satan. It was a refreshing, flickering bacchanal: quite an idea.
“J Christ,” to the extent that it works, works in pieces. The video is simply a series of microshock vignettes, many of them a callback to his greatest hits (from two years ago): the Satan Shoes containing a drop of blood, the stripper pole to hell from the “Montero” video. Remake the “Jesus crossing Satan on a basketball court” meme. He leads a flock of animals to a large ship. (That was Noah, but whatever). In a promotional clip, he slams his cane into the ground and separates a huge mass of water. (Moses, but who's counting?)
The video begins, for unclear reasons, with celebrities imitating Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Ed Sheeran, Kanye West and more lining up at the pearly gates. This conceit is also recycled, whether from the nearest Madame Tussauds or West's 2016 “Famous” video, a much more exciting and genuine transgression.
Each of these micro-jokes works as a scare, unexpected enough to elicit a small gasp. But there is little scaffolding underneath. They are punchlines designed to be clipped and denatured in meaning. The lyrics are also empty: only the nasal, creaky, spreading syllabic assonance that rhymes “vi-ii-ral”/“hi-ii-gh” has any catchiness. (It should be said that the video is a small sartorial triumph: striped sports socks under cowboy boots combined with a sheer shawl, a pink cheerleader outfit, a jeweled headdress that divides the face vertically. The high-end style is the most conceptually rigorous thing here.)
Record labels are increasingly involved in the content business, and by that metric, Lil Nas X is the platonic ideal of a star. Imagine meetings involving artists who are less comfortable with the camera, less self-aware, and less fluent with algorithmic distribution. Let's imagine musicians who simply want to play music.
Lil Nas X can't. “Do you mind if I enter my Christian era?” he asked on Instagram a few weeks ago, in the caption of a video in which he sang a folk gospel song more elegant than anything he's released so far.
On TikTok, he devoured communion cookies. She posted a mock acceptance letter from Liberty University, the evangelical institution, signed by Jerry Falwell (who died in 2007).
Lil Nas X even meekly weaponized the media that would have given him breathless coverage anyway. The @PopCrave Spotify's official accounts posted “LNX is back with more mid-range music 🤷♂️”; is trolling critics beforehand.
Call it what you want: a statement of fact, a statement of defiance, a statement of indifference. But it's really just a cheap LOL and a place for Lil Nas
But all this attention to agriculture must be exhausting. During his last release, Lil Nas X spent a lot of time on Twitter attacking his opponents. Now, he's doing much less of that, as he adds the exasperation of the misunderstood: “Because I'm a troll, you all dismiss my art as just 'pissing people off'.” He wrote before the release of “J Christ.”
in a self-filmed four-minute video Posted all over his social media on Monday, he paced back and forth and spoke seemingly extemporaneously about some of the negative reactions he received for his playful manipulation of religious images and themes. Grammy-winning Christian rapper Lecrae said in X, “if God can transform King Neb, the murders, the slave masters, the sex workers, etc., He can add another Blasphemer to the list.” And prankster Twitch streamer Kai Cenat fumed: “God will take care of you, bro.”
These are predictable, deep-sighing responses to predictable, deep-sighing jokes. But in his response video, it seems like Lil Nas X takes criticism like this seriously. At one point, he apologizes for some of the specific parts of it, even as he confesses that he doesn't fully understand the images he was referencing.
That said, the most powerful aspect of the clip is the anticipation that he could break character at any moment. Is this simply part of the fragment, a setup for the next meme? Will he end up sitting down with Cenat to debate God or making a saint-sinner duet with Lecrae?
As he walks, Lil Nas Even in what should be his most serious moment, the jester is just around the corner; It's almost impossible to convey gravity when his sincerest form of expression is mockery.
