The nude shower choreography of “Industry Baby” blew up the prison-set rap video cliché. Male pop acts don’t often cover female acts’ love songs, and when Nas X sings “Jolene, I’m begging of you please don’t take my man,” the weight of a whole straight culture presses down on him as well. Hip-hop artists like Young Thug sometimes toyed with wearing dresses to illustrate their free spirits, but Lil Nas X made a not-obvious choice to put gay love and desire at the center of his craft. It was virtuoso trolling, and everyone from Nas to Noem seemed to get what they wanted out of it (publicity, laughs and fundraising - Nas directed fans to charities like the Bail Project for every track on “Montero”).īut the fact that a rap-aligned gay Black artist - let alone one who’s also such a country fan that he covered Dolly Parton’s “ Jolene” - could pull this off atop the charts was startling. Somehow thinks that Satanic worship should be mainstream and normal.” Kristi Noem, who said, “This is outrageous, disgusting and perverted and on #PalmSunday no less. If Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion sent right-wingers sputtering with “ WAP,” “Montero” finished the job for Republican politicians like South Dakota Gov. The clip, where Nas frolics in a Y2K-era digital Eden before dropping down a stripper pole to Hell, scandalized the Christian right and needled Nike’s lawyers with a blood-injected shoe spinoff. When he began this album’s long rollout back in March, the Luciferian lapdance of “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” did exactly what he hoped for.

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