By the time you read this, Lil Nas, which was released at 00:00 on Friday, December 12 (US time), will be titled J Christ. “My new single “It is dedicated to the man who had the greatest comeback of all time!” he writes in his tweetaccompanied by an image in which he appears crucified.
Until then, the musician born as Montero Lamar Hill (Atlanta, USA, 24 years old) had set his account this other tweet from January 3: “I love this constant cycle that the world has with me. When I started making music, everyone told me I was just another Twitter rapper. Then I made the greatest song of all time. Everyone called me a one-hit artist. Then I released one of the most streamed albums of the year with three top 5 hits. Now everyone says my new shit won't achieve anything. At some point you will have to realize that I am God's favorite.
It is just one of the many messages that, since the end of 2023, he has been posting on the networks to announce his new song, which will be accompanied by a video clip that he directed and scripted himself and that he recorded in Brazil. Little else is known – for now – about this release, which smells like a preview of a second album, the successor to Huntsman, which appeared in 2021 and became a global hit. Yes it has shown a small fragment of a song, rap style, on his Tik Tok accountand, at the time, he announced that the single featured “a very beloved pop star of whom I have been a fan for a long time and I truly believe it is going to be the greatest comeback of all time.”
another message with a photo of the singer Kesha carrying a sign that said “New music, January 12”, made her think of it, but the singer soon came out of it by publishing a denial on his Twitter account in response to another tweet from Lil Nas
On January 9, following the announcement of the song's title and cover, he revealed that the guest pop star was… God. In another of the multiple posts, appears posing with the singer Pink Pantheress, and he has also retweeted a good number of news from accounts that appear to be false, created by himself, in which numerous stars give their opinion on this new topic, showering all kinds of superlative praise.
You come to believe it when you see Beyoncé, Elton John, Taylor Swift, Tom Holland, Ellie Goulding, Nicki Minaj or Megan Thee Stallion, but when the protagonists are Michael Jackson either Queen Elizabeth II of England One already realizes that Lil is an expert at laughing at (or with) all of us.
A Christian conversion that smells like marketing
All this viral marketing action had its first explosion on November 30, when the star shared a video with a honeyed acoustic folk ballad, accompanied by the phrase: “Do you mind if I enter my Christian era?” What seemed like an isolated joke has gone in crescendo with a riot of things with which the musician, officially atheist until then, tries to convince us that he has converted to Christianity: using the symbol of the cross instead of his name on his social networks, recording on Tik Tok from a church, showing photos with alleged posters advertising their single outside several rural American temples, announcing that there will be previews of the video in churches in New York, Chicago, Houston and Los AngelesSW hanging a video game designed by him in which you go to heaven or hell accompanied by this claim: “Will you fly high with the angels and party with God or will you suck Satan's cock and sleep with Hitler?”
To finish all this, On January 3, he shared the first artistic design sketch that will accompany the theme. In it, a drawing of him appears dressed as a priest, with the legend “In the name of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. Amen”. Just yesterday he announced that this year he will begin studying Biblical Studies at the private evangelical Liberty University, with deeply conservative ideals. One finds here a possible joke at the expense of the religious conversion of his colleague Kanye West – who co-produced one of the songs on Huntsman– but, above all, we can see a viral strategy clearly aimed at scandalizing. Something that he is already achieving, in view of the numerous
messages (it is no longer known whether real or invented) from Christians outraged by Lil's blasphemous attitude, to which he responds by saying that he is not making fun, that he is making art.
In reality, this African-American and LGTBI icon (he is openly gay) would be delving even further into the controversy with which he shook the most reactionary sectors of his country based on the video of Montero (Call Me By Your Name). Irrefutable proof of this is this other message from November 30: “Making Christian music does not mean that I can no longer suck cocks. They are not mutually exclusive things. “I am allowed to kneel for multiple reasons.” Minutes later, he wrote: “Everyone sees everything I do as the construction of a character, when in reality I am just an artist expressing myself in different ways. It doesn't matter if you are a cowboy, gay, satanic or now a Christian, everyone will find a problem! They are not capable of acting as police for other people's art as they do for mine. “Everyone hates me because I am funny, cute and small.” “I promise to make all my haters “They don't want to live any longer this year,” he tweeted on January 4. AND, in his first image of the year, appeared dressed in a white woman's dress, like Madonna in Like A Virgin. Obviously, the controversy associated with the video clip of Like A Prayer (in which in 1989 Madonna danced in front of burning crosses and kissed a black saint in a church), is a reference that is being commented on a lot.
A brilliant and controversial career
From such self-conscious self-aggrandizement one can infer anything: from the fact that everything is a big smoke that hides the fact that this new music is rather generic or that, really, we are facing one of the pop milestones of our time and the boy from Atlanta is making history for the third time. The first was with his debut single, Old Town Roada theme of country-rap, sung by a black, gay boy, which spent 19 weeks at number 1 in the US in 2019, breaking the absolute record for consecutive time at the top of the charts. The second time, in 2021, when he was included in the list of the 100 most influential people of the year for the magazine time with only one newly released album. Proof of her strength in the industry is demonstrated by the cast of collaborators who appeared on that album: Elton John, Kanye West, Miley Cyrus (her father, Billy Ray, had already participated in the remix of Old Town Road), Doja Cat, Megan Thee Stallion and Jack Harlow.
The song planned for this Friday will be the first thing Lil Nas In another of his recent messages, he joked that he hadn't posted anything because he had forgotten his Spotify password. But the fact is that the artist has not exactly been standing still in all this time. After the publication of Huntsman In September 2021, he began preparing a tour that would begin just a year later. This ended on November 17, 2022 in Barcelona, at a Sant Jordi Club where barely three thousand people attended, proof that here the artist has not yet achieved the status he has in other countries. Last summer, he visited us again, this time as part of the poster for the Mad Cool festival in Madrid, and, as an anecdote, he was also seen enjoying the Chueca night with several drag queens at the Vuélvete Loca club.
His Show live it responds to all the canons of new pop, although scenically they are not so new, in reality. As on Rosalía's last tour, there are no musicians on stage, and what plays through the speakers is so faithful to the album that each song could be recognized using the Shazam application. As the critic Diego A. Manrique would say, more than a concert it is a spectacle of vedette, marked by constant changes in scenery and costumes, choreography and a development in three acts. Basically, the pop concert model that Madonna implemented in the mid-eighties of the last century. From her, and from Lady Gaga, Lil Nas kitsch that constantly overwhelms.
The songs are secondary: the important thing is that the fan does not look up (or take his cell phone away) from the stage. Part of this tour was recorded in the documentary Lil Nas X: Long Live Monterowhose premiere at the Toronto festival was also involved in controversy: it had to be delayed due to a bomb threat.
There was also no shortage of controversy during his performance at the Grammy Awards ceremony in April 2022. In the always conservative American recording industry, he received criticism for repeatedly grabbing his genitals, placing the microphone in the center of his crotch and turning it around. , pretending the device was his penis. In 2022, several single songs also arrived. The first of them, Late To Da Party, also attracted a lot of salsa, because in its lyrics it criticized the BET (Black Entertainment Awards), the awards given to the best African-American artists, for considering itself ignored by them, denouncing hidden homophobia. Then they came Down Souf Hoesduet with another African American rapper queer, Saucy Santana. His last official song to date, Star Walkinwas published in September 2022 and was marketed as the star theme of the video game League Of The Legends, where he also appears as a character. Then came the silence… and the roar. Or he says it will happen tomorrow.
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