Tempering the club banger vibes (still yet to reach its utmost potential without clubs open at full capacity) of “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” Lil Nas X has seen fit to provide us with the balladry of a follow-up single called “Sun Goes Down” (somehow reminiscent of Rihanna’s “Stay”). Along with its contemplative motif, the video for the song finds Lil Nas X acting as something of an oracle for his own life. And since oracles can reflect upon and flit between past, present and future, it’s only natural that he should opt to go back into the past.
It is here that Montero Lamar Hill still lives—before he had it in him to become Lil Nas X. The boy who tried to fit in with ‘10s interpretations of male straightness… as best he could, anyway. The “godlike” Lil Nas watches this former self toil away at the Taco Bell (one of the most iconic scenes of the video, to be honest) and tries his best to radiate a presence of comfort. In fact, the entire song reads like a letter of assurance to his old self, in addition to gay men everywhere who have yet to find the strength to come out. So it is that Lil Nas sings in a disinterested monotone, “I know that you want to cry/But there’s much more to life than dyin’/Over your past mistakes/And people who threw dirt on your name.”
Taking us through a day in the life of the scared little boy that was Montero, Lil Nas X observes him praying to God in his bedroom, asking the Lord to take his “gay thoughts” away. Because that’s what a “love thy neighbor as thyself” religion apparently begets: a total lack of self-acceptance when you’re deemed by society/the Bible as “abnormal.” His only release, ironically, is being on “the phone stanning Nicki mornin’ into dawn/Only place I felt like I belonged/Strangers make you feel so loved, you know?” Until they turn on you, of course. Which is what happens to any famous person who has truly hit the big time.
Still, Lil Nas X seems to be aware that the tradeoff is worth it. Worth using his platform to help other closeted gay adolescents feel “okay” with themselves when nothing else seems to “sanction” their existence. And the fact that we’re this far into the twenty-first century and anyone still has to feel this way proves not only how much farther we still have to go, but how important someone like Lil Nas X is in the music world, especially the ever-homophobic hip hop genre.
Sporting a backpack with an alien keychain and a sewn-on patch with a flying saucer, Lil Nas X subtly reiterates how those who are “different” are consistently made to feel as though they don’t even belong on this planet because of the thing that supposedly makes them “the other.” Alien(ated). Co-directed by Psycho Films, Lil Nas X continues to incorporate the spiritual and surrealist undertones of “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” during a moment when Montero gathers the courage to actually go to the prom (probably the scariest event ever to a gay teen struggling to suppress his sexuality), only to feel completely suffocated by the normie atmosphere.
To cope with it all, he then runs into the bathroom for a garden variety sob fest in one of the stalls. It is only after the calm, assured hand of his older, oracle self on Montero’s shoulder gives him renewed strength that he finds the courage to go back out and be who he is (as best as he can for that moment) on the dance floor. Now if only all the rest of us could have a similar future self to come back to our past (present? Things are getting time loop-y in a Dark sort of way now) and tell us it’s all going to be okay. Even though, let’s be real, it ain’t.
