Columbia Records 2021
When Georgia’s own Montero Lamar Hill accidentally made America’s most successful song of all time in 2019 he did many things at once; in the immediate term he became a lightning rod because of his perceived lack of “country authenticity” (see: racism) and aided the effort to bring Nine Inch Nails back into the collective unconscious of the Western pop audience. As “Old Town Road” became more and more of a juggernaut he released no less than four remixes of the damn thing with such guests as country-has-been Billy Ray Cyrus, electro-producer wunderkind Diplo, living meme Mason Ramsey, and the Slimiest Man Alive Young Thug, each of whom lent different aspects of their credibility and revealed Lil Nas X as a culturally omnivorous man of his generation. Can you say open-source song? Then to coat his cake with icing, on June 30th of that year he came out as gay. How could he ever top that?
He can’t and he doesn’t. Those years between his big bang and the release of Montero were full of fantastic tweets, decadent music videos, and an EP (with two-top-40s-plus-filler) so middling that any kind of expectation that a Lil Nas X record would ever be able to live up to the hype of “Old Town Road” dissipated, leaving Hill a one hit wonder prematurely in many head canons. Only then to his stans’ vindication and decent chunk of the culture critic bubbles’ surprise came a video take on the Old and New Testaments that was so Black and soqueer that to rally around it was to give a full throated “Fuck you” to the conservative pundits too prude and scared to take a joke about joyful existence. In the recent lineage of Childish Gambino’s fraught “This is America” and Cardi & Megan’s hot-and-sticky “WAP”, “Call Me by Your Name” joins them as a good but not great song dependent on its video that has become solidified as a watershed moment of protest and resilience and therefore canonized – irreplaceable because its moment in the culture moved those for and against its subject matter into a deafening public discourse. Please note: all three songs are by Black Americans, and all three hit Billboard’s number 1.
Such heralds the arrival of not a genius, only a pop icon – with raw charisma and a talent for online shenanigans Hill has what in Old Hollywood they’d call “star power”. As for the record itself, Montero’s improvement in song quality is due to the same reason Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building became such monopolies themselves—better songwriters for hire. No doubt Lil Nas X’s own regiment of practice practice practice has put him in a space to be able to write better himself but c’mon, Kanye West, Ryan Tedder, and especially Denzel Baptiste are the soundscapers making space for his hybrid rock/pop/hip-hop trifecta. Highlights include the triumphant “Industry Baby”, the Outkast rip “That’s What I Want”, and the incredibly self-aware “One of Me”, to say nothing of the Two Door Cinema Club and Nicki Minaj pastiches. Subject matter-wise he focuses on love, self-loathing, and world conquering with such mid-range introspection and ebullience that it all proves resoundingly, brilliantly, infectious. It’s without a doubt a worthy submission for his place as a frontrunner of the current pop landscape, to the point it’s even earned hosannas from grateful people who identify with it. This is subversion for progress whose grace saves it from being simply meretricious.
Cosmic Hero 