Hot black gay men making out full#
For “Industry Baby”, he has a whole prison yard full of fine boys twerking in pink uniforms. For “What I Want”, a sweet, horny song about needing a boyfriend, he plays an American football player having a steamy locker-room romance with a teammate. Judging from his videos, and his relentless commitment to getting as naked as possible with as many hot young men as possible, he’s well past both self-esteem problems and sexual guilt. His lyrics allude to the fact that he hasn’t always felt that way: “Since ten, I’ve been feelin’ lonely … Always thinkin’, ‘Why my lips so big?’/ Was I too dark?” he sings on “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)”, which also references feeling haunted by his “gay thoughts”. Pulling off this kind of sauce is easier when you’re as handsome as Lil Nas X. Freedom of expression gone out the window.” A deeply unimpressed Nike sued to stop the limited edition of (wait for it) 666 pairs from going on sale, leading Lil Nas X to tweet: “I feel like it’s fucked up they have so much power they can get shoes cancelled. There was the time, for example, that he launched a range of customised Nike trainers called Satan Soles containing “a single drop of human blood”. But pop music is, at its greatest, ludicrous. Above all, they want to be taken seriously. Fame brings an agonising level of scrutiny, but we seem to be stuck now with a cohort of stars who are no less interested in famous, but very keen that you should feel sorry for them when they get there. Better to attract no attention than the wrong kind.Īll this is, of course, terrible. So you end up with a culture of caution, where the worst thing you could possibly be is interesting. One social media misstep or “problematic” lyric and you’re thrown into a cycle of denunciation and genuflection. Artists are more preoccupied with declaring their moral bona fides than with making songs that encourage listeners to shake it like a lunatic. But have you ever considered that pop music could be - just sometimes - a vehicle for having a really good time?Īctually, a good time is kind of a dirty concept in the 2020s. “I’m trying to preach a message that is cleaner and different but still real,” Jaden says. “When I said ‘niggas wanna pipe me like they Mario’,” he says, waving his finger in a teacherly way, “I was referring to the social and economic state of the world.” (Think of what the French mean when they say “une pipe”.) It’s even funnier when you find out it’s actually a piss-take of a video made for Genius by Jaden Smith, son of Will and Jada, in which he doles out heavyweight explanations of his flimsy lines. (Genius is a website where song lyrics can be annotated by anyone, and performers and songwriters often add comments on their own work.) Another favourite: a TikTok video of the rapper on a yellow background under the caption “me trying to make my lyrics deep on genius”.
Not that Lil Nas X cares about such pinhead calculations when he’s having this much fun being a pop star. Pop music is, at its greatest, ludicrous. “INSENSITIVE AND TRANSPHOBIC”, railed one Disgusted of the Internet, who later walked their take back after the privilege accountants determined they (white trans man) were in fact punching down on Lil Nas X (black gay man).
High up in the list of favourites, there’s the Instagram post where he coyly posed with a highly convincing fake baby bump. So we consoled ourselves by swapping favourite posts from his social media. Apparently we’re not the only ones willing to pay out the big bucks for the chance to see him turn out his signature mix of rap, camp and raw pop joy. Sad news from one of my friends: she tried to get tickets for Lil Nas X at the Eventim Apollo, but the whole lot had gone within seconds. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. This article is taken from the June 2022 issue of The Critic.