“Like, if I read a negative comment or whatever, I get to decide, is this important to me? Is this true? Is this not true? If it is true, then how do we make it untrue? If it isn't true, then why the fuck do we care?”
“It teaches you to block out the things in your life that you don’t really care about,” he says. His favorite genre is what he calls “self-discovery” books, and he’s proud to rattle off the titles he’s read: The Rose Effect: Eight Steps to Delivering the Performance of Your Life, by Keana Henson, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Don Ruiz’s The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, and, his favorite, Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. I’ve been pretty good with, like, handling the comebacks or whatever, but I know for a fact that 2020 me would’ve crumbled. He occasionally checks himself out the mirror above my head, and I notice, amused, that he’s wearing the infamous “Satan Shoe.” His energy is all over the place, but he finds an engaging focus as he recounts his past seven days: “I just know that if that moment in the hotel didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have been able to make it through this week,” he says. Shirtless in a dressing room at Hubble Studios in Los Angeles, Nas paces around a large coffee table, adorned with an oversized bouquet of flowers from Beach House, the dream-pop-duo. In response to one of the rapper’s clapbacks, she tweeted, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Governor Kristi Noem, of South Dakota, dedicated multiple tweets to the rapper, even as her state struggles with one of the worst COVID outbreaks in the country. A backlash began to form: Videos of pastors deeming Nas a “satanist” circulated the internet. Just as quickly, Nike sued MSCHF, barring them from shipping any of the product. An accompanying product, the “Satan Shoe,” a collaboration with the art collective MSCHF, sold its inventory of 666 pairs within minutes of release. The past few days have been a whirlwind for Nas: the song garnered 46.9 million US streams and sold 21,000 downloads in its first week. It was something I, like so many other LGBT Black people, have always wanted to see. Here’s a young gay black man, doing whatever the fuck he wants, and losing absolutely nothing for it. I met Lil Nas X a few days after the release of his single and the accompanying visual, “Montero (Call My By Your Name).” The song, about a young man the rapper dated during quarantine, features lines like, “I wanna feel on your ass in Hawaii/I want that jet lag from fuckin' and flyin'/Shoot a child in your mouth while I'm ridin',” and a video that sees the artist, clad in patent leather boots, rides a stripper pole to hell, where he grinds on a stoic-looking Satan before killing him. And just like a rocket, his greatest strength-and weakness-is that he refuses to stop.Ĭlapping for emphasis, he says it again: “No. But this time, he has the power to steer it. The young man is, again, on a rocket ship. This moment - the release of his sensual (and inescapable) single “Montero (Call My By Your Name),” the quick rise to the top of the charts, being social media’s main character- feels “almost déjà vu-ish” for him. “I feel like I never really need [them[ anymore because I'm finding joy and finding a happy life in what I'm doing now.” “I never want to take a break again,” he adds, emphatically. Releasing this album’s second single just as the world begins to see the light at the end of the long tunnel of quarantine, it seems that Nas is also afraid of taking any more time out of the spotlight. “That song is a reminder that I have the power to make any situation better.” You know one of those times where you cry so hard your fuckin head hurts? It was like that.”Īfter four months, “Holiday” was certified platinum. I felt like I’d…” He pauses, grasping for the right words, eventually settling on: “ failed myself, almost. Nobody's really fucking with this song.’ I was crying.
“I told my manager, ‘I don't want to do it.
He had scheduled rehearsals for his performance on the premiere episode of Amazon’s “Holiday Plays,” a multi-episode Christmas special, starring Miley Cyrus, the next day. So, not knowing what else to do, with nowhere else to go, he checked himself into a hotel. “But I was seeing a lot of fucking negativity too.” So he checked the charts. “I was seeing some nice things,” he recalls. To celebrate the track’s release, he had a small gathering with friends, but his focus kept shifting to comments about the track on Twitter.