Lil Nas X | J Christ / 2024 [music video]

gotterdammerung

by Douglas Messerli

 

Montero Hill, Mike Lévy, Omer Fedi, and Blake Slatkin (composers), Lil Nas X (screenwriter, director, and performer) J Christ / 2024 [2.52 minutes] [music video]

 

After a series of white-clad look-alike celebrities, Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Marian Carey, Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, and Barack Obama, and even a moon-walking Michael Jackson walking in a straight line up a stairway to Heaven, Lil Nas X is ready to announce that he too is back, presumably announcing his return to the splendiferous stardom of his past videos:

Look, look, look, look

We going all the way up, man

We going past what we been like

Taking this shit back to the Westside

(Is he 'bout to give 'em something viral?)

Fine cash shit

 

Yeah, uh

Bust-down chain, that was thirty bands

Bust-down wrist, match my bust-down thirty inch

Walk up in the club poppin' shit like it was Doublemint

Lookin' for a ten, we only settle when it's settlements

Uh, uh, uh, let 'em slide, yeah

Last year was a quiet year

Now I'm on Mariah

I'm finna take it higher, okay

Let 'em slide, yeah

Last year was a quiet year

Tell 'em, "Come outside"

Baby, we ain't tryna hide

Know what I'm on, I'm on a break

You know when I'm back, it's all for take

You know that I'm ready for everything

You know when I play, it's all for keeps, uh, uh

 

    But Lil Nass X evidently has a few superman-like tasks to take of before he joins the holy chorus.

 

   Back down in Hell, with a rather demonic vision of himself boiling human body parts, he plays a basketball game against Satan, scoring a slam dunk victory before appearing as the head of a heady chorus of cheerleaders.

   His reward is evidently being crucified just like Christ, shearing the lamb which should remind us the wool is part and parcel of the fashion world in which he has always partaken. But this time, the show, witnessed on TV by Ts Madison, reveals another of God’s punishments for such exaggerated egos, Noah’s flood, which Lil Nas X survives just fine, a golden cross around his neck while performing a major dance number on the rooftop of the ark.

     As the captain of the ark Lil Nas X sails across the global flood, singing:

 

Back-back-back up out the gravesite

Bitch, I'm back like J Christ

I'm finna get the gays hyped

I'm finna take it yay high

 

Back up out the gravesite

Bitch, I'm back like J Christ

I'm finna take it, uh, uh

I'm finna take it yay high

 

Know what I'm on, I'm on a break

You know when I'm back, it's all for take

You know that I'm ready for everything

You know when I play, it's all for keeps, uh, uh

 

   The sunshine breaks through just as promised, with the text spelling out his transformation: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, He is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5:17)"

    The skit, and it is a “skit,” fits the former Montero Lamar Hill’s multiple metamorphoses perfectly; after all, isn’t he the Ovid of the 21st Century constantly going through remarkable changes in identity where no one else dared to go.

     This time, of course, it just got to close to Christian fundamentalism and all hell broke loose. He admitted that perhaps he had gone “overboard,” but isn’t that what his rather amazing musical talent is all about?

      If he pretended or even somewhat seriously regretted his vision of his endless transformations,  

he also argued that the artwork wasn’t making fun of the sacrosanct religious figure. As he quite rightfully argued: “The crazy thing is nowhere in the picture is a mockery of jesus. Jesus’s image is used throughout history in people’s art all over the world. I’m not making fun of s—. yall just gotta stop trying to gatekeep a religion that was here before any of us were even born. Stfu.”

     Frankly, I agree, along with his admission that he wasn’t quite innocent about the images he chose to represent: “When I did the artwork, I knew there would be some upset people or whatnot simply ’cause religion is a very sensitive topic for a lot of people. But I also didn’t mean to, like, mock.”

     This kind of artist is almost doomed in a world where we people still prefer pretty white boys like Troye Sivan who pout and drop their pants below their waists as they kiss any boy or girl in site.

      Meanwhile, in a world where the President of the United States goes free from raping underage girls, Lil Nas X is arrested for running down the streets in his underwear and possibly even streaking naked. O my gawd, what are we to do?

      I just hope he doesn’t give up!

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).