Lil Nas X made a meme out of replying to all who responded with cries of satanism to his latest music video. This is part of the performance piece Montero which puts Lil Nas X in a history of intertwining life, music, and tech into one unassailable immersive identity. Music as art has a way of attaching itself to certain personalities through the form of new technologies. How that works and why ‘queer’, in a very broad definition, is often in the mix for those personalities as they seek to rise through the noise and grab our attention is what I explore here.
Queer, being queer, queerness, otherness
When Lil Nas X released Old Town Road it was a watershed moment for TikTok, a watershed moment for country music, a watershed moment for beats marketplaces. In the end it was also a watershed moment for Lil Nas X himself as he came out as gay from a position of fame and thus from a position of some power to take control of his narrative.
Part of what made Old Town Road a success was the controversy it created within the country scene. The artist Lil Nas X rode that wave to perfection and he seems to have meticulously planned out his new controversy.
According to Aja Romano, writing for Vox, Lil Nas X showcased Montero and, of course, the satan shoes to prove the point that to be queer, to be gay, still means to be seen as an evil in many circles. In fact, it’s queer and queerness have always meant many different things. The historian Matt Houlbrook explains in his book Queer London – about male queer experiences in the mid-20th Century city – how
“in its simplest sense, queer signified men’s difference from what was considered “normal” … Yet is could also encompass differences in behavior and appearance. Queer, in this sense, could be a mode of self-understanding, a set of cultural practices, and a way of being. Its meanings were, moreover, never self-evident, stable, or singular.”
Houlbrook, ‘Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis (2005), p. 6-7
In other words, being queer always means you are defined against something else. In extremis Lil Nas X shows in Montero and the accompanying video what it means to define yourself as queer in the face of Christianity.
Gamifying the narrative
Besides the graphic imagery in the music video – and Time has a great explainer of the iconography – there’s another striking part: it looks like a videogame most of the time. Looking through the religious symbolism it’s clear that the video tries to appeal to a certain online experience. As if Lil Nas X constructs his own queerness within the spaces he knows: memes, TikTok virality, Fortnite. More than just absorbing Christian typologies the video also absorbs very current cultural trends. Just look at Lil Nas X’s own concert in Roblox not even six months ago, which had 33 million views across two days and four performances. Many in his fanbase expect the visual experience they get in Montero. It becomes difficult to see the artist Lil Nas X outside of his online personas, aided by him playing all the various characters in the video. He’s as much the virtual avatar as he is the real-life performer. Part of why he has to position himself this way is exactly because he sits outside of the norm. Attaching his identity to the technologies that allow him to express himself strengthens our perception of him as a performance artist.
From queer to trans: Wendy Carlos as a vocoder
Back in 1964 the vocoder was mostly known for warping voices to transmit secret war messages. But it was Wendy Carlos who, through the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange, brought the vocoder into our pop sensibilities (e.g. Outkast‘s Synthesizer or Ginuwine‘s Pony). Of course, she did the same for the synthesizer through her collaborations with Moog. During most of her life though, Wendy struggled to perform different versions of herself. Just as queer is a set of cultural practices as much as a way of being so is trans. For many years of Wendy’s life, however, this was not accepted on either of those levels in any level of mainstream life.
It’s almost too easy to see Carlos’ warping of the human voice through the vocoder as a way of expressing her own warping identity. Or, as Sasha Geffen puts it in her book Glitter Up The Dark:
“by developing the synthesizer as an instrument capable of creating new forms for the voice, Carlos preempted the work she would do by coming out as a trans woman.”
Geffen, ‘Glitter Up The Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary (2020), p. 87
More interestingly, I think, is how she personified herself through her music and the technologies that made it possible.
Attentive listening or a flow of atmosphere
Not all the music Wendy Carlos made was ‘disruptive’ in that sense. See, for example, Sonic Seasonings, an album of what we would now call ambient music. The radical exploration here is in timbre, but also in how to listen. In her own words:
“the idea was to find a music that didn’t require lengthy concentrated listening. We thought that if you enlarged each gesture and slowed the pace, you could stand back and still have the same perspective … It was more than ambient noises in the other room, surf near a beach house when you’re trying to sleep. Something in-between attentive composition and a flow of atmosphere.”
Wendy Carlos interview for NewMusicBox, 2007
Wendy Carlos can thus be seen as a trans woman who explored and struggled with her music much as she explored and struggled with her own identities. Through the synthesizer, she was able to process the technology that allowed her to create the sounds she wanted to hear. These days, she is the personification of the synth, but she not just questioned musical identities, but also listening identities.
The attention economy requires performance art
Carlos’ Sonic Seasonings was a reaction against what she perceived as a music that was becoming ever more intricate and precise. It jolted listeners as it allowed them to listen, but perhaps not just listen; to also allow the listener the opportunity to do something else. “The way you find the limit is by going past it,” Carlos said in that same 2007 interview with NewMusicBox. We are currently experiencing the limits of the attention economy.
MIDiA recently warned of the impending ‘attention recession‘ but before we get there we find ourselves confronted by non-stop Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces sessions, endless livestreams, a deluge of user-generated content across so many platforms, etc. and so on. What Hanna Kahlert – the author of that MIDiA blog – also puts forward is that fandom is the differentiating factor in surviving the attention recession. There’s no better way to grab your fans’ attention then embodying your music.
Wendy Carlos found fame by electrifying classical music, scaring people with synthesized voices and by challenging listeners to slow down. While her identity resonates strongly through her music and the technologies she helped develop and popularised, she was unable – for a long time – to express her own identity directly. This is different for Lil Nas X, whose subversive queerness confronts us with how our societies still others those who are different. By embracing the full spectacle of a set of cultural practices designed to suppress anything that’s queer, he grabs everyone’s attention in a way that’s reminiscent of Madonna more than Wendy Carlos. And yet, the embodiment of the queer and the trans connects Lil Nas and Carlos as it forces people to engage. Within our society, within the attention economy, it is almost necessary to force this type of engagement to pull people out of what they’re immersed in.