If you’re in any way connected to the internet, you’ve probably heard a thing or two by now about the latest release from rapper Lil Nas X: a provocative music video for his new single “Montero (Call Me by Your Name).”

The video—in which the artist is stoned to death for having implied sex with a snakelike version of himself, rides to Hell on a stripper pole, and gives the Devil a lap dance before breaking his neck and stealing his horns—has earned more than 70 million views in just a few short days, and has sparked a massive, heated debate on social media.

Fans love the video, which they perceive as a bold expression of queer Black pride. Detractors rail against its alleged Satanic message. Through it all, Lil Nax X himself has sat by calmly, watching the view counts go up and occasionally posting relevant Spongebob memes.

How did this short video so completely capture the American imagination in less than a week? And why is this pro-LGBTQ+ song receiving so much attention, when other recent releases—such as Frank Ocean’s “Chanel”—got a positive but more muted response?

Anthems

“Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” can be understood as the latest in a long tradition of “anthems”—songs written for or adopted by the LGBTQ+ community as emblematic of queer experience. For decades, well-known songs like Dianna Ross’ “I’m Coming Out” or The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” have served as rallying points for a community looking to celebrate its wins, mourn its losses, and form an identity that could provide strength and comfort in an often hostile world. 

In marketing, we might call such a grouping a category. 

While many of these songs found mainstream success, only a few became culture-defining touchpoints in themselves. Before Lil Nas X, the last artist to pull off an anthem release that big was arguably Lady Gaga. Her 2011 song “Born This Way” was a massive hit at the time of its release, and has had an enduring impact on the way we think about and discuss queer sexuality.  

How did Lady Gaga pull this off? Like Lil Nas X would do 10 years later, she found an unoccupied position within the marketplace of ideas, and made it her own.

Positioning an Anthem

In the classic marketing book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, writers Jack Trout and Al Ries argue that one of the most effective ways to communicate in a world over-saturated with information is to find a unique “position” in the mind of a listener—that is, to present a product, service, brand, etc. in a way which highlights its differences relative to other things in the same category.

The point, according to Trout and Ries, is not to create something entirely new, but to “manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.” They claim that this approach makes the thing being promoted distinctive and easy to remember, explaining that “The easy way to get into a person’s mind is to be first.”

Now, it seems unlikely that either Lady Gaga or Lil Nas X were thinking much about the positioning of their songs when they wrote them down. In interviews, both Gaga and Nas have expressed deeply felt, personal reasons for putting these pieces together. 

Intentionally or not, though, both artists managed to create songs that quickly occupied radical, original positions within both the “anthem” category and the much broader “pop music” category. In different ways, each played with existing symbols, texts, and arguments, recombined them in startling new forms, and upended the common discourse around queerness.

“A Different Lover Is Not a Sin”

Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” is a glittery, blunt rejection of a common narrative that defines homosexuality as a “chosen” behavior.

This framework, often informed by fundamentalist interpretations of certain religious texts, holds that it is inherently wrong for people to act on feelings of attraction to members of the same sex. Such a point of view insists on the free will of the individual, and claims that people who choose to have sex with others of their own sex are committing a moral wrong, and may also be setting themselves up for divine punishment.

“Born This Way” calls on religious imagery to tell a different story.

In the song’s well-known chorus, Lady Gaga states that “God makes no mistakes,” in effect claiming that anything created by Divinity—everything in the natural world—is inherently good (a point of view she seems to have held onto since). 

She, and other LGBTQ+ people listening to the song, are “on the right track”—that is, justified, accepted, not wrong—because they are “born this way,” made perfectly by a loving a Creator who would never imbue people with same-sex attractions merely to test their faith. 

“A different lover,” according to the song, is definitively “not a sin.”

According to this framework, queer people can and should act on their feelings, because they were created to do so. Lady Gaga thus positions her song as a symbol of direct opposition to a fundamentalist understanding of sexual morality and selfhood.

From the song’s point of view, living a full, queer life is not a choice, but a natural and good consequence of being born a certain way.

While liberation and queer theologies certainly existed before the release of this song—and while people have considered same-sex attraction as something a person might be born with for a very long time—Lady Gaga was the one of the first to so blatantly and openly package these ideas in the form of a pop song. In the words of Trout and Ries, she had found the “easy way” into our minds by claiming a previously unowned position.

In the years since the release of the song, the notion of a person being “born” queer—and thereby justified in acting on same-sex feelings—has become a powerful narrative in its own right. 

And that’s where Lil Nas X comes in.

“Only Here to Sin”

Like “Born This Way,” “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” uses religious imagery to stake out a position for itself relative to a fundamentalist understanding of queerness.

Unlike Lady Gaga and the fundamentalism she opposes, however, Lil Nas X doesn’t seem all that concerned with what God may or may not think about queer people and what they do together. In fact, he takes an entirely different approach.

From the lyrics alone, it’s clear that Lil Nas X’s song is a radical departure from the “Born This Way” narrative, according to which queerness is good because it is innate. In singing about a hookup with another man, for instance, Nas claims that he’s “not fazed, only here to sin.”

For the purposes of this song, in other words, Lil Nas X allows the possibility that fundamentalist critics could be right about his sexuality—that acting on his feelings for other men could indeed be “a sin.” 

This, of course, runs directly contrary to “Born This Way’s” message that same-sex behavior is “not a sin.” Whatever his personal beliefs might be, within the context of these lyrics, Nas makes zero effort to fight back against fundamentalist ideas about free will and sexual morality.

And that is what makes the accompanying video so wild.

“F*ck It, Let’s Ride”

About two-thirds of the way through the video, we see Lil Nas X’s soul rising up towards a blurry, angelic figure in the sky, presumably about to enter some version of Heaven. Then the now-infamous stripper pole rockets up from below, and the artist begins his twirling descent into Hell.

A few commentators have described this moment as Nas’s character being “condemned” to Hell for his earlier liaison with a snake-man. While this makes intuitive sense, it misses a critical piece of visual storytelling that holds the key to the video’s power—and its positioning.

Specifically, Nas isn’t forced into Hell by a higher authority, such as the hovering angel. On the doorstep of Heaven, he grabs the pole—apparently of his own free will—in order to make the trip down.

The image tells a story, and positions the video as something distinct from both the fundamentalist narrative and the “Born This Way” narrative that came before it. 

Queerness, as presented here, needs no Divine justification. Whether or not it’s a sin—whether or not he was born queer—Lil Nas X will make out with a reptilian version of himself.

He will grind on his demons, slay them, and claim his own power.

And he will eviscerate his haters on Twitter, simply because he wants to. No other reason required.

“What’s Already Up There”

Both Lady Gaga and Lil Nas X are masters of positioning. Whether trying to reframe the relationship between God and queerness, or make a bold statement that no imposed rules will erase it, both artists are clearly capable of “retieing the connections that already exist,” as Trout and Reis would say—putting new spins on existing concepts to make their own ideas stand out from the crowd. 

In the case of Lil Nas X, that can even mean entering into dialogue with the work of artists who came before, in order to amplify his own take on queer identity and experience.

To paraphrase Milton: “Better to ride in Hell, than act straight in Heaven.”