#Why is lil nas x gay series#
In the late 1990s, One Nut, an independent hip-hop magazine, created a series of minor scandals when it published a fake profile of a purportedly closeted homosexual rapper. To the level that he’s accepted, hip-hop has shown growth. Despite what a certain strain of purist might say, his presence is not an aberration of goals or abdication of duty, but the fulfillment of the music’s highest ideals. Hip-hop was created for artists like Lil Nas X to exist. Nicki Minaj and Cardi B can give lap dances in rap videos with little pushback from the center of hip-hop’s audience, but when Lil Nas X does it, it’s a problem. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella weren’t saying anything new, but they-Black men from the inner-city killing fields of Los Angeles-were saying it, and that made the powers that be uncomfortable. Much like N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” was not the first anti-authoritarian song ever recorded-the entire genre of punk rock was based on railing against social norms with groups such as Black Flag making songs like 1981’s “Police Story,” which begins, “Fucking city is run by pigs”-Lil Nas X’s comments come off as revolutionary because of the context. But when Lil Nas X-hip-hop’s most prominent openly gay male rapper, and its first out-of-the-closet mainstream star-says something like, “I might bottom on the low, but I top shit” on his semi-Christmas loosie “Holiday,” he’s not necessarily breaking new ground. This is a long way to go to say that talking about sex in hip-hop is not new. And well before then, in the 1930s, musical artists like Lucille Bogan were one-upping the previous decades dirty blues of Ma Rainey and others which had relied heavily on entendre and other figures of speech dropping bars like, “I got nipples on my titties big as the end of my thumb/I got somethin’ between my legs’ll make a dead man cum” and “I fucked all night and all the night before, baby and I feel just like I wanna fuck some more.” Uncle Luke’s 2 Live Crew spent the first half of the 1990s enmeshed in legal battles over their right to invoke women to “pop that pussy.” Hip-hop-performers and consumers alike-has always waged battles for the right to say what it felt was necessary in the ways that it felt was right to say them. In the late 1980s, gangsta rap forefathers N.W.A were the targets of national media, politicians and future Donald Trump supporters for having the temerity to tell law enforcement what it could do with itself. Popping bottles of champagne and removing women’s panties before engaging in an illustrated sexual orgy. These are just facts.ġ982’s Wild Style, which ostensibly remains as an artifactual document of the romanticized “four elements” version of hip-hop, featured pioneer and OG best rapper alive Chief Rocker Busy Bee laying money on his bed well before Instagram flexes were a thing. All other voices in hip-hop are defined by their proximity and relationship to those of marginalized Black men living in the United States. We can’t erase them, but to deny that hip-hop’s blueprint is that of the thoughts of young Black men navigating the world around them is to not have an honest conversation. Also, Brown people and women’s voices have always been part of hip-hop. Obviously, other voices have joined the choir since DJ Kool Herc “birthed” this thing called hip-hop at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. To be clear: “We” means primarily, but not specifically, young Black men. We rap about the plug, but we also rap about working in an electronics store and attending technical school. We speak of missing the bus, missing homies, missing opportunities. That line from the story alone blew up on Twitter.) We speak in many different ways. “While other rappers brag about sex, drugs and expensive cars, Jimothy raps about his ambition to one day earn enough money to shop at upmarket supermarkets and listening to his mother’s advice,” they wrote, as if discovering a Black unicorn drinking from a lake of gold underneath a project staircase. (Despite a recent feature in The New York Times, which tried to convey tall-eyed surprise at the existence of a London rapper who doesn’t traffic in the tropes of many mainstream rappers. It’s obviously not the only way we speak.
This is how we’ve spoken in hip-hop since we’ve been allowed to speak-crass and unfiltered, sexual and horny, direct yet metaphoric.