Lil Nas X's THAT'S WHAT I WANT: hip-hop masculinity and the "unhappy queer"

More than a year ago, on September 21, 2021, Lil Nas X released his highly awaited debut album Montero, which still stands as an important gay, black manifesto. Openly homosexual, Lil Nas X is disrupting with his music the instances of masculinity traditionally inscribed within the genre, proposing a new, queer, black masculinity that fights the gender phobic, homophobic and sexist discourses infamous in hip-hop. Here, I propose a reading of Lil Nas X's “That’s What I Want,” the fourth track on Montero, following feminist and queer theory scholar Sara Ahmed’s discussion of affective alienation.

The song goes against the concept of black masculinity inscribed within the hip-hop genre from the very beginning, as Lil Nas X expresses his desire to find love and the pain that derives from the absence of it (“Look, you know it’s harder to find in these times/But I got nothin’ but love on my mind”). What is even more compelling for the hip-hop arena, is that the artist sings about specifically looking for a black man ("That afro black boy with the gold teeth/He dark skin, lookin’ at me like he know me"), who is hopefully part of the LGBTQ+ community, like himself ("I wonder if he got the G or the B"). Besides, although he is certainly looking for physical contact ("Need a boy who can cuddle with me all night"), Lil Nas X expresses a longing that goes beyond the carnal desire, looking for the emotions and feelings that come with the commitment of a long-lasting relationship ("Like, tell me that's life when I'm stressin' at night/Be like, "You'll be okay" and, "Everything is alright," uh/Love me or nothin' 'cause I'm not wanting anything/But your loving, your body, and a little bit of your brain"). The tenacity of Lil Nas X’s desire for love is emphasized in the pre-chorus, where he insists on his loneliness, reflecting on how easily he gives love away – falling in love with men he barely knows or indulging in merely physical encounters – and recognizing that he is “missing out.” Finally, he expresses all his desperation for love in the chorus (“'Causе it don't feel right when it's late at night/And it's just me in my dreams/So I want someone to love”), ending it with a swearing (“That's what I fuckin' want”).

The music video for the song, released on September 17, 2021 and directed by Colombian photographer STILLZ, sees in action a story written by Lil Nas X himself, where he is the protagonist. The video frames the artist’s unhappiness and lack of long-lasting relationships, from his days as a teenager to the recently acquired fame as a musician. From the first frames, the video presents different elements that disrupt hip-hop masculinity. On the Montero University's football field, the players are dressed either in pink (including Lil Nas X) or light blue, a reference to the color analogies that are traditionally connected to the feminine and the masculine. Injured, Lil Nas X is sitting on a bench on the side of the field, looking with desire at one of his teammates – which is also something rather incompatible with the sports’ environment. In the next frames, we can see the singer’s desire concreted, as Lil Nas X and the teammate have intercourse in the locker rooms’ showers. The two are also protagonists of the next scenes, that directly recall to the movie Brokeback Mountain – a reference to the queer community’s imaginary, rather than to the hip-hop scene. As it happens to the cowboys in the movie, Lil Nas X’s partner is closeted, as the viewer finds out a few frames later, when the singer goes to his lover’s house with a bunch of flowers and his wife and kid open the door. From this moment on, the video portrays a desperate Lil Nas X, crying and drinking the pain away. The very last frames of the video represent a bittersweet moment for the singer who, in full bride drag, walks alone the church’s aisle, bringing himself to the altar where a priest (interpreted by queer icon Billy Porter) marries him to his guitar. Although he is married to his music and rocking his guitar, Lil Nas X is still crying.

Where does Sara Ahmed fit into “That’s What I Want?” In her contribution to The Affect Theory Reader (2010), Ahmed explores the concept of happiness and how it orients us towards certain “objects” that we believe will make us happy. In particular, she considers the family environment as an “happy object”, an affective community that “provides a shared horizon in which objects circulate, accumulating positive affective values" (38). In this environment, the “unhappy queer” is an “affective alien,” a concept she uses to define those who do not reproduce the family line and go against its expectations of happiness. In The Promise of Happiness (2010), Ahmed goes further, analyzing what she calls the “unhappy queer archive,” a collection of stories that never have a happy ending for their queer protagonists, highlight the negative feelings that are an inevitable part of the queer emotional existence (89). I believe that, in this sense, Lil Nas X is affectively alienated, twice.

First, the feelings of loneliness and lack of love that the singer expresses in the song can be ascribed to the gendered scripts that Ahmed discusses, being relatable to heterosexual expectations of romantic love and intimacy from which queers deviate. Reading the song lyrics through the lens of Ahmed, Lil Nas X is directing his hope for happiness towards the wrong objects – a heteronormative coupledom – and thus becomes affectively alienated. This alienation sees its coronation in the marriage scene that ends the music video of the song on a bittersweet note. Ahmed recognizes marriage as a social form that is considered as a cause happiness, at least in a heteronormative discourse. Metaphorically marrying his music, Lil Nas X embraces marriage in his queer narrative, at once proving Ahmed right. In fact, as she painfully asserts, the queer might happily go beyond marriage, but this does not guarantee happiness in return. The singer does, in a sense, go beyond marriage, disrupting its heteronormativity by marrying his music while dressed as a bride, but what comes from it is even more loneliness than before, as the last shot of the video shows.

The second level of alienation is strictly connected with the concepts of race and blackness that have been ascribed to hip-hop culture, where the black male is represented as hyper-masculine, showing a sexuality usually considered as “permissive, excessive, deviant, and predatory” (Chaney 2014, 107). As ethnomusicologist Miles White suggests, this hypermasculine image of the black male has been constructed in response to the symbolical castration that black men had to endure by the hands of the white supremacist throughout history. In “Growing Up Male” (2014), family studies scholar Candy Ratliff explores the development of the hyper-sexual stereotype of the black man, discussing how the persistent segregation and discrimination of African Americans have put them in a precarious social position that brought them to be violent, assertive and aggressive. Openly displaying his emotions and his queer sexuality, Lil Nas X alienates himself from the black hyper-masculine man stereotype, following a pattern discussed by media studies scholar Marc Lamont Hill in “Scared Straight: Hip-Hop, Outing, and the Pedagogy of Queerness” (2009). This alienation has a particular significance within the African American community: as cultural studies scholar Joel Penney argues, the queer Other, the queer black man, has been considered in contrast with the virility that black males have to regain after the emasculation conducted by “the dehumanizing legacy of racism” (2012, 330). While rap music videos are usually the space where such images of black masculinity are spectacularized for consumption, Lil Nas X uses the lyrics and video of “That’s What I Want” as a stage for his loneliness and need of love, distancing himself from the hyper-sexual black male stereotype at once embracing his queerness, which in this cultural horizon now becomes the real protagonist.

Works cited

Ahmed, Sara. 2010. "Happy Objects." The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29-44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chaney, Cassandra. 2014. "The Tears of Black Men: Black Masculinity, Sexuality, and Sensitivity in R&B and Hip Hop." Hyper Sexual, Hyper Masculine? Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Identities of Contemporary Black Men, edited by Brittany C. Slatton and Kamesha Spates, 103-131. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

Lamont Hill, Marc. 2009. "Scared Straight: Hip-Hop, Outing, and the Pedagogy of Queerness." The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 31, no. 1: 29-54.https://doi.org/10.1080/10714410802629235.

Penney, Joel. 2012. "'We Don't Wear Tight Clothes': Gay Panic and Queer Style in Contemporary Hip Hop." Popular Music and Society 35, no. 3: 321-332. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.578517.

Ratliff, Canrowing Up Male." Hyper Sexual, Hyper Masculine? Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Identities of Contemporary Black Men, edited by Brittany C. Slatton and Kamesha Spates, 19-31. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.