In the music video for his record-smashing country-rap single Old Town Road, Lil Nas X parades himself through time and space, a rogue cowboy whose sole mission in life is to be looked at. He and his horse teleport from the late 19th century to the year 2019 and plop down on a contemporary urban street, prompting perplexed stares from the denizens of the neighbourhood. Nonplussed, X dances casually, outpaces a car on his horse in a drag race, and spends his winnings on a trove of jewellery and a black fringed jacket bedazzled with his stage name. He has arrived in our time to be fabulous.
One of the first pop icons of Generation Z, the 20-year-old star (real name: Montero Lamar Hill) from Lithia Springs, Georgia, owes his ballooning success to a combination of razor- sharp social media savvy and excellent timing. Lil Nas X reportedly had a six-figure Twitter following before he embarked on a music career, and his work soared to prominence on the back of the semi-ironic ‘yee-haw’ moment – a repackaging of American Western aesthetics for a youthful, plugged-in crowd. Old Town Road initially became popular on TikTok, the video- sharing platform where people communicate in micro-comedies set to easily digestible snippets of music. Its lyrics, about riding a horse until you ‘can’t no more’, touch on a long history of white male bravado in music, like Bob Seger’s drawling road ballad Turn the Page, covered hilariously in 1998 by Metallica. X’s performance deflates these tropes with a knowing smirk, setting redneck braggadocio to a trap beat. It’s an effervescently slight song, but X’s winking tone elevates it from novelty to enduring smash, with a record- obliterating run at the top of the US charts.
On the last day of June, Lil Nas X came out as gay, using his massively popular Twitter account to broadcast what he thought might already be obvious about himself. He’s the first artist to exit the closet while holding the No.1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, but he follows in a long history of queer and gender non-conforming artists using both humour and flamboyance to spin irresistible pop products. ‘It’s like centuries of American music were all building up to these 113 seconds of genius,’ critic Rob Sheffield wrote in a recent essay for Rolling Stone on the Lil Nas X phenomenon. Arguably, you can trace the roots of X’s firepower back at least a century, all the way to the days of vaudeville, when gay men put on outrageous costumes and excoriated social norms in high falsetto from behind their pianos.
The history of queer artists using music to flaunt gender norms predates the existence of the record industry. Ever since homosexuality emerged as a social category toward the end of the 19th century, it has maintained a strong association with music. ‘Is he musical?’ became a coded question among gays to ask if someone else was one of them. And even when homosexuality was illegal in the United States, drag shows drew both gay and straight attendees for their taboo exuberance, their catharsis, and their humour.
Before Elvis and The Beatles calcified into cultural touchstones, queer black musicians laid the foundations for pop music’s defining sounds. In the Twenties, Bessie Smith and Gladys Bentley sang openly of lesbian desire in their blues songs; the latter performed in Harlem dressed in tuxedos and top hats. A decade later, the charismatic gospel musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe began distorting the tone of her electric guitar while wailing away on the bright, wild chords that would become fundamental to rock music. Little Richard, the Georgia-born musician who arguably emerged as the first rock star, performed with Tharpe while he was still a teenager. He rushed her while she was loading her gear into a concert venue, sang one of her songs for her, and later received an invitation to join her onstage.
If streaks of queerness ran abundantly through the history of early popular music, Little Richard collected and codified them into a single, indelible image. His music both provided cover for his queerness and allowed him to celebrate it in public. He could sing about having sex with other men even when he couldn’t talk about it; the outrageousness of his act and his flamboyant persona gave him just enough plausible deniability to stay safe in a culture that punished deviations from heterosexuality, especially among black people in an era of legalised racial segregation.
Throughout his childhood, Little Richard was ostracised by his peers for both his disability and the way he carried his gender. He was born with one leg longer than the other, which gave him a twisting walk that registered as feminine. But even at a young age, he felt more closely aligned with femininity than masculinity. ‘The boys would want to fight me because I didn’t like to be with them. I wanted to play with the girls. See, I felt like a girl,’ Richard told Charles White in the 1984 biography The Life and Times of Little Richard.
Rather than recede inwards, Richard availed himself of another successful strategy among bullied kids: he became a troll. He acted up at school and at home, letting his grades slip, shitting into jars and then hiding them among his mother’s preserves in the pantry. His deep self-deprecation and abundant silliness continued to serve him once he started performing in Georgia, often in drag, with local and touring musicians throughout his teens. After he signed a deal with Specialty Records in his early twenties, Richard cut the landmark single Tutti Frutti, then a staple of his chaotic live show. The song’s original lyrics were about topping – being the penetrative partner during anal sex with another man. The label brought in songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie to tone down the ribald language (the then-shocking ‘good booty’ became ‘aw rootie’), but the energy of the song – the thrill of singing the taboo out loud – stuck. Richard’s sky- high ‘whoo!’ (an affectation he borrowed from gospel singer Marion Williams) communicated the euphoria of singing about gay sex in public, even after the explicit words had been erased.
Tutti Frutti became a hit for both Richard and the white pop singers who covered it soon after its release, Pat Boone and Elvis Presley. Richard’s follow-up singles included Long Tall Sally and Lucille, both coded songs about drag queens (Sally’s described not only as tall, but ‘bald-head’). These also found success, and Richard was soon touring the States. He was popular enough to play white clubs that otherwise wouldn’t host black musicians, and he found himself in the vulnerable position of navigating the straight white world as a queer black man. His identity, its otherness, fomented excitement among both black and white fans, but it also opened him up to plenty of danger. Rather than tone down his sexuality and his gender transgression, though, Richard amplified it to comic proportions. His long-time strategy of trolling would-be aggressors continued to serve him into his stardom. ‘We decided that my image should be crazy and way-out so that the adults would think I was harmless,’ he told White. ‘I’d appear in one show dressed as the Queen of England and in the next as the Pope.’
The colourful, bedazzled suits, the sky-high pompadour, the eyeliner: all these markers of drama and excess solidified into a form of armour around Richard. Because his expression of sexuality and gender was so outrageous, so funny, he could not be taken seriously as a sexual threat. He peacocked to protect himself and, perhaps unintentionally, established the rock stage as a space detached from quotidian reality. Onstage, a man could howl in crackling falsetto and be adored for it, not spurned as unmasculine. The stage incubated wild expressions of queer joy and would continue to house gender deviants long after Richard quit the music industry, first in 1957 and again in 1977, to spread the word of God. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, a host of musicians followed in Richard’s footsteps, using the stage as an excuse to embody the most colourful and flamboyant visions of themselves. David Bowie said that he ‘heard God’ the first time he listened to Tutti Frutti as a child. Originally self-styled as a long- haired folkie, Bowie steered his image towards the extra-terrestrial and the queer after meeting trans rock singer Jayne County in London. County was one of Andy Warhol’s superstars at the time, one of a number of trans women and drag queens who ran in the pop art icon’s circle in New York in the Sixties and Seventies. Bowie saw her perform in Warhol’s play Pork and allegedly stole much of her look (County claims she shared some demos with Bowie, and that he stole those too).
Having fashioned himself as an effeminate alien, with Ziggy Stardust’s skin-tight jumpsuits by Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto, flaming red hair and eye-catching make-up, Bowie promptly announced in a 1972 Melody Maker interview that he was gay. He didn’t play it as a pivotal moment of self-disclosure; the confession seemed to come with a shrug. That he was married to a woman with an infant son didn’t seem to matter to Bowie, his interviewer or his fans. For Bowie, queerness wasn’t something dredged up from a place of deep personal authenticity, but a wild show to put on. His landmark single Starman, for instance, boasts an upward octave leap at the chorus, a feature shared by Judy Garland’s Wizard of Oz classic Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a historical gay anthem. Performing it on a 1972 episode of Top of the Pops , Bowie’s slinky embrace of his guitarist flaunted norms, but was so brazen that his fanbase only snowballed.
Many artists who entered Bowie’s orbit shared his affinity for crossing gender boundaries, if not his polished musicality. Iggy Pop, frontman of the Michigan protopunk band The Stooges, was known to wear dresses, lipstick, and bikini bottoms to his unhinged early shows. Lou Reed, singer with the influential and unvarnished New York band The Velvet Underground, donned eyeliner on the cover of his Bowie-produced album Transformer; on its hit single Walk on the Wild Side he sings affectionately of his trans friends in Warhol’s social scene. Along with the New York Dolls, who straddled the thin line between glam rock and punk, these musicians pieced together slapdash, abject visions of femininity – not so much expressions of inner defection from gender norms as deliberate provocations aimed at the straight world. Throwing on a dress and screaming into a microphone was punk, if only because it angered people.
Bowie used androgyny in the creation of disposable personae, transformative as they were at the time, but his spiritual descendant Prince embodied gender fluidity more holistically. Born in Minnesota, Prince signed his first record deal when he was still a teenager, stipulating that he have total artistic control over his work. The first track of his very first album, 1978’s For You, blossoms in a cascade of layered falsetto. In voice and in image, Prince knew from the start what he wanted to become.
Like Little Richard, Prince was a feminine child, subject to homophobic taunts from his classmates. He never grew past 5ft 2in, and his doe eyes and piercing gaze were easily enhanced by eyeliner. He suffered punishment for his femininity into adulthood: in 1981, still relatively unknown, he opened for The Rolling Stones wearing black bikini bottoms and an open trench coat, and was booed off the stage. Such displays of aggression never seemed to deter Prince. They only spurred him on to a long career full of glowing moments of androgyny.
In many ways, Prince’s crimped falsetto and vibrant costumes picked up where Little Richard
left off. He used chaos, irreverence, dandyism, and camp to build an iconography of gender
transcendence, not to mention a catalogue of songs so good they seem to have been imported from beyond this planet. There’s a certain hue of purple that will forever invoke Prince; to claim a given colour, not through copyright but through sheer insistent genius, is to offer a talent so elemental it can never be replicated. Prince defied reality only to embed himself into its fabric.
Though he never claimed to be queer and ostensibly was never sexually interested in men, Prince’s music toys with a kind of sapphic desire. Throughout his catalogue, he assumes a feminine role in relation to the women he courts, seeking them out not as others but
as kin. On certain songs, like If I Was Your Girlfriend, he explicitly fantasises about being in a lesbian relationship with a woman. He wrote it for his feminine alter ego Camille, who never emerged as a full character in her own right, as he originally planned, but appeared as a lead vocalist on Prince’s albums thanks to pitch- shifting technology, which slotted his already feminine voice up to a more typically ‘female’ range. The crimped, high Camille voice lent depth and complexity to lines like ‘I don’t really wanna be your man,’ from the 1989 Batman B-side Feel U Up ; here was a man singing in a feminised register about wanting to dissolve the gendered power imbalance between himself and the woman he desired. Prince was notoriously private despite his celebrity, offering few details about his personal life, but he used his music to stage dramas that disrupted normative gender roles. At the same time, the camp of his work gave him an out. He could sing about his femininity in a heightened reality of his own making, and its lurid artificiality gave him cover from heteronormative scrutiny.
Like Bowie, Prince opened space in heterocentric culture for new generations of musicians and music fans to play. It’s tough to imagine the current crop of gender- transgressive pop stars emerging in the absence of his legacy. The influence of Prince’s outré embodiments can be traced from the ballroom gowns Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain wore on TV during the grunge era, launching a middle finger at the homophobic fans the band had accumulated upon achieving mainstream success, to Outkast rapper Andre 3000’s colourful stage getups, which accentuated the fantastical, hyper-real videos for turn-of-the-millennium singles B.O.B. and The Whole World.
Troye Sivan channels Prince’s effeminacy, too, when he appears in bright red lipstick and a floral gown in his video for Bloom; Young Thug called on pop music’s long history of male drag when he donned a flowing, layered dress on the cover of his album Jeffery. Reggaeton stars J Balvin, Bad Bunny, and Maluma all draw from the same vein in their prismatic stage getups, as do independent artists Shamir, Perfume Genius, and Yves Tumor. And pop music’s flamboyance flows through Lil Nas X, whose bright suits and cowboy hats signal a similar refusal to conform to social norms, to blend in, to fade.
Throughout the past half-century of popular music, artists have trodden a delicate line between subversion and camouflage. Singing in buoyant falsetto and dressing in blinding colour are two ways to snap an audience to attention, to make them question the parameters of what they consider normal. They are also strategies for overwhelming the eyes and ears. When a musician’s presence inundates the senses, it’s harder to pin that musician down as a freak or an outcast, harder to sideline them into a position of powerlessness. From Little Richard to Lil Nas X, flamboyance has served as paradoxical armour – a shell so overwhelming that it’s hard to tear down, even if it breaks all the rules.
Lil Nas X’s effect is far subtler than Richard’s, Bowie’s, or Prince’s. When a musician’s presence inundates the senses, it’s harder to pin that musician down as a freak or an outcast, harder to sideline them into a position of powerlessness. From Little Richard to Lil Nas X, flamboyance has served as paradoxical armour – a shell so overwhelming that it’s hard to tear down, even if it breaks all the rules.
Lil Nas X’s effect is far subtler than Richard’s, Bowie’s, or Prince’s. While Richard would leap back from his piano, arms and legs sprawled in all directions, X dances with comedic restraint in his video for Old Town Road . His charisma comes not from overblown gestures, but from the way he reins in his long frame. From the Wild West to the city street, he looks in control and in on the joke. The joke is that he doesn’t quite belong anywhere, that he’s always going against the grain of his environment: a black cowboy outlaw, a queer kid riling up a Country Western bar. He’s displaced, but never in danger. The rhinestones on his jacket gleam, his eyes twinkle, and it’s clear he knows exactly why he is where he is.
The pre-chorus to Old Town Road goes: ‘Can’t nobody tell me nothin’ / You can’t tell me nothin’.’ It’s the only part of the song where his voice is processed and multitracked, boned up for emphasis, because it’s true: his movements, his outfits, his look – they are all impenetrable. His adornment gives him control. The world
is his: it splits open to make room for how he’s invented himself. With decades of history to boost him, he renders himself unconquerable.
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