Montero Lamar Hill took us on the journey of how he became Lil Nas X onstage Saturday evening, and straight into the future.
The 23-year-old Georgia native was born in 1999 at the cusp of the millennium, and the outspoken gay pop star’s set was an ode to progress. Possessing a flair for drama since blowing the country and hip-hop scene apart with colossal 2019 Billy Ray Cyrus collab “Old Town Road,” the artist didn’t surprise any of his fervent fans with the opening announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re ready to get cunt…”
This was only the first in a series of dramatic introductory sequences set like a Shakespearean play, with a futuristic voiceover from a bodiless face onscreen to set the tone: “The greatest thing a human can be is to create themselves, to be themselves.” Nas X promptly came onstage in a gold metallic outfit early Madonna would’ve worn as a gladiator, grabbing his crotch Michael-Jackson-style to “Panini,” off his 2019 debut EP. Despite the artist’s onstage remembrance that he hadn’t “been here since like 2019,” ACL marked his first-ever Austin show, as a planned post-blowup 2019 JMBLYA performance was canceled for weather damage.
After asking Austin to “get the fuck up,” the genre-crossing Gen Z’er emphatically swagged across the stage, then squatted and sipped from a bright blue water bottle before going into another slow jam, “Tales of Dominica.” After another slower song, “Sun Goes Down,” the pre-P!nk performer ran offstage for an outfit change while a pensive, very-packed-for-6pm crowd waited.
Disney-winking storybook whimsy continued from there. Two dancers acted as the legs propping up a huge all-gold Trojan horse, emblazoned with the Coach logo. Naturally, Nas X then emerged wearing a matching gold crop top and cowboy chaps. None of his sparkly crop-top-and-pant ensembles had fabric covering his midsection, and rightly so, because why would you hide those abs?
When he invited crowd members to twerk onstage, an elementary-school-aged boy bounced around to an enraptured audience. The entire performance was set up like a stage play, with voiceover interludes defining each act, one segment spoofing the bible’s condemnation of homosexuality, and a total of six – count them, six – outfit changes. The myth of self-creation is all a creative truly has, and Nas X buys into the whole shebang – from a horde of backup dancers, introduced by name, to hot-pink varsity football outfits for 2021 hit “INDUSTRY BABY.”
For him, everything is a performance, an effort to both act out life itself and to be larger than. Already a tall man at over six feet, Nas X tellingly rocks a nearly-6-inch faux-hawk’d Afro – elevating the concert experience the way a museum exhibition can become performance art. That is to say, the star creates his own myth and adds to it everything a gleeful audience requires: eye candy, twerking, and leather chaps.
This article appears in October 7 • 2022.