“When you slip on a banana peel,” the writer Nora Ephron liked to say, “people laugh at you. He grabbed his crotch and, for the remainder of the performance, held on for dear life. For a sheepish few seconds, you could see him calculating what to do next. His mouth formed a perfect “O” of shock, as he awkwardly covered his private parts. In the final minute of the “S.N.L.” performance, Nas was grinding on the stripper pole, thrusting with all his might, when he felt a sudden, unexpected breeze. Now, in 2021, he had achieved the unthinkable, a feat only dreamed of by some of his peers who had gone from anonymity to the top of the charts - he made another hit song, and a brazenly gay one at that.īut in live TV, as in sex, something always goes wrong. It was in the midst of this success, with his “Old Town Road” in its 17th-straight week as the No.1 song in the country, that he came out as gay.
All of this was a far cry from how audiences had been introduced to Nas three years earlier, as a spindly teenager in a cowboy hat who’d just dropped out of college and, somehow, ended up releasing the biggest song in the world. At one point, one of them took a lascivious ice cream lick out of the side of Nas’s neck, the singer biting his lip in satisfaction. When they turned around, slits cut into the top of their tight vinyl pants showed off juicy slices of butt. Dancers in studded collars gyrated around one another, tracing fingers down glistening chests or pumping their bodies between the singer’s legs. A stripper pole, flanked by demons, stood in the middle of the stage. Two weeks earlier, Nas performed “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” the first single from his forthcoming album, on “Saturday Night Live.” The song is about one man’s lust for another, and its stage performance - derived from the song’s video, in which the singer gives Satan a lap dance - was an all-male leather orgy, diluted just enough to be shown on broadcast television. Minutes later, my pastrami sandwich arrived. “It looks like somebody got bored and just murdered any animal and skinned it alive,” he said, disgusted.
We sat in a booth beneath a series of framed portraits of sandwiches, overstuffed with cuts of meat. At one point, our server, assuming we were on a date, chastised the singer for looking at his phone.
Free from the shackles of celebrity respectability - who would recognize him here, among all these khaki pants? - we got increasingly silly, eventually conducting a brief conversation entirely in fart noises. īecause the Chateau Marmont was closed, and the Sunset Tower Hotel stopped serving food 15 minutes earlier, and the food at SoHo House wasn’t even that good anyway, Lil Nas X and I ended up eating lunch in a mostly empty Jewish deli in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles.
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