MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)

The song that came with a letter

Most pop singles arrive with a press release. "MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)" arrived with a love letter, and the person it was addressed to was a fourteen-year-old boy.

On the day the song came out in March 2021, Lil Nas X posted a note to his younger self. He wrote that he had promised himself he would never be one of those people who came out publicly, that he would never be "that" kind of gay artist, and that he would take his secret to the grave. Then he admitted that he was releasing a song with his own name on it, a song about a man he had met the previous summer, and that he was doing it because he knew it would open doors for other queer people simply to exist. That letter is the key that unlocks everything else. The music video full of devils, the outrage cycle, the shoes with a drop of human blood in the sole: all of it was theatre built on top of a deeply personal confession.

The surprising truth is that one of the most provocative pop records of the decade is, at heart, a coming-of-age story. It just happens to be told with a pole, a pair of horns, and a three-minute descent into the underworld.

Background: from Old Town Road to a name on the cover

To understand why "MONTERO" mattered so much, you have to remember where Lil Nas X was in 2019. Born Montero Lamar Hill in 1999 and raised in and around Atlanta, including a stretch in the suburb of Lithia Springs, he had spent his teenage years online, building an audience on Twitter through meme accounts and an instinct for what would travel. "Old Town Road," a country-trap hybrid he made with a beat bought cheaply online, exploded through TikTok and then broke the record for the most weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, staying there for nineteen weeks, helped along by a remix with Billy Ray Cyrus.

On the last day of Pride Month in 2019, at the height of that success, he quietly came out, pointing fans to a rainbow detail on his EP artwork. It was brave, but it was also gentle and almost deniable. The reaction was mixed: supportive messages, plenty of shrugs, and a sour undercurrent from parts of the hip-hop and country worlds that had embraced him only as a novelty. There was a widely held assumption in the industry that he was a one-hit wonder, a viral accident who would fade once the meme stopped spinning.

"MONTERO" was his answer to all of that. He first teased a snippet online in the summer of 2020, and fans latched onto it for months before it was finished. The final track was produced by Take a Daytrip, the duo of Denzel Baptiste and David Biral, alongside Omer Fedi and Roy Lenzo, the team that would shape much of his debut album. The sound is unusual for a chart-topper: a quick, Spanish-guitar strum and handclaps that nod toward flamenco, sitting over a light trap pulse, with a melody that never quite stops moving. It runs to barely more than two minutes, which feels like a deliberate choice. It gets in, makes its point, and leaves you wanting to press play again.

The parenthetical title, meanwhile, is a direct nod to "Call Me by Your Name," the 2007 novel by André Aciman and the 2017 film by Luca Guadagnino, in which a teenager falls for an older visiting scholar during a hot summer in northern Italy. In that story, the lovers swap names as an act of intimacy. By borrowing that phrase and putting his own birth name in capital letters in front of it, Lil Nas X was doing something layered: invoking one of the most celebrated queer romances of recent years while insisting that this story was his, signed with the name his family gave him.

For British readers there is a satisfying footnote. The song did not just top the Hot 100 in the US, where it debuted at number one; it reportedly also went to number one on the UK Singles Chart in the spring of 2021, giving him a British chart-topper that "Old Town Road" had already proven was possible. In a country that has long made icons of flamboyant, gender-bending pop stars, from Freddie Mercury to Boy George to Elton John, the song slotted into a familiar and much-loved tradition of outrageous glamour with a serious point underneath.

Core meaning: desire, denial, and a dare

Read on its most literal level, the lyrics describe a lover who is hiding. The narrator is attracted to a man who seems to want him back but will not be seen with him, who keeps things secret and treats the relationship as something to be ashamed of. Lil Nas X has said the song was inspired by a real person he met in the summer of 2020, and you can feel that specificity: there are hints of late nights, of drinks, of a partner who lives in the shadows of his own life.

The narrator's attitude toward that secrecy is the first twist. Rather than pleading, he is teasing. He tells this man, in effect, that he knows exactly what is going on, that the hesitation is obvious, and that he is not going to wait around politely. He is frank about sex in a way that mainstream pop sung by men about men had rarely been, and he delivers it with a grin rather than a tremble. The song turns the closeted lover into the one who should feel awkward, not the one who is open.

The second layer is about the narrator himself. There are lines that gesture toward his own past caution, the years when he too would have kept things quiet, and toward the self-protective coldness of someone who has learned not to fall too hard. The song's push and pull, desire on one side and a guarded heart on the other, mirrors the letter to his fourteen-year-old self. He is singing to a lover, but also to the version of himself who once hid.

The third layer only comes into focus when you watch the video, and it changes how the whole track reads. Directed by Tanu Muino together with Lil Nas X, it plays out like a queer reworking of religious myth. It begins in a lush Garden of Eden, where he is tempted by a serpent who is also, unmistakably, himself. It moves to a gleaming colosseum where he is put on trial and stoned by a crowd. Then he ascends toward heaven, only to grab a pole and slide all the way down into hell, where he gives Satan a lap dance, snaps the devil's neck, and takes his horns, crowning himself king of the underworld.

The message is not subtle, and it was not meant to be. Many queer kids raised in conservative Christian communities, as he was in the American South, grow up hearing that who they are leads to damnation. Lil Nas X has said, in interviews around the release, that he spent years afraid of hell because of what he was taught. The video takes that threat and flips it: fine, if that is where I am going, I will arrive in style and run the place. It is defiance staged as camp, a joke with a bruise underneath. Rather than begging for acceptance from those who condemned him, he simply refuses to be frightened any longer.

Cultural context: the outrage machine and the shoes

If the song was the art, the rollout was the performance piece, and Lil Nas X played it with the instincts of someone who grew up understanding the internet better than his critics did.

Around the release, the creative collective MSCHF launched what were dubbed the "Satan Shoes": modified Nike Air Max 97 trainers decorated with a pentagram and a Bible verse reference, limited to 666 pairs and reportedly containing a drop of human blood mixed into the ink in the sole. They sold out almost instantly. Nike, which had nothing to do with the project, sued MSCHF for trademark infringement, and the case was settled within weeks, with MSCHF agreeing to a voluntary recall offer. For a few frantic days, conservative commentators, politicians, pastors and sports figures queued up to denounce the song, the video and the shoes.

Lil Nas X answered almost every criticism with a joke. When people complained that he was corrupting children, he pointed out that he had spent his career being told he was too much of one thing or another, and that he was not anyone's babysitter. He released a mock-apology video that cut away to the scene of him dancing on Satan. The more outrage there was, the more streams poured in, and the song shot to the top of charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

The live performances extended the story. On Saturday Night Live, his trousers famously split mid-routine, and he laughed it off and kept going, which only added to the legend. At the BET Awards, he performed in an Egyptian-themed set and ended by kissing one of his male dancers on stage, in front of an audience and an industry that had not always been comfortable with that image. The song later earned Grammy nominations for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and its parent album, simply titled "Montero," arrived in September 2021 with a nomination for Album of the Year.

The cultural ripple was bigger than awards. "MONTERO" helped normalise the idea that a gay Black man could be a mainstream pop provocateur, not as a side character or a novelty, but as the main event. It showed that a queer artist could use the internet's appetite for scandal as a tool rather than be crushed by it. And it pushed conversations about religion and sexuality into living rooms that would otherwise never have had them.

Why it still resonates today

Several years on, the shock has faded, and what remains is surprisingly tender. The devil imagery now reads less like a provocation and more like a fairy tale for anyone who was told they were wrong for existing. The flamenco strum still sounds fresh, the song is still short enough to replay three times in a row, and its swagger still feels like armour that was earned the hard way.

It also stands as a turning point in Lil Nas X's own story. Before it, he was a viral sensation; after it, he was an artist with a point of view, someone willing to risk his place in the mainstream in order to say exactly who he was. Plenty of artists talk about authenticity. Few put their legal name in capital letters on the cover and dare the world to look away.

For listeners who grew up queer in religious households, or who simply spent too long hiding some part of themselves, the song still works as a kind of permission slip. It suggests that you do not have to wait for the people who condemned you to change their minds. You can write a letter to your younger self, tell him he made it, and then go and dance on the devil's knee. That combination of pain and play, of confession dressed up as carnival, is why "MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)" refuses to become just another hit from 2021.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Montero (the album, 2021) — The full record surrounds the hit with something more vulnerable: songs about loneliness, fame, family and depression sit beside the bravado. Listening straight through shows that the devil in the video was only one mask among many.
• "Old Town Road" (Remix) featuring Billy Ray Cyrus — Go back to the song that made him famous and the contrast is striking. It is a playful genre mash-up made by a young man who had not yet told the world everything, and it makes the boldness of "MONTERO" feel even bigger.
• "Mystery of Love" by Sufjan Stevens — The aching ballad written for the film "Call Me by Your Name" is the emotional opposite of Lil Nas X's swagger. Hearing them together shows two very different ways of singing about the same kind of forbidden summer love.

📚 Follow the story

• "Call Me by Your Name" by André Aciman — The novel behind the borrowed title is a lush, interior account of first love and the strange intimacy of exchanging names. Reading it explains why that phrase meant so much to queer audiences long before Lil Nas X picked it up.
• "Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero" (documentary, 2023) — This film follows him on his first major tour, reportedly capturing the backstage nerves, the protests outside venues and the joy inside them. It is the closest you can get to seeing what life looked like after the song changed everything.
• "C Is for Country" by Lil Nas X — A picture book he wrote for young children, full of cheerful cowboy imagery. It is a sweet counterpoint to the satanic headlines and a reminder that he has always cared about the kids watching him.

🌍 Visit the places

• Crema, Lombardy, Italy — The small northern Italian town where much of the film "Call Me by Your Name" was shot has become a quiet pilgrimage spot for fans. Cycling its cobbled streets and squares, you can feel the sleepy summer heat that gave the song's title its romantic charge.
• The Colosseum, Rome — The video's stoning scene takes place in an imagined arena that unmistakably echoes the ancient amphitheatre. Standing there, you can think about how spectacle and public judgement have always gone together, from gladiators to Twitter pile-ons.
• Atlanta, Georgia — The city where Montero Lamar Hill grew up is also one of the great engines of modern hip-hop. Exploring its music history helps explain how a kid from its suburbs absorbed trap rhythms and turned them into something entirely his own.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Learn a basic flamenco rumba strum — The song's driving guitar is built on a quick, percussive Spanish-style pattern. Even a beginner can learn a simple version on an acoustic guitar and suddenly hear how much of the track's energy lives in the right hand.
• Write a letter to your fourteen-year-old self — Borrow the idea that launched the song and tell your younger self what you wish you had known. It is a surprisingly powerful exercise, and it shows why that small note mattered as much as the music.
• Throw a Pride-season listening night — Gather friends, play the album alongside the film soundtrack, and talk about the songs that made you feel seen. Turning the song into a shared ritual captures the community spirit Lil Nas X said he hoped to create.

🎵 Listen to this song