BANNED AID – Bitch I’m back like J.Christ

About a week ago this video dropped. There’s a lot in it. It’s very well done, a lot of people love it, a lot of people hate it and want to ban it -what do you think – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCrQeUaXkLo&ab_channel=LilNasXVEVO

My original plan was to do five posts about banned songs, and I posted Part 1 (on racism) last week, but before I get to Part 2 (on politics) I’m doing this extra post because it deals with Racism, Religion and Gender in such a powerful way that it’s hard to ignore.

Previous posts:

Part 1 – Racism – https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2024/01/13/banned-aid-a-guide-to-the-banning-of-music-racism/

Future posts:

• Part 2 – Politics
• Part 3 – Illegal Substances
• Part 4 – Gender
• Part 5 – Religion

THE VIDEO

A lot happens in the video – things to watch for –

1. This video is like Monty Python’s Life of Brian – there’s nothing in it that disrespects Jesus Christ, the target is Christianity and the followers of Christ who have done things Christ would most probably condemn.
2. One of the themes is resurrection, and this post’s title, Bitch I’m back like J. Christ, is a lyric in the song.
3. At first we see several celebrity look-alikes – Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Mariah Carey, Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama on their way to Heaven.
4. A Michael Jackson look-alike makes an appearance in the next sequence.
5. We see Lil Nas X in Hell boiling body parts
6. Lil Nas X returns to Heaven and plays a basketball game against Satan. Lil Nas X wins.
7. There’s a close-up of Satan’s shoes (see below).
8. We see Lil Nas X, and several other men, appearing as cheerleaders
9. Lil Nas X is being crucified
10. 10. Lil Nas X is shearing a lamb
11. Lil Nas X appears on television in a fashion show being watched by Ts Madison (an American reality show star who was the first black trans woman to star in, and be the executive producer of, her own reality show, The Ts Madison Experience)
12. Lil Nas X as Noah leads an army of animals into an ark, a modern day flood descends upon the Earth with ferocious power but Lil Nas X keeps the ark afloat.
13. Sunshine breaks through, we see “Day Zero – A New Beginning” then a Biblical quotation – 2 Corinthians, Chapter 7, Verse 5. Lil Nas X has done his homework.

THE CONTEXT

• Lil Nas X (real name: Montero Hill) is openly gay and he has suffered greatly for that from the religious right in the United States. Thus the cheer leading scene in the video.
• Lil Nas X wrote and directed the video
• Lil Nas X has stated that he made the video to “make people stay the fuck out of other people’s lives and stop dictating who they should be.”
• J.Christ is not the first religious video Hill has made. His video ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’ was also condemned by church leaders as sacrilegious saying that it encourages Satan Worship. Since the video opens with Lil Nas X in the Garden of Eden then later descending into Hell and giving Satan a lap dance, the response isn’t surprising. This video was also very well made, with a powerful surprise ending in the last ten seconds. Here is the video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6swmTBVI83k&ab_channel=LilNasXVEVO
• Hill’s debut single, Old Town Road, was so popular, it spent 19 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart making it the longest running number one song in the chart’s history. It went 17 times platinum and was the second-highest certified song in the US. He has won two Grammy awards and a trunk full of other awards. The fact that he is black (black country singers are a rarity – hats off to Charlie Rich), and even more so the fact that he was gay, didn’t exactly endear him to the country music establishment in the US. The fact that the single sold in enormous numbers really pissed off Old School country music folks. Hill is very good at taking the mickey out of people. Here’s the video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7qovpFAGrQ&ab_channel=LilNasXVEVO .
• The fact that Lil Nas X received a lot of hatred from the country music community for Old Town Road (it was banned from some Country Music charts) and a lot of hatred from the religious community for Montero (Call Me By Your Name), may be why Lil Nas X has said that the song J.Christ is about comebacks, not just Christ’s resurrection, but about his own comeback.
• Keys to the success of Lil Nas X include his musical talent, his polarizing effect, the fact that you can’t ignore him (he also exhibits a lot of attention-getting behaviours outside of the recording studio), he has a sense of humour, and he takes great care with his videos.
• At the 57 second mark we see a close-up of Satan’s shoes. There actually were shoes called Satan Shoes. They were custom made Nike Air Max 97 shoes created by Lil Nas X in collaboration with MSCHF, a Brooklyn, New York art collective. The shoes are black, with a bronze pentagram on the laces, an inverted cross, and a Biblical reference on the side (Luke Chapter 10, Verse 17 – “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name”). Only 666 pairs of shoes were made (666 is the Number of the Beast, i.e. of the Antichrist, according to Chapter 13 in the Book of Revelations in the Bible). Each pair sold for $1018.00 . Angel Numbers are supposed to bring religious joy into one’s life and 1018 is an Angel Number. Despite the hefty price tag all 666 pairs sold out in under a minute! The box the shoes come in features a gruesome detail from the painting Crucifixion and Last Judgment diptych by the Dutch artist Jan van Eyck (1390 – 1441). Each pair of shoes also comes with an actual drop of blood. Lil Nas X was condemned for including the blood but no one condemned Kiss when in 1977 Marvel Comics published a story about Kiss and the members of Kiss all contributed vials of blood which were mixed in with the ink that was used to print the comics. Everyone was also quite fine with skateboard champion Tony Hawk releasing blood-infused skateboards.

This reminds me of the time a million years ago when I was in secondary school that leftist Abbie Hoffman was on the Tonight Show wearing a shirt adorned with a large American flag. People were outraged, and viewers wrote in (this was decades before the internet / email / social media) saying anyone who wears the flag as a piece of clothing is disrespecting the flag and is therefore a traitor. But then someone came up with a photograph from the appearance of right wing icon Roy Rogers on that same Tonight Show also wearing a shirt adorned with a large American flag. No one had got upset with Roy Rogers.

By Jan van Eyck – art database, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23856016

• At about the time the video came out Lil Nas X was seen wearing a t-shirt that read “If God doesn’t exist, who’s laughing at us?” which didn’t exactly help his cause. Is the video J.Christ an atheist video? Does that warrant censoring it in a democracy (not a theocracy)?
• Should the song be censored for its use of the word ‘Bitch’ ?
• Lil Nas X was raised in a seriously Christian home and his father, R.L. Stafford, was a gospel singer though he has not been very happy with Montero’s music.
• Some have condemned Lil Nas X for portraying himself as Christ on the cross. No one seemed to mind when Tupac Shakur was depicted as Christ on the cross on the cover of his 1996 album The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, the first album released a few months after Tupac was murdered at the age of 25. No one condemned Kanye West for appearing as Christ wearing a crown of thorns on the cover of Rolling Stone. Kendrick Lamar has also appeared wearing a crown of thorns. Johnny Cash famously sang “I wear this crown of thorns upon my liar’s chair” on his recording of the song Hurt shortly before he died and his rendition garnered considerable praise (rightly so). Here is an illustration from 1649 by William Marshall depicting King Charles I of England who in that same year was executed (he was beheaded). In this illustration King Charles is reaching for a crown of thorns:

KING CHARLES I OF ENGLAND SHORTLY BEFORE HIS EXECUTION IN 1649
By William Marshall – https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw35442/King-Charles-I, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94704904

Mind you, when John Lennon sang the line “The way things are going, they’re going to crucify me” on the Beatles song The Ballad of John and Yoko, he was also condemned.

THEREFORE . . . ?

• Should the video / song J.Christ be banned?
• Would it in fact increase sales if it was banned since Lil Nas X has already quickly built up a huge fan base with his hit Old Town Road?
• Would the reaction to the song / video be less critical if it was done by someone who was straight? Someone who wasn’t African-American? Someone who was known as being deeply religious?
• Would the reaction be less critical (or more critical?) if it was done by a woman (see Madonna’s video Like a Prayer which was soundly condemned by the religious establishment – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fzeNUqQbQ&ab_channel=Madonna ).
• What would or should a civilized, progressive, responsible Christian make of this video?
• What would or should a civilized, progressive, responsible atheist make of this video?

It is reasonable to criticize or reject a religious doctrine if that doctrine encourages or demands discrimination or unjustified violence. But if a religious (or atheistic) idea one doesn’t believe in is harmless, or in some cases beneficial (e.g. Christian charities, or the Red Crescent society) then one doesn’t get to ban that idea and one shouldn’t mock it if one wants to be a decent person. One also doesn’t get to ban someone else’s harmless idea just in order to advance one’s own agenda. So, are the ideas in the video J.Christ harmless? Dangerous? Acceptable in a pluralistic society?

The image of Christ on the cross is sacred to millions of people so one must respect their perceptions. But what if some people use their religion to justify going on Crusades against Islam, conducting an Inquisition, denying science, or covering up child sexual abuse? Someone might argue that if you don’t like the video just don’t watch it, but that won’t do if one thinks that watching the video will make or encourage people to do things one thinks are ethically unjustified. This whole pluralistic society concept is complicated – which is why we have Political Philosophy.

Finally, how does this play out in the greater scheme of things? Presently the U.S. is polarized and the right wing extremists (Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Stephen Miller, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, several Supreme Court justices, and so many others) are the loudest voices, and have the most power. Yet the majority of the population oppose what they do. Is that majority too compliant? We do know that they are heavily propagandized / cynicized. When Trump bragged about grabbing pussy and jailing women who got legal abortions he, and every single Republican, should have received zero votes in every subsequent election. Men as well as women should have dropped Trump like an extremist potato. It didn’t happen. He got elected President instead. Why are things like hating and enslaving women and girls, embracing racism, attacking the LGBT community, doing nothing about the slaughter of school children, and on and on, not deal breakers? Perhaps they are deal breakers for many younger members of the electorate, and for fans of Lil Nas X. One wonders how it will all play out over the next few election cycles, and whether videos like this will have any effect on how things go.