While fucking satan in stilettos should be more than queer enough, Lil Nas X has proved himself to be one of the great minds of Gen Z time and time again: from his three Grammy nominations to winning The Trevor Project’s first-ever Suicide Prevention Advocate of the Year Award, his blood-filled “Satan Shoes” to his, um, pregnancy before the birth of his first album.Īt any given moment, you get the sense Lil Nas X is having the time of his life, and his fearless joy - every time he owns a homophobe on Twitter or accidentally rips the world’s tightest pair of leather pants on live TV - is contagious for the rest of us. To stop at calling the music video the defining pop culture moment of the 22-year-old singer’s year would be to overlook the entire cultural shift that took place after his rise to fearless rap-pop stardom/world domination over the course of 2021.