Analysis of Article "I Grew Up Afraid. Lil Nas X’s ‘Montero’ Is the Lesson I Needed"

I have always viewed fear negatively, but my perspective greatly changed after reading Ashon Crawley’s article, “I Grew Up Afraid. Lil Nas X’s ‘Montero’ Is the Lesson I Needed”. Lil Nas X’s new album gave me a new perspective, just like this article. The article included both ethos and pathos. Crawley had examples from his own personal experiences with religion, the LGBTQ+ community, and some background history on Montero. Montero’s album was very controversial, as it included a music video as “a young Black man rides a stripper pole to hell to give the devil a lap dance” (Crawley, 2021). He also included an analysis of the music video on a deeper level. Crawley effectively convinces the audience that fear should not be presented as a negative thing with emotional experiences, vivid imagery, and perspective.  

Crawley creates a strong sense of pathos by including his own encounters with religion and how he related to Montero’s album. He opened the essay with a story about a pastor he met through his music teacher. The pastor looked at Crawley and said, “I can tell you’re a bad boy” (Crawley, 2021). Crawley was shocked on why the pastor would come out and say this towards him specifically. Why would a pastor look past everyone and target a boy 30 years younger than him? This encounter showed Crawley that his “time to be exposed was soon to come” (Crawley, 2021). He admits that at some point his parents are going to come home and catch him “chatting in a sinful corner of the early Internet” (Crawley, 2021). He brings up all of his experiences with fear and how it changed his perspective on his future. The author also brings up a story about his high school teachers calling him a slur and another teacher making a comment about how high his voice was in choir. His clear use of pathos makes the audience read deeper into the issue at hand. The way he included the story is important because it could help and connect with someone reading the article or show a different viewpoint to someone who may not feel the same way about the album Montero.

 By connecting back to pathos, he was able to also include a part at the end about how this music video would have helped teenage Ashon. He stated, “even as an adult, I am grateful for the audiovisual troubling of fear ‘Montero’ provides” (Crawley, 2021). He brings it back to the present and it shows the importance of how much this video may have meant to him. He also reintroduces the concept of fear and why we shouldn’t let it consume us. Crawley explains that he isn’t going to let fear take over anymore because it urges him to “remember that joy and pleasure are serious, necessary work” (Crawley, 2021). Making sure you create some type of joy in your life is important because if you just let fear take over, you will not have anything to work on in your life. He also talks about how he never had a strong understanding of the devil but had  “a sense for eternal torment” (Crawley, 2021). Not everyone may be religious, but it will affect everyone in different ways. As a person who wasn't raised in a religious household, I personally connect with this because growing up, all of my friends would say, “You’re going to hell if you swear.” I’ve always had that little voice in the back of my head telling me that hell was waiting for me. 

Crawley incorporated ethos by including a detailed analysis of the video and what the scenes represent. For example, he described the first scene as “The double-speak that runs throughout the song begins here, with Montero framed not as a person but a place, in which fear of being bashed and excluded and violated for engaging and enjoying pleasures of the flesh is not possible” (Crawley, 2021). He talks about the opening lyrics and how Montero is being portrayed as a place and not himself. Crawley connects with the audience as he is able to relate back to the music video himself. Watching the video was a different experience because I was not able to relate back to it, but it just showed that fear is everywhere but you shouldn’t take it to heart.

After reading his descriptions of the video, Crawley was also able to create an image in my head using vivid imagery. He described the start of the video with “hues of blue and purple” (Crawley, 2021). As someone who has watched the video I would know what he was referring to but to someone who may not have watched it can kind of imagine all the different shades of colors at the beginning. The music video was really interesting to watch because Lil Nas X was able to create such a different energy with this song and it has created such a controversial reaction among the different generations especially. According to The Guardian, the video has “garnered criticism from conservative politicians and commentators, who say the song encourages devil worshiping and scandalizes young fans” (Wicker, 2021). Lil Nas was able to respond quickly about the music video and talked about how it helped him and it may help other people who are afraid to come out and be themselves. Another image he created in my mind was with the quote “You can feel the heavy breath between them, the flutter in the hero's chest and heart as the creature straddles him, licks his stomach” (Crawley, 2021). Crawley was able to tell the audience how he felt during the scene but also include the scene in it. This music video was deemed inappropriate by many people but Crawley has changed the whole meaning of fear with this video. 

Perspective was also used by Crawley in this article. Crawley was able to change his perspective on fear by this one video and he convinces the audience with it also. The very sentence in this article was “fear was the air we breathed” (Crawley) and the last sentence on fear was “nothing is more titillating and arousing than prompting the imagination. And it compels me to remember that joy and pleasure are serious, necessary work” (Crawley, 2021). I really enjoyed reading about his personal experiences with religion and how it may have had an effect on his own relationships with people. He started out with his story about the priest and it slowly shifted over to the present. That was when his perspective shifted to a non fear based relationship with religion. He asked “what is more terrifying than living and loving a queer Black life in an anti-queer, anti-Black world?” (Crawley, 2021). This quote really stood out to me because Black lives are always in danger and to be part of the LGBTQ community makes it even harder in a world that doesn’t accept you. Ashon b.