Toward a Review of Montero

I posted over on FB some brief thoughts on Lil Nas X’s album _Montero_. Short form is simple: it is really awesome, and stands up incredibly well to heavy repetition.

Here’s my once-revised post from FB:

“ I’ve been spending more time listening to my stereo (that Bluetooth Receiver by Denon that R. found turns out to have been Just What I Needed to find time to actually listen to music again at home).

Lil Nas X’s album _Montero_ is unbelievably awesome. There is such a broad emotional and musical range, and all of it feels so goooood to listen to. I wish I had a better vocabulary to describing what’s going on, and why it feels so good, but for whatever reason, I lack that vocabulary. Fortunately, not being able to detail it in no way interferes with my ability to find joy in it.

Heartily recommended.

ETA:

I have now read several reviews of _Montero_ and for the most part, they are talking about his twitter activity, that shoe prank thing with MSCHF, collabs with famous people (long list) (also, the Uber Eats ads are hilarious, so I understand the temptation to mention), and generally not engaging much with the content of the album beyond Oh It’s Not Just New Celeb Complain-y Songs. Now, to be clear, I actually _love_ I Got Famous And It Kinda Sucks Sometimes songs, and I always have. To put some meat on this, one of my ring tones is a clip from AJR’s I’m Not Famous. _Even if half this album was just Being Famous Has Problems_, that would probably only make me love it more. However, this is a very superficial level of engagement with the material. I’ve listened to this album at least 30 times at this point, and I’m still actively looking forward to the next listen … and I still can’t sing along to all the lyrics, so at least this once, it is not _just_ about the lyrics. The sound is so layered on this thing that it feels symphonic / operatic at times; I wish I could find even one review that got into that aspect of it.”

But that is still only scratching the surface.

There are genre issues. The album and the artist are broadly recognized as “queer” and “rap”, which is great. I mean, who could argue, look at the people working on the album with him. Duh. But the album and the artist are also really clearly “country”. But given what happened with Old Town Road, hardly surprising that there has been a general agreement among all parties not to mention the “country” part. The reviews definitely mention Outkast, which is a way of gesturing at it, I suppose? Another thing that comes along with the Outkast mention is the outsized persona, and the careful organization at the album level, which in turn is part of why I keep thinking of it in operatic terms.

But none of that really does an adequate job of conveying all the layers to the music. There is so much _sound_ on this thing.

There’s a certain kind of person out there who can be relied upon, when asked what kind of music they like, to name not a band or a singer or a genre, but rather to claim they like all kinds of music “but not”, and then a list of things that includes one or more of rap, country and opera. I love the idea of monetizing heavily the intersection of all the things that the people who can’t tell you what they like, but only list of what they don’t.

ETA still more:

This is a much better review than any of the ones I read but did not link to:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alessadominguez/lil-nas-x-montero-album-review

_Surviving the White Gaze_ , Rebecca Carroll

My friend A. picked this one out for book group this month, and we had a really delightful conversation about it. Because it is set in New Hampshire, and because several people in the group knew at least one (white) mother who had adopted a child of color, there was definitely a strong sense of relevance within the group. We read a lot of books by women, and a lot of books by POC, because several of us push for that for our own reasons; this felt much more organic than many other selections because it connected so directly with our lives. (<— Did I just center white women’s experience? Yes. Yes I did. And I acknowledge that.)

Because it is set in New Hampshire, I was expecting a lot of New Hampshire, but even I was a bit startled by _how_ _completely_ New Hampshire this book is. I’ve already described this in some detail in a post yesterday about a Particularly Glorious Paragraph:

https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/1948964.html

Everywhere on this planet (for sure, everywhere that I’ve ever been, and I imagine that this is universally true), there are people with varying degrees of sociability, intelligence, integrity, etc. New Hampshire has its own range. New Hampshire, like many smaller(er) population places sharing borders or physically near places with much larger population places, can be very difficult to make sense of if you’ve only ever lived in New Hampshire. Children raised in places like this figure out that there is Something going on Not Where They Live that splashes into their smaller pool at unpredictable intervals; some recede further away from that edge and hunker down and never leave; some can’t wait to get out.

This memoir can be read, in part, as both the journey of the author out of that small place and into the wider world, and also how that small place — like the places people in cities all over the world go back to and are dissatisfied with what happens when they do go back to those small places — is where the people they (once) loved remain fiercely connected and unwilling to really even acknowledge that Grander World Outside. The people who live in and love small places _by_ _choice_ have an astonishing ability to believe with every fiber of their being that their Small World contains everything they could possibly want.

And that’s lovely, except, of course, for how rejecting that is for everyone who doesn’t share that view.

I don’t know that that should be considered a primary theme of the book. There’s a lot going on in this memoir, and it’s all great. Obviously, transracial adoption is a major theme. Intersectionality / intercommunality / that other phrase I have temporarily forgotten is another theme. Concerns surrounding intergenerational mental health struggles is a big part of the story. The title, tho, really captures it best. No matter how much parents feel that they love their children (adopted or otherwise), parents do fail those children, quite frequently not specifically because of a failure to feel love for their children, _or even a failure to express_ that love for their children. Rather, the failures generally speaking come down to their limitations in terms of providing a nurturing environment. Assuming the children survive and grow up, it comes out in memoirs and other artistic endeavors, and there is quite a bit going on here. The complex interaction of adopting a child of another race/ethnicity for pretty sus reasons, never being willing to reassess those reasons from any perspective (like, the adult that child grew up to be), and raising that child out in the middle of what could _charitably_ be considered BF nowhere, but could _also_ be considered a playground for richer, more powerful families to go so they can do reprehensible things and not encounter effective resistance / enforcement. (Believe me, that is a solid element of Life in New Hampshire.)

It’s terrible to do that to any kid — arguably, their biological daughter suffered from their choices on a scale comparable to the author of this book — but to do that to a child who will also suffer systemically seems worth pointing out. Obviously, the systemic issues need to change. Equally, part of changing the systemic issues has to involve pointing out the abuse of privilege involved in adopting a child into this kind of dangerous environment for the child _while firmly believing you are doing the child a favor_. Assuming that a child of color is going to have a better life experience just because they are raised in a white family is just wildly fucked up.

I am pleased to note that while my book group was — not unexpectedly — pretty negative on the open marriage, since it is depicted as not being what Mom wanted and as causing her pain, and as being part of a generally self-involved pattern by Dad, they did _not_ suggest that this open marriage was a source of meaningfully additional danger to the kids. I did my usual, “It’s worse if you lie and cheat” and left it at that. As poly or poly adjacent depictions in non-fiction go, this was unusually positive for a narrative where the poly aspects are in no way being celebrated. It’s a very dispassionate description that notes positives and negatives for the various participants both direct and indirect, and unusual in terms of a child in the community noting that it created a sense of Many Parents / Village because of shared pick up / drop off / etc. but that it was not a positive for all the children.

I spent a chunk of this book thinking about how _wanted_ the author was. It’s taken for granted in a really amazing way, especially when you consider that she was born literally a couple weeks before I was. That was not a time when abortion was easy to access, and New Hampshire has never been particularly liberal in terms of supporting reproductive health and choice for women. When I described this book to my husband, and when we discussed it in book group, it was _assumed_ that abortion was a meaningful option for the author’s biological mother. _It_ _was_ _not_. She was a minor. Her mother was institutionalized, and when her mother left the institution she was in, the mother wanted to help raise the baby, but then changed her mind. The adoptive father was _the high school teacher_ who was an involved person in the life of the pregnant minor and her brother. It is _impossible_ for me to believe that the biological mother would not have made other choices, had termination been as accessible in the year of the pregnancy as it would later become for the author, who openly describes her use of reproductive health services in an admirably forthright way. All of the adults in the life of the biological mother were pushing for a particular outcome; the only variant was adoptive Mom in terms of who would raise the child.

While I absolutely believe that the biological mother would have chosen differently, it is _simultaneously_ incredibly clear to me that the author was a _very_ wanted child. Her maternal grandmother and that woman’s mother, as well as the adoptive parents, a third non-biological mother figure (the adoptive father’s long-term lover, after the adoptive parents’ marriage became an open marriage), and later the biological mother all actively participated in raising the author. I say this recognizing that just because people want a child and want to raise a child does not on any level mean this is going to be good for the child. But not being wanted is a whole other awful that does not actually seem to be present here. The author is convinced that she was and is loved by the people who raised her, and I read nothing within the book to suggest she is not entirely correct. Having the people who want and love you fail so completely in understanding and supporting you is a huge theme of this book.

Carroll also does an amazing job of depicting complex social relationships. It’s not just in the larger actions or speech, it’s in the detailed descriptions of facial expressions and other non-verbals, and thoughts in response to those. It’s in the language used to describe human touch within all kinds of relationships. There is so much going on that I am incredibly impaired at understanding, but even I can tell how amazing this author is, in terms of really conveying the social landscape around her.

I hope whatever is going on now with the author, that she continues to moisturize and hopefully take good care of her beautiful hair. That’s important! And I am incredibly grateful that she shared the arc of her life so fully through this book. I am also grateful that for the body of work she has produced (and hopefully will continue to produce!) supporting the voices of so many others who we would not otherwise be able to read and hear.

I recommend this book without any reservation, and I believe it would support rereading well.