Lil Nas X has come under fire after being accused of copying FKA Twigs frame-for-frame with the music video for his latest single ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’.
Lil Nas X, who rose to the highest echelons of viral fame with his 2019 track ‘Old Town Road’, revealed his first new music of 2021 last week. The track arrived with a wild video that featured everything from Eve passing with a snake, a pole dancer seducing satan, and a bunch of Marie Antoinette-core prisoners.
Andrew Thomas Huang, the director of FKA Twigs’ 2019 video for ‘cellophane’, has taken to social media to highlight that there are frames from ‘Montero’ that directly rip-off his collaboration with Twigs. In a series of tweets, Huang revealed that Lil Nas X reached out to him for the project.
The posts compared frame-by-frame stills from both music videos, highlighting distinct similarities between the pole dancing scenes — Lil Nas X hired the same pole choreographer as FKA Twigs, Kelly Yvonne.
Check out ‘MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) by Lil Nas X
“I’m a fan of @LilNasX. Old Town Road is iconic. Sharing collaborators is common. Seeing the Cellophane choreographer collab with Lil Nas X is awesome (love a Satan dance). Sharing aesthetics and paying homage is part of the creative process. Collective consciousness exists,”Huang wrote.
“Images are also expensive to make. Years of work went into the creation of Cellophane, from physical training to the emotional labor of unpacking Twigs’ life to construct images told her story of trauma and recovery. Cellophane was a confession in the most vulnerable sense.”
Huang went on to call on the music industry to do better in terms respecting “directors, uphold artistic accountability and honor the ingenuity of artists.”
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“When an artist is in a position of power (amplified with the help of major record labels, social media, PR, etc) and repurposes someone’s labor and ideas to serve their brand image, they cause harm by displacing the efforts of the artists who did the original leg work,” he continued, “We can do better.”
Images are also expensive to make. Years of work went into the creation of “Cellophane,” from physical training to the emotional labor of unpacking Twigs’ life to construct images told her story of trauma and recovery. “Cellophane” was a confession in the most vulnerable sense.
— Andrew Thomas Huang (@Andrew_T_Huang) March 28, 2021
Intentional or not, copying other artists’ work happens. Making music videos is a labor of love. The demand for content pushed by major labels renders our work disposable and pits artists against each other.
— Andrew Thomas Huang (@Andrew_T_Huang) March 28, 2021
Check out ‘cellophane’ by FKA Twigs
