Steve 'Flash' Juon“Ha ha ha, yeah the joke’s on you.”
That’s true. The popularity of Lil Xan is unquestionably a joke at the expense of anyone who thinks of rapping as “the opposite of singing.” Listening to Nicholas Leanos perform the songs on “have a nice day” with his cohort Chris Miles, it’s hard to tell where he begins and Miles ends. I can’t honestly describe what either of them do as “rapping,” but everything from the production matter to the topics will be familiar to modern day rap fans. “I said who the fuck told you that it’s alright? Just kill me now baby, end my life.” It’s that bleak, drug abuse, emo rap, Soundcloud sound. You can picture Lil Xan without even seeing the video for “Miss Me.” Messy hair, tattooed face, hoodie on, swimming a sea of codeine and feelings while trying not to drown.
At times I feel like the entire scene has become a Key & Peele sketch, unaware that it has become a parody of itself, spiraling ever inward toward an event horizon that flattens them all into a rap singularity. “Paranoid” is the manifestation of the spaceship sucked into the gravitational pull that can’t escape. All I can think about listening to it is the bleak future of AI generated music. When rappers stop rapping because record labels prefer AI artists they don’t have to pay, there will no longer be real human beings making it for AI to be trained on. That’s the only reason AI music even has a chance to sound decent at present. Once AI can only learn from AI, “Paranoid” will be the result. This is the future.
The most shocking part of this to me is that “have a nice day” is absolutely listenable. It’s certainly not because of the lyrics of songs like “Drop Dead,” which betrays the fact it’s about depression and drug abuse before you even press play. It’s because these malevolently negative sentiments are dressed up in enough layers of production to be suitable for YouTube shorts or TikTok memes. In fact at eleven minutes long the entire release feels like a short that became a “long” by accident.
I hesitate to call what Lil Xan and Chris Miles did “good” but it would be unfair to call it “bad.” It’s not creative. It’s not artistic. It’s simply listenable in an inoffensive way. If the goal of art is to make you feel an emotional response of any kind, “have a nice day” does at least make me feel one — sorrow. I feel for a generation that grows up on music like this. I’m not saying it’s better to be an old fart who grew up on Kurtis Blow, Ice-T and Run-D.M.C., nor a 90’s kid who grew up on Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast, and UGK, nor even a 21st century young’un influenced by Kanye West, Eminem and The Game. I’m talking about anybody born after 2010 who only knows this style of “rap music” as their reference point. I feel sad that with over 50 years of hip-hop history in the past, they will never be interested in it because it doesn’t talk about popping Xannies like candy and wishing you were already dead. Who knew emo rap would be the genre to make the nihilistic gangster rapper generation sound positive and upbeat just by comparison?