In the annals of the Least Hip-Hop Shit Ever Documented, the headline “Lil Xan Flees Angry Tupac Fans… Cop Keeps Him Safe” is up there. If you didn’t know Xan from “Betrayed,” a red-eyed anthem for breaking up with benzos that last year cracked the Hot 100, your introduction to the 21-year-old may well have been from the recent “controversy” following his proclamation of Tupac’s music as boring in a deeply useless bit of video content. Boy, did that make folks mad—Waka Flocka, Michael Rapaport—though for whatever it’s worth, a small piece of context seemed to get lost in the mix. The video called for the rapper to rank subjects specifically in terms of “clout” on a scale from one to nine, a proposition that strikes me as far more idiotic than Xan’s answers themselves. For comparison’s sake: Kush, according to Xan, is a hard nine on the clout scale; face tattoos are an eight (because “they’re cool and all, but too many people are getting them nowadays”); and Xanax bars, in a Shyamalan-esque twist, have a clout level of zero. Tupac is clout level two.
To all of which I say: Who cares? It’s a little too tempting to dunk on Lil Xan and his Xanarchy crew—one member of which you may know for the Anne Frank tattoo covering the right half of his face, affectionately dubbed “Xan Frank”—for reasons that might reveal more about the listener’s false hopes as to what this stuff is supposed to be, and for whom, than what it actually is. And yes, this is a young man named after a prescription tranquilizer who makes sold-out theaters chant “I like lean, I like drugs, I like beans, I got plugs”; yes, he looks like a streetwear-swaddled cherub fallen out of heaven and directly upon hard times. There is certainly that.
But Xan opens his debut album, Total Xanarchy, with a sing-song proclamation—“Xans don’t make me what I am, Xans gon’ mess up all my friends”—and that complicates things. That song, “Who I Am,” is of the “XO Tour Llif3” school of rap that presents incredibly bleak scenes with startling casualness: “The only friend I have is time/The only friend I had just died,” Xan raps later, in the cadence of a nursery rhyme. “Betrayed,” his biggest hit and the reason why this album exists, is the same deal: Over a Bobby Johnson beat somewhere between Noah “40” Shebib and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, a miserable-sounding Xan rejects his namesake. He’s said he recorded the song during the final days of his years-long Xanax addiction, the fallout of a prescription to treat his extreme anxiety. Art-wise, maybe it’s not the kind of thing that outlasts the fall of empires. But when he dispassionately chants “Xans gon’ betray you,” someone needed to hear that—a lot of someones, if the proof is in the play count.
Thanks to “Betrayed,” Lil Xan got billed early on as part of a wave of sad rap, or emo rap, popularized by guys like the late Lil Peep. But most of Total Xanarchy does not feel “sad,” exactly; in fact, save for a suite of melancholy and fairly poignant Bobby Johnson collaborations towards the end, it’s hard to detect any particular emotion at all. Instead, we get a whole lot of Cool SoundCloud Rapper posturing delivered in a comatose flatline that is perhaps thematically appropriate but a bummer all the same: “I fuh dat bih, yea,” he reminds us on “The Man,” in case the nuances of his Twitter handle (@lilxanfuhyobih) did not fully sink in. Flows are borrowed with a heavy hand. Charli XCX shows up to do her depraved femmebot thing on “Moonlight,” a cloud-rap/folktronica crossover that is, if not good, at least interesting, like a Caribou song with clout goggles. “Sauce for the young niggas and all of my white fans,” 2 Chainz raps on “Tick Tock,” clearly aware of the “How do you do, fellow kids?”-ness of all of it.
Which, of course, is probably the point: If adult critics really loved this stuff, the Xanarchy team would no doubt feel they’d made a wrong turn somewhere. It’s punk, or it’s the thing people who don’t really know what “punk” means call “punk,” or it’s a dog whistle meant to sail over the heads of the the elderly (i.e. anyone over 24); on “Saved by the Bell,” a “Citgo” descendent on which Xan manages to pronounce the titular phrase using only two consonants, he raps, “Fuck them teachers, fuck suspensions, fuck detention.” And though many of the songs themselves feel hollow, I find myself struck by the idea of a character who is profoundly conflicted by the identity that made him famous, living in a world in which the thing people want from you is precisely what you hate about yourself. In recent months, Xan’s promoted what he’s calling the anti-Xan movement. At some point, he hopes to be known by his first name, Diego. By then, perhaps Total Xanarchy will be a mile-marker of a moment someone thought they had themselves all figured out.
