Although Lil Nas X and Kurt Cobain were never alive at the same time—the “Old Town Road” viral superstar was born five years after the Nirvana frontman died—Cobain received a surprise songwriting credit on Lil Nas X’s debut EP, 7. “Panini,” the EP’s sing-songy second single, nods to the chorus melody from Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” not that it was a conscious decision: Lil Nas X admitted, in a recent interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, that he’d never actually heard Nevermind before. “It’s like, I always seen the cover but I never actually listened to it,” Nas, whose real name is Montero Lamar Hill, told Lowe. “People was like, ‘Wow, he sampled Nirvana.’ I was like, no. I didn’t realize I was using almost the exact same melody.” When Nirvana’s 1991 breakout record dramatically, unexpectedly dethroned Michael Jackson’s Dangerous on the Billboard charts in January 1992, that achievement came to be seen as a defining transitional moment in the music industry, if not pop culture writ large. Could it be that this is how we’ll see the streaming juggernaut “Old Town Road” in the rearview, too?
“Panini” and “In Bloom” aren’t that similar—if anything, crediting Cobain feels like a record company’s preemptive move in these itchy, litigious times, when Marvin Gaye’s estate can successfully sue Pharrell for stealing a vibe, Rodgers & Hammerstein are posthumously profiting off an Ariana Grande hit, and Sam Smith must share his “Stay With Me” Grammy with the late Tom Petty. Still, something about the connection between “Panini” and “In Bloom” makes a certain kind of cosmic sense. Like Nirvana before him, Lil Nas X is an out-of-the-blue Billboard insurrectionary, whose gigantic and unpredictable success represents a monumental sea change for an oft-puzzled music industry. And like the alt-rock idols before him, Nas has found a way to tap into the feral energy of an underground scene (for Nirvana, it was the DIY ethos of late ’80s indie rock and hardcore; for Lil Nas X, it’s the caustic, laptop-lit mumble of SoundCloud rap) and infuse it with the sort of hypnotic, melody-embracing hooks that translate to mass appeal. As unlikely a phenomenon as Lil Nas X was a few short months ago, he’s fully transformed into a radio-friendly unit shifter.
7—which runs a brisk, savvily replayable 19 minutes and is bookended by the remixed and original versions of “Old Town Road,” all but guaranteeing the song’s 12th week at no. 1—isn’t a grand artistic statement of purpose so much as a practical rebuttal to the criticism that the most popular new musical artist in America has only one song. Now he has … several. In terms of both quality and genre, 7 is a mixed bag, and it gives little certainty as to the type of artist Lil Nas X might become down the (forgive me) road. None of these songs will come anywhere near the country charts: “Panini” ditches the cowboy hat and fashions itself in the style of moody pop-rap crooners like Juice WRLD and Lil Uzi Vert. “F9mily (You & Me)” is a relatively generic blast of hi-fi pop-punk energy produced by Blink-182’s Travis Barker, who also plays drums on the song. “Bring U Down,” co-penned and co-produced by songwriter-to-the-stars Ryan Tedder, has a chugging bass and stratospheric guitar solo that would have easily slotted it onto any alternative rock station’s playlist around the turn of the millennium. Rock, hip-hop, country, trap, and grunge all mingle on 7 like friendly old chums. This is our new normal. What’s odd is not that Lil Nas X is interested in working in such seemingly disparate genres, but that a record company’s safest strategy for riding the coattails of the year’s most successful debut single is to blend them all together.
One theory I’ve developed about the seismic success of “Old Town Road”—and I’ve had some time to think about it, since it’s been perched at no. 1 for almost three months—has to do with that video I hope you have seen, of a gymnasium full of elementary school children losing their minds to a surprise performance of the song. Why is the appropriate response to this video a smile so wide it hurts your face, while a somewhat similar video of children at a trampoline park shrieking along to Sheck Wes’s “Mo Bamba” induces nothing but existential terror? It’s simple. The closest thing to a “curse” uttered in “Old Town Road” is “boobies,” a word that, if we’re being honest, is probably used more frequently by giggling third graders than self-respecting adults (excluding Post Malone).
The SoundCloud rap scene from which Lil Nas X (basically) emerged has caused near-apocalyptic levels of parent panic. In their songs, artists like Lil Pump, Lil Xan, and the late Lil Peep extol the virtues of popping prescription pills like M&Ms; Juice WRLD and Lil Uzi Vert flirt freely with violent and even suicidal imagery; the late XXXTentacion and the convicted felon Tekashi 6ix9ine indulged in reprehensible behavior in their personal lives. The music of these artists has been bubbling just below the mainstream for the past few years, buoyed by their massive on-demand popularity on streaming services. But they weren’t exactly the sort of artists you’d play for your mom or your elementary-school-aged sibling. Lil Nas X isn’t the most proficient rapper in the bunch—and on most of 7 I’m not sure you’d call him a rapper at all—but he has been the most successful at packaging the aesthetic and ethos of SoundCloud rap for relatively guilt-free, generation-spanning mainstream consumption.
Though there are a handful of words stronger than “boobies” on this EP, 7 continues to molds itself within the contours of SoundCloud rap while sanding off its sharpest edges. A brooding breakup ballad with a nursery-rhyme melody, “Panini” feels like a kinder, gentler “XO Tour Llif3,” swapping out Lil Uzi Vert’s macabre imagery for, you know, a series of words that rhyme with “teeny.” “Bring U Down” and “F9mily” pay homage to emo and pop-punk, though less stylishly and confrontationally than Lil Peep did on his Come Over When You’re Sober albums. Lil Nas X is a passable rapper, but 7 proves that his true focus is melody—a universal, boundary-obliterating delivery service that makes his songs, in spite of their stylistic eclecticism, go down almost deceptively easy.
Two summers ago, when I wrote about alternative rock’s influence on a new, doomed generation of streaming-era rappers, it still felt a little subversive for, say, an artist like XXXTentacion to conjure the acoustic brooding of Elliott Smith, or for Lil Peep to worship Gucci Mane as readily as Sum 41. Lil Nas X’s 7 proves that this approach is no longer the slightest bit strange. Who knows how the “Panini” melody came to him—maybe some strains of “In Bloom” seeped into his consciousness somewhere in his digital-native, media-saturated upbringing; maybe he just happened upon the same few notes as Cobain did when he too was trying to find a means to transmit his underground-loner music to arena-sized audiences. Even if it was just a coincidence, though, it offers Lil Nas X and his cohort something of a historical context: Maybe SoundCloud rap is the new grunge, if either of those genres can be considered real or stable rather than a set of marketing terms helping us elder lamestains make sense of shifting cultural terrain. Still, each were their generations’ means of commodifying (male) teen angst, blurring the line between beauty and ugliness, and rewriting the industry’s rule book in a language illegible to pretty much anyone over 30. If you ride it long enough, the road circles back on itself.
Lil Nas X still has a decade to go before he reaches that milestone, though, and as such he still has plenty left to learn. “I’ve been listening to it a lot lately, actually,” he said of Nevermind, after the “Panini” melody prompted him to seek it out. (Imagine what happens when he hears In Utero.) Fame caught Lil Nas X while he was still becoming himself, and whether that will be an insurmountable limitation or an opportunity for growth is now up to him. But for the moment, at least, he’s still got some mileage on that “Old Town Road”—stupid, contagious, and entertaining as hell.