Review Summary: A collection of dirty stiff socks found from under Lil' Xan's bed, sold at the price of an actual album of music.
At this point, after sifting through lists and lists of emoji-laden audio waves, what can anyone find worthwhile, on Soundcloud? You have a few peaks of amazing, innovative content and a whole lot of unfortunate valleys, where anyone with a BIC-pen face tattoo and a doctor's prescription can blow-up. Although, there are a few peaks to balance jive along two if fun releases like Lil' Pump's
Gucci Gang is something to go by. But, in the deepest of Souncloud's bowels, we found Lil' Xan. Having all the tropes to form the generic Soundcloud Rapper; blatant body-modification, a mega-phone in hand to announce his addiction, and a how-to-adlib manual glued to his tongue, the Californian rapper is blowing up across every platform you use online and you wanna know if
Total Xanarchy might be worth a try.
If one wishes to spend time engaging with repetitive, "turnt-up" rap music or not (hey, it is an intensely fun genre at times), Lil' Xan's debut reveals two things about his own position in the genre which should make you turn away from this release. First, he is possibly the laziest person lying in the beanbag of the trap lounge. We all know that this music is not lyrically potent, but even the basics of basic-ass rap has some sort of concept to follow. Lil' Xan avoids conceptual development like one wishes to keep away from babies on airplanes, and having to sit-through and try to actively find out what each track possibly means, fifteen times, is an exercise in brain-grating. Second, he hacks ideas from past and present artists so shamefully, that I felt like putting a DCMA claim on every video and stream on the behalf of A$AP Rocky, Post-Malone, and, of course, Lil' Pump. Taking all this into account when looking at the overall time of the album,
Total Xanarchy irritates the listener to the point of fun and irony being bludgeoned to death by its monotonous and plagiarizing gravity. 43 minutes of continuous trap cliches, eery production, and an addictive yet cheap persona, make for one of the hardest musical outings anyone might have to endure. Sure, the features are nice, but what good does having YG or 2Chainz on a track if one has to return immediately to the attitude-reliant cadaver that is Lil' Xan, who drones on like the corpse of a reanimated teenager, who was dead for weeks from a lean overdose.
Many, including myself, love this genre. It's fun and almost colorful audio, which could grow and provide room for creative people to spin it in all kinds of wonderful directions. But for now, we have an over-saturated market of party trap and that's okay. Whether the individuals who scream about the quantities of drugs and genitalia they partake in care about art and concept is not the problem. It's mainly fun some of us are looking for. But
Total Xanarchy is not fun. You see, I personally wanted a colorful portrayal of arrogance, confetti and drug-abuse, not to endure what could possibly be voice one hears when overdosing. It is a disgusting, overexertion of human sanity and, simply put, a collection of dirty stiff socks found from under Lil' Xan's bed, sold at the price of an actual album of music.
