Lil Nas X Won't Leave You Alone in the New "Panini" Video
It's the hitmaker's latest video, and it marks his official metamorphosis from cowboy to robot.
Lil Nas X has officially hacked the system.
The official video for "Panini" just dropped, and it's an ultra-futuristic, Blade Runner-inspired montage of neon lights and dancing holograms.
In the video, the "Old Town Road" singer essentially stalks a girl to the point that she eventually leaps out of an airplane (wearing a parachute) in order to escape his advances—of course, that doesn't work, and he floats after her wearing hover-boots. It's creepy if you think of it as a genuine depiction of stalking, but here's hoping that Lil Nas X meant this as an allegory for the fact that his songs are just impossible to get out of one's head, or that he's an inescapable presence in the media.
This seems even more likely when you remember that Lil Nas X is openly gay, and just yesterday he spoke out about why he waited until he was famous to come out. So it wouldn't make sense for him to manufacture a straight relationship in his music video (right?).
Regardless, the song "Panini" itself is a smooth one minute-and-fifty-five-second post-genre earworm. If it sounds familiar, that's because the chorus sounds borrows from Nirvana's "In Bloom"—which Kurt Cobain's daughter, Francis Bean, just officially approved. Ultimately, it proves once again that Lil Nas X is a master at revamping some of the deepest archetypes in American iconography (cowboys and robots) and putting his own charming, absurd twist on them. He's playing all of us, and yet he means it completely.