There was something enchanting about “XXL Freshman Freestyle,” part of the viral rap phenom Ian’s appearance on this year’s annual XXL Freshmen List, which he’d later release on streaming under the title “Oh OK.” It was among the most memorable moments from the series since the legendary 2016 edition with 21 Savage and Lil Uzi Vert. Ian raps an absurdist set of unrhymed couplets — “Damn I’m on my Brittney shit, Oops I hit again” — that signal a wry kind of humor, like the perfect inside joke. Reactions to the freestyle depended on whether or not you were tuned into its sarcastic frequency. This, of course, has been the case for Ian’s whole career. The “Suburban White Guy Who Became an Overnight Rap Star,” as a recent Wall Street Journal profile puts it, Ian remains a hip-hop fascination because he seems to be the first to sprout from the new generation of artists born entirely on the internet.
While much (perhaps too much) has been made of the racial optics around Ian’s rise, it’s his function inside the meat-grinding churn of viral content that proves more instructive. Since first making waves with 2024’s “Figure It Out,” Ian has maintained an ambient online presence, appearing on livestreams with creators like Plaqueboymax and dropping interviews of varying seriousness with podcasters and content creators across the web. Throughout, he has maintained a relentless touring schedule. There he was at Lollapalooza playing maestro to a mosh pit of Gen Z-ers. In between it all, he’s been able to rack up the requisite clout tokens: A picture with Drake, a Lil Yachty feature, content collabs with the buzzing London-based painter Slawn, even a dustup with Tyler, the Creator, who criticized Ian’s whole schtick in an interview last year. Whatever you think of the music, Ian’s rise is distinctly modern, an example of the myriad avenues and platforms required to maintain relevance in today’s algorithm-driven culture.
But what about the music? For the past few months, Ian has been teasing his latest mixtape, 2005, which takes its name, presumably, from the year of his birth. The project makes several attempts at striking gold by building on well-trodden formulas. “You Told Me” offers a clean-cut rendition of the lovelorn pathos of Juice Wrld and 808s-era Kanye, though it falls short of resonating beyond the surface. “Remember Me” feels like a peak 2010s rap-R&B crossover replete with clunkily delivered lines about a tortured romance. “Bitch you think you crazy, you gon’ find out,” Ian growls. “How come when I actually fell in love, it wouldn’t come back to me?”
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For all of Ian’s vocal abilities — he manages to suffuse his bars with a gristly whisper — it becomes monotonous fast. Like with his closest contemporary, Yeat, it’d be naive to think listeners come to Ian for bars. But where Yeat makes up for ultimately hollow songwriting with a healthy amount of brooding world-building, Ian offers us less to grasp onto. Mainly because he doesn’t really have much to say. Not only in the sense of him being a lackluster lyricist, but even in the atmosphere of the music. It all strikes the same note.
Take “Have My Back,” where he offers as close to a thesis as we get across the project. The song has the underdog bravado you’d expect from a young up-and-comer, but ultimately feels like a generic pump-up anthem, almost forgettable by design, in the way that background music at the gym bleeds into high BPM nothingness. For an artist so young, Ian appears surprisingly averse to risk-taking, draping himself instead in the armor of a hip-hop swagger that so clearly isn’t his native tongue. The result is a nine-track retreading of A/B-tested sounds that land just above the threshold of listenability.
Ian suffers from an affliction that seems widespread among the pandemic generation: Aura Anxiety, or a palpable fear of being “cringe,” lest one lose precious “aura,” that indefatigable catchall for a person’s vibe. Aura exists in the mind’s eye, a representation of what you might look like observed through the lens of a video shared online. It is, of course, wrapped up in the paranoia of being the most surveilled generation that has ever existed. “The way the internet moves, everybody has to make you out to be whatever they want you to be,” Ian told the Wall Street Journal. “I understand why people might believe I’m here for jokes and virality. But I’m not going to stop.”
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I don’t envy members of Ian’s cohort, forced to grapple with a social media panopticon made worse by feeds that’ll forget about you just as fast as they catapult you to stardom. You can sense a heightened level of self-awareness, teetering on paranoia, in Ian’s promo for the mixtape. Ahead of its release, he shared a clip on Instagram of him performing as a country act, complete with a full-blown music video, a play on the critique of artists like Post Malone who rode into stardom on the back of hip-hop only to pivot to country music later on. Thankfully (or not?) it was all just a skit, a way of signaling that Ian, too, is aware of the ways he might be perceived. Except, who exactly is the joke for?
There’s more pressure than ever to find a unique hook to keep people’s attention online. For Ian, the suburban white kid thing has run its course. Perhaps he should pivot to country, a genre in which he honestly doesn’t sound too bad; then we might gain some insight into who he actually is.