Lil Nas X took the popular music world by storm with “Old Town Road”, a trap country song that has dominated the charts this year. But I’m not here to talk about music. I’m here to talk about ReBoot.
Remember ReBoot? With a surreal but technically astounding (for the time) CG animation style, Reboot was the premiere show for ‘90s kids incredibly fascinated by what was going on inside their computers and more than willing to believe it involved heroic green men with plastic hair. Also, it was remade by Netflix as a sentai show that one time, which was weird.
ReBoot, sadly, is most likely gone forever, but its strange animation style, that early CG cyberscape vibe that feels like it’s been poured out of a series of shiny molds? It lives forever. Which is why I can’t stop watching the hypnotic video for Lil Nas X’s new song, “Panini.”
Is “Panini” a good song? I don’t know, and right now I don’t care. What I care about is this visual style, which I’m going to dub ReBoot-core because I have that power.
Featuring Lil Nas X and a lady love interest, the video renders X and everything around him in a computerised style, with circuits and robot parts mixed with plastic-y CG limbs, abstract imagery and backgrounds mixed in that feel like they were pulled from a Windows 98 screensaver.
The slow, looping images of the “Panini” video feel like visual ASMR for the ReBoot fan inside of me. It’s hypnotic, and a little garish, and absolutely fantastic.