The 2020s File Feature
That Way
That Way — Lil Uzi Vert and the Backstreet Boys Connection Among the more unexpected creative events of early 2020 was "That Way" by Lil Uzi Vert, a track th…
01 The Story
That Way — Lil Uzi Vert and the Backstreet Boys Connection
Among the more unexpected creative events of early 2020 was "That Way" by Lil Uzi Vert, a track that drew substantial attention for its direct and unironic engagement with the melodic legacy of late 1990s boy band pop music. Specifically, the song built its central hook around a vocal and melodic homage to the Backstreet Boys' 1999 ballad "I Want It That Way," one of the most recognizable pop songs in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. The creative choice to anchor a contemporary rap and melodic trap production to a sample or interpolation of that specific song was a statement about the generational experience of artists like Uzi, who grew up absorbing the pop music of the 1990s and early 2000s alongside the hip-hop that would more directly define their artistic identities.
Lil Uzi Vert, born Symere Bysil Woods on July 31, 1994, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had by 2020 established himself as one of the most distinctive and commercially successful voices in the rap landscape. His aesthetic, characterized by a fusion of melodic rap with visual and sonic elements borrowed from rock, emo, and pop music, had made him a polarizing but enormously influential figure in the genre's evolution during the late 2010s. His 2017 track "XO Tour Llif3" had been a commercial and critical landmark, and the album Luv Is Rage 2, which followed later that year, had debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, moving more than 128,000 album-equivalent units in its opening week.
"That Way" was released on February 28, 2020, as a standalone single rather than as part of a larger project, which meant that its chart performance was driven entirely by its own merits rather than by the halo effect of an album release. The track arrived at a moment when Uzi was actively building anticipation for Eternal Atake, his long-delayed second studio album, and it served as one of several pre-release singles that maintained his presence in the streaming ecosystem during the period leading up to that album's eventual release.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "That Way" debuted on the chart dated March 14, 2020, entering at position 21. The following week, March 21, 2020, the track climbed one position to reach its peak of number 20 on the Hot 100, an achievement that placed it among the most commercially successful standalone pre-album singles of his career at that point. The song spent a total of 12 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, a sustained chart run that reflected both the genuine commercial appeal of the track and the broader momentum of his streaming audience in the period immediately surrounding the release of Eternal Atake.
The production on "That Way" was built around a lush, melodic instrumental that leaned heavily into the emotional texture of late 1990s pop rather than the more aggressive sonic palette typical of contemporary trap. This production choice was essential to the song's thematic coherence: by surrounding his vocal with sounds that evoked the specific emotional register of the era he was referencing, Uzi created a sonic environment in which nostalgia for a specific period of pop cultural history became an active ingredient in the listening experience.
The chart performance of "That Way" was boosted significantly by its timing relative to the release of Eternal Atake, which arrived on March 6, 2020, generating immediate and massive streaming numbers. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with more than 148,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, making it one of the most anticipated and commercially successful rap releases of the early part of the year. "That Way" benefited from the enormous wave of attention that surrounded that release, with many new listeners discovering the single as part of their introduction to Uzi's broader catalog.
The song accumulated approximately 48 million YouTube views over time, a number that pointed to sustained listener engagement driven both by the initial burst of commercial momentum and by the ongoing organic discovery that comes when a track establishes itself as a recognizable and beloved entry in an artist's catalog. The nostalgic hook at the center of the track made it particularly well-suited to repeated listening, as the emotional resonance of the referenced source material added an additional layer of meaning to each subsequent play.
Nostalgia as Creative Strategy
The creative decision to engage directly with Backstreet Boys source material represented a broader trend in contemporary rap of the late 2010s and early 2020s in which artists drew openly and affectionately on the pop music of their childhoods. This form of nostalgic engagement differed from traditional sampling in that it was not primarily concerned with recontextualizing older material to make a political or artistic point but with expressing genuine affection for the emotional texture of a previous era of pop cultural experience. In Uzi's case, the gesture felt authentic precisely because his broader aesthetic had always drawn freely on sources outside the conventional rap canon, from rock and emo to pop and electronic music.
02 Song Meaning
Longing, Nostalgia, and Romantic Vulnerability in "That Way"
"That Way" occupies a distinctive position in Lil Uzi Vert's catalog as a song that wears its emotional vulnerability as openly as anything in his recorded output. The connection to the Backstreet Boys source material is not merely a novelty detail but a genuine thematic anchor, because the original song it references was itself an exercise in the kind of earnest, uncomplicated romantic longing that 1990s pop explored with a directness that later generations of artists sometimes found difficult to replicate without ironic distance. Uzi's decision to engage with that emotional directness without irony is one of the more interesting artistic choices in his body of work.
The thematic core of "That Way" is the experience of wanting someone who is no longer present or accessible, a romantic longing that is complicated by the passage of time and by uncertainty about whether the feeling is reciprocated or whether the relationship being mourned was ever as meaningful to both parties as it was to the narrator. This emotional position, of longing for something that may or may not have been what it seemed, gives the song a melancholy complexity that elevates it beyond the simple heartbreak narrative it might appear to be on first encounter.
The use of nostalgia as an emotional tool in the song operates on multiple levels simultaneously. On the most immediate level, the hook's connection to the Backstreet Boys creates a feeling of temporal displacement, of being pulled backward in time to an emotional state associated with an earlier era of one's life. For Uzi's audience, many of whom grew up in the 1990s or early 2000s when that source material was first encountered, this temporal pull is a genuine phenomenological experience, not merely a clever commercial gesture.
On a deeper level, the nostalgia embedded in the song is also about the nature of romantic memory, about the way that relationships from the past take on a particular emotional quality in recollection that they may not have possessed in real time. The tendency to idealize past emotional experiences is one of the most universal dimensions of human psychology, and "That Way" uses the sonic environment of the song to create an experience that mirrors this tendency: the sounds themselves induce the nostalgic feeling even as the lyrics describe it, creating a unified artistic statement in which form and content reinforce each other.
The melancholic quality of the production, with its lush melodic backdrop and relatively restrained percussion, establishes an emotional context in which Uzi's vocal delivery can operate at a lower emotional temperature than his more aggressive or energetic material. This restraint is itself meaningful: the vulnerability of the emotion being expressed requires a sonic environment that does not overwhelm it with aggressive energy, and the production choices honor that requirement. The result is a track that sounds genuinely gentle, a quality that is relatively rare in the commercial rap landscape and that helps explain part of the song's appeal to a broader audience than Uzi's core rap fanbase.
The song also contributes to a broader conversation in contemporary music about the relationship between generations of pop cultural production and the ways in which artists raised on a particular era's output carry those influences forward into their own creative work. Uzi's engagement with the Backstreet Boys is not a postmodern exercise in ironic citation but a genuine expression of the way that specific sounds and melodies become embedded in the emotional memory of a generation and shape the creative possibilities available to artists who grew up with them.
The romantic narrative at the center of the song sits comfortably within the broader emotional world that Uzi has constructed across his catalog, a world where love, loss, and yearning are recurring preoccupations explored with a directness that his melodic style both enables and amplifies. "That Way" represents perhaps the purest expression of that emotional directness in his recorded work, stripped of the more confrontational or transgressive elements that characterize other parts of his catalog and reduced to the simplest and most universal of emotional experiences.
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