My introduction to XXXTentacion came milling about a concert venue in New York. The DJ was playing the hugely popular “Look At Me!” while a swarm of kids made their best attempts at moshing. Intrigued, I searched up the song and discovered a “graphic testimony” from a victim of domestic abuse.1 Suddenly, the dissonance was staggering, watching people throw around their bodies with reckless abandon while I was processing how a young artist could do something so heinous. This was merely a glimpse of the XXXTentacion question. As X’s short career was taking shape, he transformed into a vehicle for critical discourse on music consumption and ethical responsibility.
XXXTentacion was the most serious and severe emo rap practitioner to rise up from the 2010s SoundCloud boom. His style was gutsy and wounded. He was a proficient musician who drew a massive and loyal fanbase: a sea of kids who hung onto his every word, for better or worse. Caught in a deep cycle of violence, the young artist’s presence in hip-hop raised a series of ethical questions as court records revealed a disturbing history of physical abuse—his controversial persona and insistence on outbursts also did him few favors with critics.2 He was named an XXL Freshman, and national music outlets began to pen nuanced pieces detailing the ins and outs of enjoying his music in spite of the violence he had perpetrated.3
Born in Plantation, Florida, and raised in Broward County, XXXTentacion had a tumultuous upbringing. In a 2016 interview with No Jumper, the artist born Jahseh Onfroy details a fraught childhood: he was kicked out of schools, engaged in a lot of fighting, and had hardships with his mother that led to Onfroy resorting to brutal violence at a grade-school age. He expressed empathy towards her situation, and the challenges she faced attempting to raise him, though they warped him as a kid. “I chased her,” he said. “I used to beat n****s at school, just to hear my mom yell at me or talk to me… I just wanted some attention.”4 In these early moments of his No Jumper interview, there is something deeply sad about the way Onfroy framed his young life through violence as the only means to achieving emotional fulfillment.
“When I first found out about X, it was not because of his music,” shares journalist, cultural critic, and on-air correspondent Ivie Ani. “It was because of reports of all his legal troubles. I didn’t know about his music—an introduction like that, through the consumption of the reporting on him and social media… That was a lot of people’s introduction, especially people not in his age group. It was the perfect storm.”
Before his tragic murder in June 2018, XXXTentacion was positioning himself as repentant. The timeline between the flurry of reporting on his transgressions and his redemption tour was brief, cut shorter still by his death. X was only twenty at the time. Fans—listeners, the crew of artists he ran with, and the young artists he’s since influenced—were heartbroken to have lost their idol before the public could see the new leaf he was turning.5 After his passing, in an article about his memorial, The New York Times described him as “a messianic youth-culture figure.”6
“I was inspired by the change of heart and progress in life by X,” young emo rapper midwxst emphatically shares. “If X could flip his entire life around, flip the way he went about things, and the way he reciprocated emotions. He worked towards all those things—they didn’t just come overnight. Not a lot of people can get to that status among the kids, especially kids my age.” Midwxst is not alone—the conception of X as redeemed over a long stretch of time is a common thought in his fan community. When thinking or talking about X with people who feel the music as a part of their identity, time seems to become brittle and break away. The deep attachment to his work overwhelms the harsh realities plaguing his legacy, and yet, it still doesn’t feel right to adorn XXXTentacion with the “monster” label and wash our hands of the conversation.
XXXTentacion’s success shocked the industry, led by this fervent fanbase. X began both of his studio albums with opening “instructions,” a warning shot of sorts that was meant to weed out those he deemed unable to open their minds to his music and ultimately, to his own mind. He sought loyalty from his fans, making sure to differentiate between diehards and casual listeners. “If you’re a fan, you abide by everything I believe in,” he told No Jumper. “I have a cult fanbase—I speak to my fans; I help my fans.”
“I think he needed his fans,” music journalist and Look At Me!: The XXXTentacion Story author Jonathan Reiss explained.7 “I think he had a deep void in his soul—he was one of those people who was always trying to build a family, and I think he did that with his many fans. Something that’s not really written about is the fact that he communicated with fans directly throughout his career. He really built those relationships in a way that I don’t think anyone else has in this era. I think it was of a function of the fact that he genuinely needed it.”
Look At Me! details the challenges X faced: lack of parental guidance, potential mental disturbances, allusions to psychosis, poverty, traumatic loss, and more, without absolving X of his actions. The opening set piece, explaining the physical hole in Jahseh’s heart, matches Reiss’s larger, more philosophical look into X’s need for family. An undercurrent of X’s loneliness drives Look At Me!’s reporting. Graphic portraits of the wounds X caused color the biography, but so do the many fan and artist tributes. It becomes difficult to square the incredible sensitivity and impact of his music with his unscrupulous behavior. At times, Look At Me! struggles to pin X down, refusing to label him as purely a monster or a musical visionary.
The book is one of the more nuanced takes on XXXTentacion’s life and art, an attempt to provide balance during an era of media sensationalism. To close the work, Reiss writes, “XXXTentacion’s story was a hard one to tell. His acts of violence were too numerous and gruesome to ignore or downplay.… Just as his violent behavior cannot be denied, the brilliance of his work cannot be ignored.”
Brushing off XXXTentacion grew more and more difficult as his star rose. His breakout moment, December 2015’s “Look At Me!,” was an aggressive and fleet-footed beacon of South Florida’s hip-hop sphere. Unlike the luxe sounds coming from the Rick Ross port of Miami, the South Florida rap scene was much more intense and ghastly, almost repulsive. Young artists would go ballistic on the mic and ship their works off to SoundCloud. The South Florida hip-hop boom that encompassed everyone from X to Ski Mask the Slump God, to Denzel Curry, to Kodak Black was sudden. As X’s music evolved from his scattershot mixtapes and Members Only crew compilations to the sonically rich sound of his debut album, 17, his streak of violence and incarceration followed. Much of 17 was written while X was in jail, with some of his drawings from that time adorning the album cover.
17 appeared as an outlier for X’s sound, playing as far more R&B-focused and more traditionally emo than preceding tapes, namely Revenge. Though X’s content had always had shades of anguish, 17 was the first time he fully embraced the form of emo rap. The album was tender. The productions were soft, and the suicidal writing was evocative. There was a constant throb of pain, an overwhelming loneliness lacing X’s every breath. His voice, in this gentler soundscape, was arresting. X was often regarded as brightly charismatic by his peers, but his earliest offerings were missing that tug of personality. 17, a record whose heart was cold-blooded depression, made X relatable. In the same way young kids flocked to Juice WRLD and Lil Peep, they could now see themselves in X. The music had gone from taking over Southern Florida to being a national phenomenon. 17 reached No. 2 on the Billboard album charts.
Mainstream reviews were less than flattering, all at one point centering the moral question of listening to XXXTentacion in light of his domestic violence case. Pitchfork wrestled with the question of essential music and the difficulty of taking part in X’s orbit.8 Writer Meaghan Garvey described 17 as “a collection of shell-shocked bedroom R&B and hopeless, rock-bottom grunge that deals exclusively with depression, heartbreak, and suicide.” And it is true the album is incredibly proficient. Smaller blogs and college papers covered 17 with more of an appetite than national publications, and the more niche the audience online, the louder and more heaping the praise for X’s versatility.
Despite X’s unfavorable online reviews from big league outlets, during his time in jail and once he was released in March 2017, X’s every move was publicized as a means of taking a moral position on abuse. There is a note in Look At Me! about the Streisand Effect, and the relationship negative, and even finger-wagging press, has on the rising stars of the internet age. The question of the press’s role in developing a star is limiting, however. A better question is that of the music critic as an arbiter, and of the capacity society has for accountability, rehabilitation, and reintegration.
“Two things can be true at once without absolving an artist of their transgressions,” Ani explains when I ask her how she squares XXXTentacion’s fans attesting he saved their lives with his music. “It’s honest to say that someone’s music or cultural production has had some semblance of value to whatever fanbase and music canon, whilst that person was committing crimes and being who they are. Those things are true!”
“I also think people aren’t thinking critically about the psychological element of how we view celebrities,” she adds. “That’s the missing piece of the conversation of separating the artist from the art, or not. A couple years ago, I interviewed a psychologist to help explain why we mourn celebrities and a big reason for that is empathy. Empathy is more of a subconscious thing—it was very enlightening, because that strong emotional response completely influences the way we engage with their work. Empathy makes us feel like we can connect with these people, when they have even just one similarity with our lives.”
To think about XXXTentacion is to consider the systems and cycles of violence in America, how they permeate the lives of young people and produce outcomes like X’s life and tragic death. “To only be twenty and develop into such a violent person, it says more about the environment and systems that created a young person like this than it does about the short amount of time he had to enact this violence,” Ani agrees. “He’s not the only person, and he won’t be the last.”
As Reiss details in his book, and as X himself details in his early No Jumper interview, his harsh—to put it lightly—upbringing is just as much responsible for his violent inclinations as X himself. It would be disingenuous to suggest XXXTentacion was born a perpetrator of evil and lived out a self-fulfilling prophecy. The deeply rooted issues at play, which evidence themselves in his crimes and his music and persona, are just as important to critically consider.
Had XXXTentacion not been brutally murdered in broad daylight, with the video of his death promptly viewable on social media, I do believe by 2023 critics and fans would have been able to have more robust conversations surrounding his work. Moreover, it has been documented that when writers attempt to have these conversations—particularly Black women writing from the perspective of survivors—they are attacked and endangered by X’s fans. To suggest a fanbase is the direct responsibility of the artist is foolish, but it is valuable to note those fans are an impressionable group of kids who fed off of X’s own crass energy. At the very least, the fan response to any negative remarks on X’s behavior can be seen as a mirror into the persona the artist cultivated.
And yet, most of the critical writing on XXXTentacion following his death has an empathy-filled hole. “If we see a video of XXX getting shot, everything goes out the window,” Ani says. “It’s clear that some people are letting the video of XXX being violently killed eclipse his violence. But the natural, human response is empathy. It’s an automatic response our brain has. And imagine how much less control a child or a teenager has with that feeling. This is why the younger demographic is not able to separate that art from the artist.”
XXXTentacion’s fans stood their ground on a bedrock of some of the most important music in the emo rap canon. 17’s “Jocelyn Flores” is regarded by Internet Money founder and producer Taz Taylor as one of the best emo rap songs ever made: “All the shit happening with X, you’re getting a look into his mind. You feel how he feels.” 17 followed this ethos, with each song appearing as a blitz of gushing depression. No song touched three minutes, and the album itself barely crossed the twenty-minute mark. It revealed X as an extremely efficient writer and performer—he needed only a few seconds to worm his way into his listener. It’s almost parasitic, except there’s a real relationship built between X and his fans, who see him as nothing short of a giver.
By 2018’s ?, X had become the de facto face of emo rap’s musical prowess and deep-seated controversy. And still, the album was a bubbling example of the breadth of XXXTentacion’s capabilities. Following the spoken opening manifesto, “ALONE, PART 3” played like a mumbled emo rock demo from the middle of the country. Even the more rap-minded tracks, “Moonlight” and “infinity,” had the spiritual and mentally disconcerting undercurrents that helped define X’s sound. ? hinged on XXXTentacion’s biggest crossover hit, lead single “SAD!”, which was posthumously RIAA-certified Diamond. Unlike the snarling “Look At Me!”, “SAD!” is a strictly suicidal and tender pop smash. It could only exist in a post–“XO Tour Llif3” world, where Lil Uzi Vert broke open the doors for miserable rap music to topple the charts. Though “SAD!” would not reach the chart heights of “XO Tour Llif3” while X was still alive, it did become a No. 1 hit following his murder.
In the months, and now years, leading up to and following his death, X has morphed into a mythical creature, less of a deeply troubled symptom of larger systemic failings in America and more a means of litigating ethical consumption in music. Or, as a window into the violent fantasies embedded into disadvantaged—and privileged, if we’re being honest—young men. His music and public persona fulfilled a fantasy for young men in America. Yes, he’s there for them with his evocative ballads, but he also taps into the inherent violence of being nurtured by the darkest elements of the streets. His music worked both because of its quality and because the more aggressive and disturbing elements of the material scratched a deeply rooted itch in his fans. Yes, the work is compelling. Its quality merits thinking so critically about X’s role in reflecting social values through music.
Still, there is another part of me, as I write this, that sees him as a tragic, disposable figure to a series of bad actors using him to advance their own agendas, either monetarily or morally. The emptying of the vault of X’s recorded music, and the dumping of said music into half-baked posthumous releases, even as I believe in the value of the archive for all artists, feels nothing short of nefarious. In the years since his death, X has become a pawn to prove a point about violence and being a moral arbiter vis-a-vis art consumption, without really exploring the meat of why these cycles and circumstances came to pass in his life.
In short, X is an easy example to pull out of a hat, but he was also a victim of brutality for most of his too-short life. He perpetuated that cycle of violence, without question, all while continuing to mean the world to millions of kids. They feel a sense of duty to protect his legacy, no matter how rabid and certifiably dangerous their actions online and in person. The beauty of X’s music runs completely contra to the wickedness of his violence, but this doesn’t bother a hurt kid. I have to imagine that as more time passes, as our society develops a richer vocabulary to discuss abuse, and as his fans grow older and more distanced from his tragic death, there will be a holistic critical reappraisal of XXXTentacion.