CEITEDMOFO
Banned
You may have noticed in your internet travels last week that a rapper named XXXTentacion was released from jail. You may have read that immediately after his release last Wednesday, he went on Miami’s 103.5 to discuss three upcoming projects: 17, I Need Jesus (I kid you not), and Members Only Vol. 3. And also to call Drake a bytch:
He is not a man. I think he’s a bytch, that’s a bytch move. Especially when I was in jail facing life, you know what I’m saying? If Drake would’ve came to my bond hearing, you know what I’m saying, that would’ve made my fukking day. If he would have showed that he’s a hospitable person and that he’s really in this shyt for the culture, rather than being a … taking my shyt, running off with it and then putting it on his album, then he would’ve gotten my kudos, he would’ve gotten my respect. I would’ve let him hop on the remix and take 100 percent royalty rate. I would’ve done it.
Another thing that XXXTentacion would theoretically do for Drake: get Drake’s name tattooed on his ass cheek. But only if Drake could out-rap him, he said Tuesday.
For context, because some is desperately needed: Several weeks before Drake’s More Life “playlist” was released, something familiar happened: The Boy previewed a new song that sounded awfully close in craft and delivery to another rapper’s, once again spurring (fair, possibly accurate) accusations of biting and wave-riding. It seemed Aubrey Drake Graham, with great malice aforethought, had once again siphoned the talents of a less-well-known but burgeoning rapper and cosplayed with their signature sound like Rap Game Kirby. The song in question was “KMT,” on which he rushes out free-association bars in single gasps, with a familiarly nasal and high-pitched tone.
If “KMT” was the heist, then the mark is a smallish, twitchy 19-year-old from South Florida’s Broward County, a SoundCloud rapper named XXXTentacion (pronounced X X X tent-ah-see-ohn). Born Jahseh Onfroy, he has a handful of tiny, hastily considered face tattoos — the words “BAD VIBES” are written across his eyelids, a broken heart is scrawled under his left eye, “numb” is in cursive beneath the other — and another, larger one of an elephant on his neck. You may recognize these (along with a few others), his sallow skin, and tufts of fuzzy twists atop his head — half bleached, half not — from his mugshot.
That mugshot also now serves as cover art for his biggest hit, “Look at Me!,” released on SoundCloud in 2015. It is, even for a given measure of trash,trash. There’s a boom-in-the-shot quality to the song that’s punkish and even refreshing if you choose to read that much into it, but the levels are all over the place, the mix is as if the song were recorded in a rusted oil barrel, and the second line — the very second one — is “can’t keep my dikk in my pants.” Oddly enough, it’s also … exciting? (Still, that revelation occurred to me after a lot of listens.) And, though Drake denied grafting his flow during a recent DJ Semtex interview, you don’t need to squint too hard to see the resemblance.
There’s a breaking point in SoundCloud surfing — or, rather, a buying-in point — where you loosen your grip on pretense and begin to consider the music on its own terms, appraising it within its own scarcely existent rules. It’s like a viewer’s willing suspension of disbelief while watching a film. And I’ve found that it’s only within this vacuum that XXXTentacion’s music can work.
Skipping refinement in favor of purposefully ramping up distortion does bottle the raw, knock-down-drag-out energy of a mosh pit at a live show, and it makes you question, if briefly, whether rap is even listenable at low volumes. With self-described eclectic taste, XXXTentacion does display a proclivity for different styles, though most of them are the ones we usually talk about with regard to your angsty neighborhood AutoPlay SoundCloud rapper: futuristic (is it just “present” now?) bedroom R&B, slurry pop-leaning trap, soul-bearing emo rap that is equally slurry, the like.
The sampling choices he makes further point to some sort of dexterity, and they are different enough to be interesting. “Look at Me!” rips and pitches down a vocal sample from a Mala record made in 2007. He told Genius that his dream collaborations are with the Fray, Kings of Leon, and Lorde. A fireside chat on his SoundCloud page is set to “Head Above the Water” by Palace, a British alt-rock-blues band that I’d never heard of, and now might kind of love.
https://theringer.com/xxxtentacion-recent-release-from-jail-46e7381da141
