Jahseh D. Onfroy, better known as XXXTENTACION, has gained a lot of attention recently. The 19-year-old Florida singer-rapper caught so much heat on the Internet that even prison bars couldn’t stop XXL from reaching out to him for an interview. Onfroy – whose Soundcloud profile has amassed millions of plays and 328k followers in the past 12-months – claimed in the interview that Drake bit his flow for an unreleased track with Giggs that he premiered on tour in Europe. This, coupled with the potential jail time he is currently facing with for aggravated battery of his pregnant ex-girlfriend, has understandably sparked a mad storm of interest in the Broward County artist.
XXXTENTACION’s music is puzzling to say the least. It’s simultaneously captivating and (genuinely) atrocious to listen to. ‘Look At Me!’, the track on which he spits with the flow he claims Drake catted, samples Mala’s dubstep classic ‘Changes’, and sounds pretty clean and ethereal until the oversaturated bass drops in and distorts the mix beyond listenability. There’s lo-fi and then there’s just unmastered; this tune, like many of Onfroy’s others, falls into the latter category. Equally, it’s a brilliant choice of sample and a genuinely bold sonic statement.
Ranging from moody, cavernous r&b to violent metal-infused trap, not all of XXX’s already substantial catalogue sounds like his biggest hit – which speaks for his creativity – but when it comes to the guy’s lyrics, variation is nowhere near the agenda. XXX hits you with all the typical themes and subjects of 2010s narco-rap: disrespect for women, slavish obsession with high end streetwear designers, “am-I-bovvered” drug misuse and casual boasts of dramatic violence. He really might be a very boring rapper, if it weren’t for the new extremes he pushes these well-worn topics to. “Post with that fucking blade/ bitch I’ll skin your face,” he warns us on ‘#ImSippinTeaInYoHood’. Whilst ‘Look At Me!’ is littered with insights like “I like to rock out like I’m misfit/ My emo bitch like her wrist slit.” And, “I gave her dick she got mad/ She put her tongue on my dick.”
Words like ‘foulmouthed’ and ‘petulant’ just don’t cover it: the shit this dude says is concrete evil. The kind of raging references to mutilation and non-consensual penetration that ICP and the rest of the horrorcore old school never got close to passing off as ‘catharsis’ are, in XXXTENTACION’s case, even further from possible defence of any kind, given his recent history of pregnant woman bashing and all.
Through this wild venting, XXX loudly surfaces a deep nihilism; a fundamental disgust with an existence characterised by pain. While XXX’s delivery is blunter and more arresting, his lyrics draw obvious parallels to Yung Lean’s: “Imma make you hurt,” / “Get my balls licked by a Zoe Deschannel lookalike,” etc. Both rappers went viral as teenagers for rocking sadness as a fashionable statement of identity. Popular Facebook groups exist dedicated to trendy psychedelic images depicting the two artists, and fans approve the posts on these pages with crying emoji reactions rather than likes.
If Future’s meteoric rise to superstardom via pain-stricken club bangers wasn’t enough to suggest it, then XXX’s meteoric ascent proves it once and for all: we’re at a moment in time where rap is very happy being ‘sad’. The commercial success of this once-obscure ‘sad rap’ aesthetic, beyond creating a series of icons far darker and more emotional than any in hip-hop history, also says a lot about the young men that bump the tracks.
It might come as a shock to many (excluding Chris Brown fans) that an artist with an ethos and behavioural record this extreme and hellish could ever rise to the heights of Internet stardom that XXXTENTACION has. But – kind of like Brexit, Donald Trump, and Lil Yachty dropping a tune with Carly Rae Jepsen – it shouldn’t. While he may be its most extreme figurehead, XXXTENTACION is only the latest in a well-documented line of ‘sad’ rap icons. The vaportrap-happy corner of the internet once obsessed with Yung Lean, Bones and Travis Scott has spent all of 2017 so far sharing memes which plea for this guy’s release.
And the rap-meets-emo wave isn’t even one constrained to the limits of niches and cults. Eminem became the best selling rapper of all time by channeling psychopathic rage, addiction to benzodiazepines, sexual perversion and extreme personal anguish. Remember the opening line of ‘Insane’ from Relapse? “I was born with a dick in my brain, yeah fucked in the head/ My stepfather said that I sucked in bed.” More recently, The Weeknd wowed David Letterman with a performance of ‘Pretty’, where – in far from subtly coded terms – he threatens to emotionally and physically ruin a girl for betraying him sexually.
Any comfort we might find in thinking that only a small portion of angsty bedroom-bound teens identify with and celebrate this brand of heartless depravity is false: some of the most visible and commercially successful male hip-hop role models package and brand themselves in these terms.
What does all this say about the generation of young men this worldview appeals to? Maybe it’s merely a safe place for newly liberated wanna-be-sadomasochists in the vein of 50 Shades of Grey. It could also be a constructive creative outlet for dark, vivid imaginations – kind of like Batman fan fiction.
Unfortunately, the evidence suggests something a lot more real and sinister. Socially collected data shows us that young men these days are more anxious, depressed, medicated and suicidal than ever. As macho culture piles on the pressure to pull girls, pump iron and generally ‘win at life’, things like Internet porn and Call of Duty offer a safe and enjoyable way to avoid social anxiety without having to stray from the computer screen. This same need has even affected the drugs people take, as the colourful spiritual horizons promised by LSD in the hippy culture heyday are overlooked for the numbing relief of Xanax, Valium and Sprite-flavoured opiates.
It might be out of this social climate that the XXXTENTACION fan’s mindset spawned. Women are never a threat if they’re emotionally distanced through objectification and disempowered through degradation. People’s opinions of you don’t matter if your take on people is sub-zero misanthropy. You don’t have to look like Taylor Lautner if it’s cooler to wear a box logo. This is the attitude benzo-banging ‘sad boys’ take to life, and it’s the outlook that both informs and reinforces hip-hop’s quietly seismic shift from street realism to swagged out anaesthesia. If there’s a problem with XXXTENTACION, it’s a problem he shares with his millions of listeners.
So, with this bleak picture of Generation-Z’s fractured masculinity in mind, what can we expect for the future of hip-hop? Well, like a lot of things right now, the ethos (or ‘culture’) is something that’s becoming incredibly fragmented and polarised. On one hand, you’ve got XXXTENTACION. On the other, you’ve got the straight edge Lil Yachty – 100% Instagram-ready positivity and vibrant colour palettes, who has already collaborated with Kylie Jenner, Charli XCX and Carly-Rae Jepsen. You’ve got Lil Uzi Vert acting cute as an anime version of himself. You’ve got Cakes Da Killa, iLoveMakonnen and Mykki Blanco.
Hip-hop has always had an emotional spectrum – compare ‘Suicidal Thoughts’ to ‘Me, Myself & I’ – but its identity politics have never been as varied and volatile as they are right now. In a world where young men increasingly feel the pressure to be things they’re not, great comfort comes from idolising artists who wear weirdness and difference as badges of honour.
For every 90s east-coast purist who rolls his eyes at the teenager blasting DRAM in his mum’s whip, there’s a new school adolescent gaining a bizarre but real sense of security in seeing the conventions of masculinity warped and abandoned in a sphere of pop culture they once dominated. Compare the artwork for Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ to that of Jeffery; compare, even, the messages implicit in the same two albums’ titles.
Having expanded way beyond the New York neighbourhoods in which it originated, hip-hop – after shedding its initial defining geographical point of reference – has also grown to mean new things to new audiences. That XXXTENTACION is doing bits on SoundCloud, as well as saying a lot about how angry and emotional many of today’s hip-hop fans are, shows us once and for all that expecting anything in particular from the ‘hip-hop’ tag is a waste of your time.
Having once upon a time provided global audiences with a window through which to observe the specific realities of black male experience and metropolitan ghetto politics, the genre now (while continuing to do this) also holds up a mirror to anyone listening to it, anywhere and in any mindset. These days, if you’re a lonely, depressed Swedish boy obsessed with American consumer goods and narcotic routes of escape, you can even become an internationally renowned rapper yourself. The fringe has become somewhere you can not only escape to, but belong.
And it’s some extreme variation of that very common mindset – the darker and more extreme male condition – which XXXTENTACION’s music speaks to. In their glorification of reckless drug use, excessive consumerism and brazen misogyny, the wave of rappers that swim in XXXTENTACION’s stream have established tangible cults around their personalities and world views, which give disillusioned young men a sense of emotional relief by inducing and celebrating a state of numbness to everything.
The title of XXX’s debut album? Bad Vibes Forever.
LUCID SCREENING 
