On January 28, while performing in Amsterdam, Drake delivered previously unheard rhymes in a ratatat cadence. “I get my dough in advance/Love is just not in my plans,” he sneered. No sooner did video from the event surface than hip-hop fans started speculating about how much the flow might be indebted to an unsigned South Florida rapper currently behind bars.
XXXTentacion—pronounced “X-X-X-tentación,” as in the Spanish word for temptation—is best-known for a luridly distorted track called “Look at Me!,” which includes these aggressively spat lines: “Can’t keep my dick in my pants/My bitch don’t love me no more.” Its influence on Drake’s song is debatable, but the fact that it was argued at all illustrates how much notoriety X has gained, amidst a fast rise that raises age-old questions about the separation of art from the actions of those who create it.
Around 11:30 p.m. on October 6, 2015, X—whose real name is Jahseh Onfroy—allegedly “punched and kicked” his pregnant then-girlfriend, according to an arrest report. “Victim’s eyes [were] punched to where both eyes became shut and victim could not not see,” the report states. According to documents provided to Pitchfork by the Miami-Dade County state attorney’s office, prosecutors have 51 pages of the alleged victim’s medical records. There are multiple photographs that show injuries Onfroy purportedly inflicted on the woman. More than one shows the two in a tender pose together, with her nose allegedly bruised from an earlier head-butting. Another shows the woman with her left eye reddened and the skin around both eyes all hues of purple. Prosecutors have taken sworn statements from several witnesses, among them the alleged victim, in preparation for a trial.
A small, multi-racial 19-year-old with black-and-yellow hair and face tattoos, Onfroy was arrested in Miami-Dade on October 8, 2016. The official charges against him—aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness-tampering—mean he could be facing years in prison if convicted. Onfroy is being held in his native Broward County for violating a house arrest agreement prior to trial on two other charges, armed home invasion robbery and aggravated battery with a firearm, that stem from an alleged incident in November 2015. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
As unsettling as the charges against Onfroy are, they don’t seem to have diminished his allure in rap circles. Depressingly, the accusations—beating his pregnant girlfriend, strangling her, forcibly confining her against her will, and then trying to bribe her not to testify against him—coincide almost exactly with indications of the rapper’s swelling celebrity. In comparison to the sharp spike of interest in X lately, Google Trends data suggests hardly anybody was searching for him before last October, when the battery allegedly occurred.
These days Drake is only one of the famous rappers with X’s name, or at least his rhythmic pattern, on his lips. In the first weeks of 2017, X already has been called the “hardest n---- in Florida” by A$AP Rocky and been quoted by Danny Brown on Twitter (“Cocaine for my breakfast, hold that pistol ambidextrous”). With “Look at Me!,” currently No. 2 on a Billboardchart that measures streaming growth, he has even soundtracked the gaming antics of YouTube personality PewDiePie. His total SoundCloud followers, less than 20,000 within the past year, now stand above 320,000.
X’s musical appeal in hip-hop circles isn’t hard to see. “Look at Me!,” which dates back to December 2015, samples a haunting, voice-like melody fragment from dubstep pioneer Mala’s 2007 track “Changes,” essentially cranking the volume way past the red line. The resulting blown-out, lo-fi production—combined with X’s horrorcore-descended lyrics and trendy triplet rapping style—closes a circle that runs from trap near-contemporaries like Lil Uzi Vert (“Free da xxxster,” Uzi tweeted) or Florida’s Spaceghostpurrp back to the pioneering murkiness of early Three 6 Mafia.
At least in his hustle, X has the potential makings of more than a one-hit wonder. “Look at Me!” is the only one of his songs available on Spotify or Apple Music, but Onfroy has been a steady presence on SoundCloud since at least March 2014. While a promised debut album titled Bad Vibes Forever is still forthcoming, his various EPs and loose tracks paint a portrait of an eclectic artist. In contrast with the hyper-aggressive sexual id of “Look at Me!,” X’s other songs span beat-less introspection, Weeknd-like R&B moodiness, and, most surprisingly, quiet-loud alt-metal. “As of right now I want to work with the Fray, Kings of Leon, and probably Lorde,” he recently told Genius in a call from jail. “I do multi-genre, I don’t just rap.”
American culture has a romance with criminality dating back to colonial times, and historically those flames have been fanned by changes in business and technology. Newspapers helped build up the 19th-century outlaw Jesse James as no common thief but a romantic antihero, an avatar of pure style. The motif of the chic gangster remains a staple in cinema, TV, and popular music: a renewable resource of street slang, drug lore, and general rebelliousness that speaks to urges also latent in law-abiding homes throughout the land. Naturally, the outlaw archetype has adapted to fit the social media age. Brooklyn’s Bobby Shmurda, who Shmoney-danced his way to the Vine-driven smash “Hot N****” in 2014, leaving a trail of arrests in his wake, is serving seven years on gun and conspiracy charges. Kodak Black, who, like X, is 19 and from South Florida, scored his first Hot 100 hit, “No Flockin,” just last month, in between a prison stint on drug charges and an unresolved, far more serious charge of sexual battery. Black was released from jail December 1 on a $100,000 bond.
It’s not terribly uncommon for a rapper to stare down the law just as his career is taking off. In 1995, 2Pac spent nine months in prison for sexually abusing a fan in his hotel room two years earlier, in what a judge called “an act of brutal violence against a helpless woman.” (2Pac maintained his innocence and died in 1996 with his case under appeal.) In 2001, Shyne was sentenced to 10 years for assault, reckless endangerment, and gun possession. In 2009 and 2011, Lil Boosie, aka Boosie Badazz, was handed two separate sentences on drug charges (he was found not guilty of murder). Max B, who appeared last year on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, was convicted in 2009 of murder, armed robbery, and other offenses (his 75-year sentence may be shortened).
Some crimes resist being easily romanticized. Gunfighters sticking it to the authorities may always retain a certain cachet, despite the tragic consequences of actual gun crimes; similarly, the drug trade can be seen as embodying capitalism at its nihilistic extreme. But domestic violence, which still affects one out of four American women, may finally be different in the eyes of the public. Long after Chris Brownpleaded guilty in 2009 to assaulting former girlfriend Rihanna, calls for boycotting him have continued, despite Rihanna publicly forgiving and once again collaborating with him. Then again, Gucci Manepleaded guilty to pushing a woman out of a moving car in 2011, and he remains a cult-beloved figure. When female victims are unknown, their fates have been easier for the public to overlook. This was also one of the issues underlying the extensive list of accusations of sexual predation leveled against R. Kelly (who has denied the allegations).
Even from jail, X has found ways to speak, whether to his 142,000-plus Twitter followers or in interviews with outlets like XXL, where X has been given a platform to reassert his innocence without adding much clarity to the events of October 6 to 8. Meanwhile, the alleged victim has faced comments that she “prolly deserved it”; “IMMA LAUGH WHEN HES FREED AND STUNTS ON YOU AND CONTINUES TO BE SUCCESSFUL AND MAKES THIS SHMONEY,” reads one tweet at her. In December, X’s Twitter account posted a photograph depicting the alleged victim and her nude lower body from behind (a tweet that has been deleted). In a follow-up tweet, erased more recently, the person controlling X’s Twitter account wrote, “All I ever abused was that pussy ):”
X’s case also coincides with a time when U.S. consumers are demonstrating increasing concern over which values their consumption supports. Conscious media consumers are already used to having to weigh an artist’s actions against the merit of their work, but any calculus of aesthetics and ethics quickly gets daunting. Cinephiles have debated allegations of abuse against Woody Allen or the statutory-rape guilty plea by Roman Polanski. In music, men who’ve admitted to domestic violence range from John Lennon to Don McLean, Ike Turner to Bobby Brown, and Ozzy Osbourne to Scott Weiland—and that’s just those who’ve come clean. Where to draw lines, or whether to draw them at all, is ultimately a personal decision, but it has public consequences in revealing what sort of behavior a society will tolerate when pressed. Fans can only make an informed choice if they know the facts.
Onfroy was born in Plantation, Florida, a city outside of Miami. Last year, in a video interview that has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, for the No Jumper podcast, he described an unsteady upbringing—a mother who passed him along to other people who didn’t always put him in the best situations. “My mom just had it hard, bro,” Onfroy said in her defense. He recounted a tendency to act out violently, not excluding attacks on girls and, despite his protestation that he’s not homophobic, on boys he perceived as gay (X: “You think I can tell the story about that faggot I beat up?”). The latter scrap happened, as Onfroy told it, during a year he spent in a correctional facility for armed robbery, armed burglary, possession of a firearm, grand theft, possession of Oxycodone, and other charges. With a rapper he met in confinement, Ski Mask “The Slump God,” X went on to help co-found a hip-hop collective called Members Only, joined by Houston’s Craig Xen and Florida’s Wifisfuneral.
Like the charges against him, X’s anecdotes are sad and disturbing. In another 2016 interview, with podcast The Mars Files, he spoke of struggling with depression. “There really is no happiness,” he said at one point, later adding, “The only person who inspires me is Kurt Cobain. He did it right as fuck, man.” On January 12, a since-deleted tweet from X’s account concluded alarmingly, “I’ll see you in the next life if there is one.” Rather than view the allegations against Onfroy as cause for empathy or professional counseling, some fans online have cheered the charges as evidence of his gritty authenticity.
On January 1, the host of No Jumper, who goes by Adam22, announced he was now X’s manager. “I don’t have a comment on his cases except that I believe him that he didn’t beat the girl up,” Adam22 told me via Twitter direct message. After X’s grim tweet about the “next life,” Adam22 wrote publicly, “i talked to x he's fine.” A hodgepodge of lawyers have represented Onfroy in the two pending cases; all either declined to comment or have not yet responded to my requests for comment. A promised conversation with X for this article failed to occur.
I will not be coming home for awhile, it seems that it doesn't matter whether or not the state has evidence against me. I'm sorry.
— MAKE OUT HILL - XXX (@xxxtentacion) January 19, 2017
Adam22 directed me to a video from another call, where Onfroy can be heard saying, “If I can get these charges dropped in Miami, and I can prove this bitch a liar, then I can get out … She knew that I was on house arrest.” In video of another call, provided by the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office and readily available online, Onfroy can be heard saying, “I did not beat that bitch, she got jumped.” There’s laughter. The same voice continues, “And by the way for all you dumb fuck-ass n----- that thought this stupid bitch was pregnant, I got the paperwork signifying that she wasn’t pregnant, so when I get out I’m fucking all your little sisters in the fucking throat hole.” Again, laughter. All told, the state attorney’s office told me it has in evidence more than 200 phone calls Onfroy has made from jail.
Miami’s Rolling Loud festival, set for May 5 to 7, has announced XXXTentacion as part of its lineup. It’s not unthinkable that X could be out of confinement by then; a hearing is set for February 8 on whether he should be released on bond. The charges involving beating his girlfriend are scheduled for trial in April. How audiences choose to assess X’s music and the allegations against him remains to be discovered, but the quandaries punctuated by his ascent are there to be considered. In the months ahead, while X sits at a discomfiting precipice between youth culture and true crime, people—as he demanded in song—will be looking at him.