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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jarett Kobek
Read between
July 8 - July 8, 2019
On 6 March 2014 AD, XXXTentacion tweets: “so fucking happy , my dad called me , asked me to rap for all his homies on the cell block , and them niggas all freaked out” And follows it up with: “nigga told me he was proud of me”
He tweets about shit that anyone with any good sense wouldn’t put on the Internet. A ton of law-breaking, much while under house arrest or on probation. It never seemed to bite him on the ass, which tells you about his pre-fame importance in the hierarchy of criminal justice.
There’s a thing that happens, over and over again. He’ll get into an argument on Twitter and then demand the address of the person with whom he’s arguing. Sometimes, people are stupid enough to give him the address. Or an enemy rats them out. This is followed by a succession of tweets in which XXXTentacion is on his way to this someone’s house, is outside someone’s house, and tweeting after he’s fought the person. There’s also a lot of tweets about his broken hands.
His sex drive and sex life are discussed in endless detail. That dude fucked a lot. And while he was young, too. He preferred Latinas.
When he’s still @fuckjahseh, XXXTentacion communicates with people who aren’t wired into the world of music. They’re kids he goes to high school with, girls that he’s fucking, people he knows from around. The vast majority of these people deleted their accounts. The remaining conversations are spectral, one-sided, fragmented, Jahseh only. • By the time the other kids from Broward County decide that they should delete their accounts, @fuckjahseh has become @XXXTentacion. And he’s well on his way to being famous. And he’d linked that fame to a Twitter account he started when he was fourteen
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There’s an edge to his many calls for his own death, and their frequency, and his own professions of emptiness, and his ability to turn from love to hate on a dime. You can go on Twitter at any moment of the day and find teenagers tweeting about how they want to die. But I defy you to find another who’s tweeting their address and asking people to come shoot them in the head.
In the files of Broward County, there’s a traffic citation that XXXTentacion received on 29 August 2015 AD. He was with a young woman. They were on the side of a road. They were having an argument. Whatever happened, it upset XXXTentacion. He jumped into the road and ran into a car that was traveling at 30 miles per hour. The police report says that he hit the car with enough force to cause significant damage. He was that kind of crazy. • There are two tweets from that night. The first reads: “I hate hospitals.” The second reads: “I should be dead.” • Here are a quick succession of tweets
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Talking about his criminal background, he makes four main points. That he was arrested in his early youth for possession of a firearm, armed burglary, possession of OxyContin, grand theft, and resisting arrest without violence. That he went to jail for a year. That while in jail, he met $ki Mask. That while in jail, he beat the shit out of a homosexual cellmate. • The final story is grotesque, involving XXXTentacion bashing in the kid’s head and XXXTentacion taking the kid’s blood and smearing it on his own face like warpaint.
After the No Jumper interview, whenever a Righteous White writes about XXXTentacion, they will always include his year in jail, $ki Mask, and XXXTentacion’s beating of a gay kid. The homophobic beating signals itself to the Righteous: at long last, another Black dude who has disqualified himself from The Cause. He’s the latest and greatest find in that perpetual quest. An African-American who can be criticized without anyone calling you racist. The new O.J. Simpson.
On 23 February 2014 AD, he tweets: “lol i served 7 months for robbing your house and fucking your bitch”
So when he does lie, it’s remarkable. And telling. Because he only lies about one thing: thug life. When he’s a lonely teenager and he has no fans. When no one is watching. An adolescent boy who wants to be perceived as hard on social media. • And it’s completely unnecessary. XXXTentacion was incredibly violent. There’s a million videos on the Internet of him beating the shit out of people.
Two types fight different than everyone else. People who’ve done martial training and people who had awful childhoods. You can spot the latter in an instant. They’re the ones who get into a schoolyard scrap and end up sticking a pen in someone’s eye. They go from 0 to 60 in less than a second. They don’t stop.
Melody is the series of notes that carries a song through. It’s essentially the top of the song, the tune that you hum. Harmony is the sound of all the different instruments together. Rhythm is the beat and the way that the beat manifests itself across a piece of music. It’s the groove. Lyrics are lyrics. • Timbre, roughly speaking, is everything in music that doesn’t fall into the above four categories. Timbre is what made Whitney Houston sound like Whitney Houston. Timbre is what made Whitney Houston an international star. And timbre is why your cousin only sings at weddings.
Rap is almost entirely rhythm and timbre. Which means it’s based in individual performance.
XXXTentacion sounds like a wounded animal that stays down. He sounds like the saddest person in the world.
There’s no real melody, there’s no harmony. There’s just a killer beat and with two verses and a one-line chorus repeated about fifty times: “BITCH, I AM UP.”
Put this into perspective. Until the day that human life ends, David Bowie will receive handjobs from the White commentariat regarding the glorious decade that he spent shape-shifting from one album to the next while maintaining a grand cohesive artistic unity. If you listen to A Ghetto Christmas Carol, you’ll find XXXTentacion doing the same thing. Across five songs. On the same album. In nine minutes. And eight seconds.
People used to think that rock n’ roll was a revolutionary music. No joke. The reoccurring motif of four-to-five proletariat idiots with guitars and wah-wah pedals was conceived as a vanguard of a forthcoming social change.
XXXTentacion understood, consciously or not, that if hip-hop as a culture is different than the genre of rap, and if that culture emerged from a musical style determined entirely by timbre and performance, then if you came from hip-hop you could do anything and still be hip-hop.
It had always been about the sound. Timbre is the most important thing. It’s the only thing.
No genre of American music has been given greatest emphasis on lyricism, and lyrical constraints and finesse, than rap. But the amount of people who actually give a fuck about lyricism is small and ever diminishing.
Fuck a chorus. Fuck a verse. Fuck every known song structure. Fuck every received idea about music. While remaining popular. While remaining danceable. Because otherwise it’s just Norwegian Black Metal.
On 9 October 2013 AD he tweets: “no one understand my twitter name, it means ‘sexual’ or ‘pornographic’ temptation.” And much later, on May 5, 2015 AD: “the name ‘xxxtentacion’ is completely original, it’s about my habit or ‘temptations’ to do crazy or erotic things, Triple X , Temptation.”
On 19 February 2014 AD, he’s expelled from Piper. Thus ends his formal education. • Now he has what every artist needs. He has time. For all the normal teenage shit: drugs, fucking, violence. But also for music.
January is one of those months. On the 6th, he tweets that he’s going to be arrested soon. On the 9th, he’s arrested.
Here we should pause and think about the distinction between Jahseh Onfroy and XXXTentacion. It’s like two living beings in one body. XXXTentacion is transcendent, radiant. He’s the inner core. He can’t be stopped. In less than two years, he’ll be on the Billboard charts with a song that was uploaded to SoundCloud. And then there’s Jahseh Onfroy. Jahseh Onfroy’s life was marked by the blunt reality that he had terrible luck. Whenever anything could go wrong, it did. It’s a defining aspect of his existence. And like anyone with bad luck, a great deal of it was self-inflicted.
Right now, XXXTentacion has finished playing his first real show. He seems happy. And then Jahseh Onfroy takes the wheel. Almost immediately after his performance, he gets jumped by another rapper and that rapper’s crew. This is a beating that he didn’t see coming. Only a few hours earlier, he had a warm encounter with the other rapper. They fuck him up.
On 25 November 2015 AD, he gets off probation. Earlier, he tweets: “I finish my probation in two weeks, I’ve been on probation for three years, I’m proud of myself!” And: “went from robbing niggas houses, check scams , snatching chains and pawning shit to making money off saying a few words with meaning.” • The insane thing is that on 16 November 2015 AD, he goes out and robs a dude. For this particular crime, he won’t be arrested until nearly a year later. • It goes down like this. He and three other individuals go into someone’s house. XXXTentacion hits the dude in the head with a pistol.
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After SoundScan, a stunning reality emerged. People really liked to fuck with recordings made by Black people. It’s possible that the known history of sales up until 1991 AD was a web of lies designed to hide the financial and cultural impact of Black people.
We will throw money at artists and record labels, said the investor/entrepreneurial class, in the form of royalties in the hopes that one day these investments will pay off through the perceived value of user growth. We will give you user growth, said the American public, as long as you don’t ask us to pay money while we destroy our brains with the ghostwritten output of Drake. We have always been, we will always be, said the record labels. We have the survivability of cockroaches. Free money sounds great. And fuck the artists.
It starts with a road trip. XXXTentacion, $ki Mask and three other dudes in Members Only drive to a gig in Denver, Colorado. Three days on the road. Florida→Georgia→Tennessee→Missouri→Kansas→Colorado. The gig happens on 9 January. While they’re traveling, they shoot footage. It gets edited down and released on YouTube. Everyone’s on some Jack Kerouac shit. Happy, goofy, out discovering America.
Back in Florida, on 20 January, he gets into an altercation at Deerfield Beach. He stabs at least three people. No one dies. Without referring to the specifics of the event, he tweets about it: “bruh this shit real life, ya’ll niggas think this is a game, you try that tweaking shit ima stab the life out you.” And: “how ya’ll 40 deep tryna jump me and don’t get shit done , I aint take no L’s so far in 2016!”
Then he goes to Portland, Oregon. He’s there for about a week. He gets fucked by a witch, arguably the only reason to ever go to Oregon.
It’s down the rabbit hole. It’s another reality. Free drugs. Sex with witches. Life is nothing but a dream.
He runs a contest on Twitter to see who can play his music the loudest in a classroom. It’s Part Two of that aborted parking lot tour. Many fans respond with videos of “Look at Me!” being blasted in school. They’re all funny. And pregnant with meaning. The high school fuck-up who fucks up high schools. With nothing more than a tweet.
During the 27 June fight, when he’s rolling around on the ground, he mugs for a photograph. He’s smiling. His arms are wrapped around the other dude’s bloody head. On 4 July, he uses this photograph as the cover image for a new song that he uploads to SoundCloud. The song is called “YuNg BrAtZ.” It’s a banger.
His rapping was never going to win plaudits from the 50,000 people who care about What Makes a Real MC. There’s no explosion of tight constructions. Rarely does meaning carry over from one bar to another and change with the next. The schemes are not especially innovative. But that’s okay. He wasn’t from New York. And 1994 AD was a long time ago.
You have to accept that a totally violent dude can also be defined by questions of self-worth.
If you had the right eyes and ears, you could look at him, and listen, and know exactly what he was and where he was from. And I don’t mean Broward County. That dude was from the Internet.
If you were alive in 1995 AD, it was impossible to look into an LCD screen and watch bukakke anal gangbangs and then, half a second later, look again into that screen and watch someone from Maida Vale behead an American journalist, and then, half a second later, be told by fifty people on social media that you are the living incarnation of evil because you misgendered a character from a fantasy novel.
Another gift of the transformation: the certain knowledge that there is no future.
What happens if your interaction with the world is dominated by an engine of human contempt, designed by the ultra-wealthy to inform you that you are less than garbage?
Why no eyebrows? Because I don’t want to look like people, I don’t want to look everyone else. I wanna be myself and if that means I have to be ugly to look like myself then I’ll be ugly. And honestly I’d rather be ugly and attract the real people and attract the real people around me than be, be what everyone wants me to look like and be around a bunch of fake ass niggas that only wanna be around me for some clout. Cause I’m honestly tired of being used. I get used all the time. If you haven’t even noticed nigga I don’t even wanna be on the fucking Internet as much because of how fucking
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the first wank not over a copy of Playboy found in the basement but Skin Diamond in Doctor Whore, sucking a dude off with the help of April O’Neil, a pornstar named after a character from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
Here’s how life used to work: you could be young, and you could exist, and you could do stupid fucking shit, and unless you’d been caught up in the criminal justice system, you could walk away from that stupid shit.
Your life is the property of others. There is no longer any need for vast apparatuses of state security and secret police. Every stupid thing that you do, in public or in private, is recorded by someone’s smartphone. And they’re going to snitch. And the world will know. And the people who rule the world will make serious money off your transgression. Every pussy is up for grabs.
Rich kids don’t suffer the same Internet as poor kids. Just watch Twitch or homemade pornography.
Thoreau might be a dick, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
Having enacted my needless exercise in proving a point, I learned the truth of what I had always suspected. There is no reward in human achievement. Status, power, fame, cash. It’s all shit. In a post-industrialized economy, the only thing that money is good for, really, is the down payment on an ugly home. And better legal representation.
Here is my advice. If the whole game is rigged, and your behavior is constructed by invisible social pressures, then there’s only one thing you can do. Do every thing wrong!
