Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World

by Jarett Kobek

In April 2017 AD, XXXTentacion is released from jail. The second day out, he tweets that Drake’s mom can catch a dick.

The prison calls are the product of mental illness. There’s no other way to describe someone who spends 16 hours on the phone in a 46 hour period.

it feels like he’s back in that No Jumper/thug life lying. Example: he talks about the January 2016 AD stabbing incident. He says that he stabbed ten people. As can best be established, this isn’t true. He only stabbed three or four. Which ain’t great. But it’s that exaggeration shit again.

A hot minute after he dies, people upload videos of XXXTentacion dead in his car. The video quality is super shitty. Pixelated messes shot by people who don’t know how to turn their smartphones to a horizontal orientation.

That night, I make a tasteless joke to a friend: “He died like he lived.” “What do you mean?” asks the friend. “He died like he lived,” I said. “In a shitty video on the Internet.”

that’s the old American hypocrisy. Whenever we hire someone to murder Brown, Black and Asian people, they’d better have beautiful table manners.

The refocusing on the American arts meant that a reckoning was coming. Alas, XXXTentacion was made for this moment. He had done everything wrong: he was Black, he was young, he was too honest on the Internet, he’d bragged about beating up a gay kid, and he’d been accused of beating the shit out of his pregnant ex-girlfriend. And worse than anything: he was successful. Kids really loved his music. And him. And they gave neither a fuck nor a tuppence about morality manufactured by Righteous Whites living in Brooklyn and Chicago.

If you’ve spent three years cramming support for Black Lives Matter between your tweets about hot yoga and vaping legal weed, then I think you have an obligation to not roll over like a dog waiting for a stomach scratch whenever a Black dude you don’t like is caught up in the criminal justice system.

Consensus reality is manufactured on devices that are embodiments of global evil. Look at your smartphone: it’s filled with minerals strip mined by child slaves in the Congo. The mineral profits fund wars. And you never hear about those wars. They happen in a part of the world that no one cares about. • The minerals then get sent to China, where other slaves put them in phones and computers. And these devices are used to manufacture consensus reality. There is literally no way to have an opinion, in public, in 2018 AD, and not be involved in the hierarchy of global evil. This book is a good example. Despite its intentions, this is a byproduct of global evil.

I always wonder: is this being done for money or is this being done to hide the sins of the self? Because other than earning cash dollars off Geneva’s beatings, the only reason for writing a negative posthumous article about XXXTentacion is for the writer of said article to make the world aware that they are a Good Person. And who the fuck needs to do that? Only people haunted by their own past. Who are establishing a backcatalogue of righteousness as a counterbalance for when the reckoning arrives.

If we had to think about every incident of violence, and its causes, and the mental state of the person who committed that crime, we couldn’t function as a society. America has so internalized the logic of the prison state that this logic has become the de facto justification of our civilization. But there’s a pathology in the constructed behaviors of our society. 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 freaked out” And follows it up with: “nigga told me he was proud of me” This pathology can’t excuse individual behaviors or choices. But, Jesus Christ, can it ever explain them.