XXXTentacion’s short and violent career
JAHSEH Dwayne Onfroy was small – he reportedly barely tipped 57kg on a scale – but he led with his fists. Violence radiated off him.
“I’ve been fighting since I was a kid,” he once said.
As he mounted the hip-hop hierarchy under the name XXXTentacion, the rapper brawled with concert goers and tossed verbal barbs at megastar Drake. He allegedly turned his fists on his girlfriend for nothing more than humming another rapper’s track.
And yet all the violence did little to hamper Onfroy’s rise from the SoundCloud underground to radio. In March, his second studio record ? debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s 200 album chart. The success, however, came as he awaited trial in his native South Florida, charged with domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and aggravated battery of a pregnant woman. His accuser, Geneva Ayala, recently documented the abuse to the Miami New Times.
That brief, turbulent career ended last week with a burst of gunfire. Police suggested the shooting may have been an attempted robbery.
Onfroy’s early death will likely do little to still the controversy stirred up by his improbable cannonball into the mainstream. The rapper’s popularity put pop music in a moral bind, a hiphop version of the ongoing debates swirling around film directors Roman Polanski and Woody Allen: How can you celebrate the work of an artist accused of such deplorable acts?
According to Vulture, Onfroy began posting songs to SoundCloud in March 2014. In December 2015, he uploaded Look at Me, a track that would eventually spill onto the Billboard charts about ten months later.
But 2016 was chaotic. At the end of the previous year, Onfroy was charged with home invasion robbery and aggravated battery (in March 2017, he pleaded no contest to the charges and received probation, according to court records.)
The artist’s nasty personal history sparked denunciations. “XXXTentacion is Blowing Up Behind Bars. Should He Be?” Pitchfork asked in an article. “You should not be able to beat up a pregnant woman and still have a career,” music critic Tom Breihan wrote on Stereogum. When Miami New Times recently tracked down Onfroy, he was living both under the cloud of his legal trouble and in the lap of luxury.
“Would I change anything about my journey?” Onfroy said. The answer was a resounding, expletive-laden “no.” – Washington Post