17

One of the most disruptive effects of streaming culture, especially as it pertains to rap, is the way it brings the periphery to the center: When one hot SoundCloud single does more for a young artist’s career overnight than years of label development, there are no rules beyond what works and what doesn’t. And so the fact that 2017’s most vital rap movement—a loosely-connected group making bruised, blown-out DIY music that often doesn’t sound much like rap at all, mostly discussed under the umbrella term of “SoundCloud rap”—has almost no mainstream appeal is not a hurdle, but a selling point. “Look At Me!”, the breakthrough hit from XXXTentacion, this scene’s most contentious poster boy, is a succinct embodiment of SoundCloud rap’s ideals. Purposely mixed like shit so you know it’s real, with crass lyrics that tumble over a decayed, bass-boosted Mala sample, the song was an inhospitable introduction to the underbelly of South Florida rappers that have so far dominated the sub-genre. Currently, it has more than 92 million SoundCloud streams; the first comment on the track reads, “MY EARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

But despite making a handful of the scene’s marquee hits, the 19-year old born Jahseh Onfroy stands apart from his SoundCloud rap peers. That distance was plainly illustrated in this year’s XXL Freshman cypher: while Playboi Carti, Ugly God, and Madeintyo bounce around, hyping one another with ad-libs and cooking dances, XXXTentacion lurks motionless in the background, head hung low. Then Sonny Digital cuts the beat, and X crouches to the floor, expressionless, rapping in a chilling monotone: “And if the world ever has an apocalypse, I will kill all of you fuckers.” There is a sense of unease when Digital brings the beat back; whatever just happened, no one is sure how to follow it.

It’s a thing, these days, for rappers to insist that their work transcends genre—and hey, more power to ’em, though by now it’s a bit clichéd. But a deeper dive into X’s three-year catalog turns up sufficient proof that it is more than just lip service when he lists his inspirations as Nirvana, Papa Roach, and the Fray. Scattered throughout his SoundCloud are surprisingly compelling experiments in grunge, nu-metal, and post-Weeknd R&B. In fact, “Look At Me!” might be one of X’s least essential offerings—a solid introduction to his persona, but an insufficient distillation of his artistry. If anything, the song’s most revealing element is its title’s imperative exclamation point: “Look At Me!” is not a request, but a demand.

It turns out people are looking, though perhaps not for the reasons X had hoped. As “Look At Me!” crept up the Hot 100 earlier this year, X sat in a Broward County jail, serving time for violating a house arrest agreement from 2015 charges of home invasion and battery with a firearm. But more recent, and far more harrowing, charges have made X notorious, raising the valid question of whether ethical consumption of his music is possible. Miami-Dade County court records reveal charges that include aggravated battery of a pregnant woman. That woman is alleged to be his ex-girlfriend; a photo of her swollen, bruised eyes has been circulated across social media. Google Trends data shows a grimly proportionate correlation between the alleged October 2016 incident and X’s sudden spike in visibility. Since then, there has been almost no middle ground in the response to the rapper’s popularity. X assumes a cult-leader authority over his die-hard battalion of stans, outlining in interviews a rubric for fandom that feels more like the Sea Org’s billion-year contract. Many of these fans seem eager to comply by trolling his critics (and, horrifyingly, his ex herself) with frenzied claims of “innocent until proven guilty” and familiar misinterpretations of the First Amendment. Meanwhile, just as many listeners have chosen to opt out entirely, and understandably so; it is soul-crushing enough to exist in 2017 without the obligation to engage with music made by even alleged abusers.

If you can stomach it, though, it is interesting in a purely critical sense to imagine receiving 17, X’s first official album, on unmarked CD or anonymous zip file. Nothing on the 22-minute album sounds anything like his breakout hit; and while I imagine that X relishes in this opportunity for a bit of a fake-out, it feels disingenuous to chalk up 17’s stark distinction from “Look At Me!” to pure provocation. In an Instagram post last month, X warned fans: “If you listen to me to get hype or to not think, don’t buy this album.”

In fact, it would be a stretch to call 17 a rap album at all; instead, it is a collection of shell-shocked bedroom R&B and hopeless, rock-bottom grunge that deals exclusively with depression, heartbreak, and suicide. “Jocelyn Flores,” a half-sung, half-rapped dedication to a friend who ended her life in a hotel room earlier this year, presents pain as one’s final connection to something that’s no longer there. “Dead Inside (Interlude)” is just a piano and X’s racing thoughts, reminding me quite a bit of the 2000 version of Cat Power’s “In This Hole.” “Voices in my head/Telling me I’m gonna end up dead,” he chants along with the funereal plod of “Save Me,” a blatant cry for help that sits somewhere between Staind and unplugged Chris Cornell. Of its 11 songs, only half make it past the two-minute mark. But if the songs on 17 often feel like unfinished thoughts, well, that’s what existing inside the black hole of depression and PTSD feels like. And for those who have suffered from mental health issues, it’s hard not to relate, on some primordial level, to the visceral despair here. There is no respite, no light at the end of the tunnel, just darkness.

As genre boundaries have dissolved and rappers have become known as the new rock stars in a post-Rebirth world, the recent resurgence of emo, rap-rock, and Hot Topic aesthetics makes sense beyond just millennial nostalgia. But part of the reason stuff like rap-rock was so maligned (aside from straight-up classism) was that it often seemed to sit awkwardly in the middle of the two genres it attempted to merge, unresolved. More than most of his fusion-inclined predecessors and all of his current peers, 17 presents X as impressively adept at reconciling his influences into a sound that is shockingly elegant, even at its most unpolished—an album whose disparate influences dissolve in an acid bath of raw feeling.

It is that visceral emotion that makes it easy—against all of my better judgment—to understand what makes X’s core audience so intensely, uncomfortably fanatical. If Xanax, within the vernacular of SoundCloud rap, has come to function as a trendy accessory—a signifier for a certain type of fuck-the-world cool for those on the fringes of society (or those who imagine it might be glamorous to be)—17’s desperate numbness is a reminder that opiates’ clinical purpose is to temporarily anesthetize a traumatized mind. The R&B songs here—especially the Trippie Redd-featuring “Fuck Love,” currently the most-played song on SoundCloud this week—feel adjacent in sound to popular R&B of the past few years. But where “alternative R&B” in the 2010s has largely suffered from an air of total detachment, “Fuck Love” bleeds emotion. You’ve probably experienced, in recent years, the strange cognitive dissonance of turning up to Future songs in which he appears to be on the brink of overdose, or bopping along to Lil Uzi Vert telling us his friends are dead. But 17 forces you to sit quietly in X’s headspace, to wholly embody that suffering; to be dancing to this stuff would be perverse.

And at the same time, this is precisely what makes 17 as a record, and moreover, the entire XXXTentacion phenomenon, so harrowing. “I put my all into this, in the hopes it will help cure or at least numb your depression,” he announces in the album’s intro, the “p” in “depression” popping into the microphone, painting a picture of X recording alone in his bedroom, just as you are listening to it. And though it’s preceded by a creepy demand for fealty (“I do not value your money; I value your acceptance and loyalty”), X seems sincere in his hope that his words might be a balm to others in pain. But it is impossible to navigate the line between cathartic solidarity with his listeners and valorization of rage, to the point of excusing the reprehensible behavior it can inspire in those who don’t see a way out. It seems almost too fitting that this is the hottest new rapper of 2017—in a cultural moment in which we are more woke than ever but unable to apply that awareness to actionable results; a digital landscape that so often feels catered towards the lonely, angry, and impressionable who seek a sense of belonging at any cost.

And while there is no shortage of catharsis in and around 17, I have a hard time getting past the nauseous feeling I get when songs like “Revenge” and “Carry On” allude explicitly to his ex-girlfriend, whose last name is the title to the album’s wallowy alt-rock outro. Certainly, it is within X’s artistic license to write about any of this, regardless of its veracity. At many points, he appears painfully aware of his mistakes, though he is conveniently unspecific as to exactly what those are. But when he sings on “Revenge,” in that queasy Isaac Brock yelp, about his vendettas against those who have betrayed him, directed obviously towards his ex, it feels like a monument to something fucked and evil, something that should be torn down.

I can’t help but wonder what it might sound like if XXXTentacion took these dark, gut-level thoughts a step further, from the knee-jerk documentation of rock bottom (as talented as he is at showing, not telling, how depression feels) to some kind of reckoning of his own part in all of this, and maybe even an attempt at contrition. And this, in turn, leads to the uncomfortable question as to whether that is what listeners really want from X anyway; does repentance ever make for art as vital as the kind born from seething, dizzying pain? Perhaps naively, I would like to think it is worth pursuing all the same.