Review: XXXTentacion, Skins

Skins fails to bring anything genuinely new to the table.

XXXTentacion, SkinsPop music loves a martyr. Just six months after the murder of 20-year-old emo rapper XXXTentacion, né Jahseh Onfroy, a posthumous album—the first of several, according to his former collaborator DJ Scheme—has already been released. That Skins is apparently not the last we’ll hear from XXXTentacion doesn’t bode well for those future releases, as many of the album’s nine songs feel unfinished, with only half managing to crack the two-minute mark.

Offering an elegiac beat by lo-fi electronic producer Speechless, “Whoa (Mind in Awe)” features only the faintest ghost of Onfroy’s vocals, with one mumbled verse and a wordless chorus both buried in the mix, while “One Minute” is dominated by guest Kanye West, with Onfroy only coming in for the screamed chorus. Even the songs where Onfroy can be heard for more than a few seconds feel more like demos than finished tracks—an effect that can be haunting, as on the spare, acoustic guitar-driven “Difference (Interlude)” and “What Are You So Afraid Of,” but more often just gives the impression that producer John Cunningham is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Whether the barrel was worth scraping in the first place is a question worth asking. As one of the leading figures of the so-called “SoundCloud rap” movement, XXXTentacion was undeniably groundbreaking but only in the immediate context of 21st-century hip-hop. Skins is frequently derivative of 1990s alternative rock and rap: Onfroy’s singing on “Staring at the Sky” takes the “emo-rap” label literally, as he delivers his verses in a stilted pop-punk accent like he’s singing along to Yellowcard before switching to a guttural screamo bellow for the chorus. Toward the end of the grim, churning “Train Food,” Onfroy’s voice takes on a hectoring, high-pitched tone that recalls Eminem. It’s possible that this all sounds fresh to XXXTentacion’s core audience of disaffected teenagers—navel-gazing angst, after all, transcends generation—but Skins fails to bring anything genuinely new to the table.

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A thoughtful consideration of XXXTentacion’s work must contend with the elephant in the room: Onfroy’s history of domestic abuse. For what it’s worth, there’s nothing here that’s any more misogynistic than what you’d typically hear on your average rap record. Skins features an obligatory handful of “bitches” and “hoes” but nothing as deeply problematic as the threat of “suicide if you ever try to let go” from ?’s “Sad!” Not that we needed any more evidence of Onfroy’s misogyny and violence in the wake of the release of a tape in which the rapper confesses to his myriad crimes.

The only truly stomach-churning lyrical moment on the album comes, unsurprisingly, from Kanye, whose lengthy guest verse on “One Minute” takes aim at false rape allegations with all the tact and intellectual sophistication of a man who once tweeted his all-caps belief in Bill Cosby’s innocence. In the year of reckoning since the #MeToo movement reached critical mass, there’s been much virtual handwringing—mostly, it should be said, by men—over where and when we should separate art from artist in creative work by abusers. But XXXTentacion makes this question easy: His music, particularly now that he’s no longer around to complete it, is of dubious merit.

Score: 
 Label: Empire  Release Date: December 7, 2018  Buy: Amazon

Zachary Hoskins

Zachary Hoskins holds an M.A. in Media Arts from the University of Arizona, and B.A.'s in Film & Video Studies and Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Michigan. His writing has appeared in Spectrum Culture, Vinyl Me, and Please. He is also the author of Dance / Music / Sex / Romance, a song-by-song blog about the music of Prince. He lives in Columbia, Maryland.

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