The narrative arc of Jahseh Onfroy’s creative life was brief but steep, ending in his murder in June. Any discussion of this posthumous album – XXXTentacion’s second release this year – can’t avoid the rapper’s long charge sheet of violent abuse (aggravated battery of his pregnant former girlfriend, for starters). The New York Times suggests this album is being independently released due to its author’s toxicity.
XXX touched a nerve though, ending 2018 as one of the year’s most-streamed artists. Skins remains almost as morally muddy as XXX’s previous output, privileging the emo rapper’s pain above all else, but maintaining his deserved reputation for genre-shredding timeliness. Skins is short but eventful: full of punk-metal digressions (Staring at the Sky) and unexpected musicality, as on the blithe guitar closer, What Are You So Afraid Of. Mid-set, Kanye West drops in for a distracting guest spot, and the grim Train Food tells of XXX confronting death.
More so, perhaps, than his often-harrowing verses, XXX’s appeal lay in the novel direction in which he took hip-hop, and the brevity of his stream-facing output. There’s nothing here quite as aurally arresting as Moonlight, off XXX’s ? LP, but his recasting of Slim Shady as an eclectic depressive indelibly coloured this year.
