“Do you still dream about me late at night?/Or are you out there living better times?” he reads from his Cameo inbox. The Blink-182 feature that closes the album is clearly meant as a nod to XXXTentacion’s love of pop-punk, but the only thing Mark Hoppus seems to know about XXXTentacion is that he died. Despite their shared Miami origins, Rick Ross mentions XXXTentacion alongside Nipsey Hussle as if reading from a teleprompter list of recently deceased rappers. It’s never clear what XXXTentacion represents to the artists who show up to support him. The dark, soul-bearing Kemba verse on “Daemons” so thoroughly outclasses XXXTentacion’s vague occultisms (“Torture victims are due to scripture”) that its appearance feels like a pity offering. The boisterous, swaggering “Voss,” on loan from Sauce Walka’s 2018 mixtape Drip God, feels like a Sauce Walka song, a common problem when XXXTentacion is paired with artists whose versatility is rooted in technique and perspective rather than pantomime. They sound like high-schoolers trying to shit-talk their way through detention. On “School Shooters,” reportedly recorded as a response to the Parkland shooting, XXXTentacion threatens to drink the blood of school shooters while Lil Wayne empathizes with them, ending with XXX screaming gibberish. The expansive features list heightens this lack of cohesion, resulting in jumbled songs that treat XXXTentacion like an accent rather than the marquee artist. His legacy, as presented by Bad Vibes Forever, is that he used SoundCloud between 20 and he listened to everything, even country. His constant hopscotching reveals no new dimensions to his songwriting, no larger artistic vision. From the diet dancehall of “Hot Gyal” and “Royalty” to the off-brand Chief Keef-isms of “Eat It Up” to the Cudi hums of “before i realize,” for all his versatility, XXXTentacion largely comes across as rudderless and indistinct. But he’s more tourist than conqueror, a one-man karaoke performance. “He wanted to be the artist that literally conquers all genres,” his manager Solomon Sobonde said. This approach could approximate intimacy, but the flip side was that it prioritized his “truth” alone, cropping out the world beyond his rage and pain and fizzing into drivel whenever he attempted storytelling beyond “I’m hurt.” As he began to extend himself beyond emo crooning and mosh rap into full-on rock balladry and thrash ragers, his solipsism remained his main tool, resulting in genre-straddling that never amounted to more than cosplay. In his world, to be broken and distorted was to be real. Favoring blunt, undermixed songs with slapdash structures and high-octane performances, his music turned crudeness into a kind of honesty. This flimsy, haphazard album attempts to memorialize the rapper as a martyr and renaissance man when he is neither.Īt his best, XXXTentacion was a reductionist. But like ? and his first posthumous record, Skins, Bad Vibes Forever fails to make his personal perception and aesthetic ideas cohere into anything other than generic kingmaking. XXXTentacion’s estate clearly chose this clip to honor and preserve the self-image that the rapper was cultivating when he was shot and killed in 2018 while awaiting trial for domestic abuse charges. “I’m tryna to tell the world to fucking relax, bro… Let me be a prince, let me be a king, nigga,” he says in a rambling snippet repurposed as the album’s introduction. The late rapper makes a similar petition on his second posthumous album, billed as his “final” release.
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