XXXTENTACION

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

XXXTENTACION was the stage name of Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy, an American rapper, singer and producer, born in Plantation, Florida, in 1998. He began making music on SoundCloud in 2013, after buying a microphone and starting to record with his friend Stokeley Goulbourne, known as Ski Mask the Slump God. His name refers to the Spanish word for temptation. In 2015 he founded the collective Members Only.

Music and breakthrough

The breakthrough came with the single Look at Me, which appeared online in 2016 and entered the American chart in 2017. His first album 17 was released in August 2017 and entered the Billboard 200 at number 2. The second album ? followed in 2018, with Sad! as its lead single. On 18 June 2018 he was shot dead near Deerfield Beach at the age of twenty. Sad! subsequently reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The albums SKINS (2018) and Bad Vibes Forever (2019) also appeared after his death.

Influence

Musically he refused to be pigeonholed. He mixed rap with distorted bass, heavy guitars, piano melodies and soft, vulnerable singing, and named Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur as inspirations. His lyrics were often about depression and loneliness. As a result he is regarded as one of the faces of emo rap and SoundCloud rap, movements that broke through in the second half of the 2010s. His career was short and controversial, partly because of his violent past and the court cases that followed from it, but his influence on a young generation of artists is great.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 201717
• 2018?
• 2018SKINS
• 2019Bad Vibes Forever
• 2019XXXTENTACION Presents: Members Only, Vol. 4

See also

• 17