I was looking at the RIAA certification numbers
this morning, and it just doesn't compute. It
really defies the laws of public relations, it
defies the logic of cancel culture, and honestly,
it just defies the basic physics of the music
industry. It really does. You have an artist
who has been dead since 2018, an artist who didn't
just have allegations, but had, I mean, we have
audio recordings of him admitting to heinous
violence, and yet, sad. is diamond. Diamond.
Not platinum, diamond. That is a tier occupied
by like... The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Drake.
How? It is the ultimate paradox. And that's what
we're looking at today. Joss Hay, Dwayne Ricardo,
Enfroy, who the world knew as XXXTentacion or
just X. Right. Usually, you know, when we do
these deep dives, we're trying to shine a light
on something that's maybe a bit obscure. But
with X, the problem isn't obscurity at all. It's
that everyone has a completely different version
of him that they cling to. Oh, absolutely. To
some, he was a genius. A prophet of sorrow. To
the kids in the mosh pits, he was the only guy
on the planet who understood their depression,
their alienation. And to the critics or, you
know, to the law. To the critics and, frankly,
to the legal system, he was a monster. A symbol
of everything wrong with toxic masculinity. A
demented abuser who, let's not forget, was charged
with beating a pregnant woman. That is exactly
where I get stuck. Because usually... Society,
you know, it picks a lane. We either cancel the
monster or we find a way to exonerate the genius.
With X, we did neither. No, we did both at the
same time. We did both. And I mean, the collective
culture here, we made him a global superstar
while he was awaiting trial for witness tampering
and aggravated battery. It makes no sense. And
that's our mission for this deep dive. We aren't
here to retry the case, though we have the court
documents and they are grim. We aren't here to
just review the albums. So what's the goal? We
need to figure out how this specific kid from
a juvenile detention center in Lauderhill, Florida,
managed to hack the cultural operating system.
We need to look at the rise of SoundCloud rap,
frankly, the weaponization of mental health,
and that very uncomfortable question. Can you
separate the art from the artist when the art
is the violence? Let's get into the sources,
because the biography here isn't just, you know,
he was born, he rapped, he died. It reads like
a Greek tragedy written by a Florida court reporter.
It really does. And to understand the end, the
BMW I -8, the robbers, the assassination, you
have to go all the way back to the beginning,
January 23, 1998, Plantation, Florida. Which
sounds so idyllic, Plantation, Florida. But the
reality for Jossie was anything but. The sources
we have just paint this picture of immediate
chaotic instability. Instability is putting it
very mildly. I mean, his mother, Cleopatra Bernard,
was very young. She had significant personal
struggles, financial, emotional. And because
of that, Jossie was essentially passed around.
Not with her full time? Not at all. He lived
primarily with his grandmother, Colette Jones,
in Pompano Beach in Lauderhill. And this isn't
just, you know, mom's busy working two jobs.
This is a fundamental lack of attachment from
day one. I remember reading an interview, I think
it was from his time in juvie, where he was asked
about his dad and his response was just scathing.
He just said, what's a father? Right. And his
father was incarcerated on RICO charges when
Josset was 10 years old. So he's serving a nine
year sentence during the most formative years
of his son's life. That absence. It just leaves
a vacuum. But it wasn't just the absence of a
role model. It was the active presence of trauma.
The things this kid saw. The sources are heavy.
He witnessed physical torture in his neighborhood.
He told stories about seeing people get raped.
And then there's the story about his uncle. The
suicide. Jase was the one who found his uncle's
body. Hanging. And that image, the hanging body,
it just haunts his lyrics later on. You hear
it in his music. It's not a metaphor for him.
It's a memory. There is one story from his childhood
that gets cited in every single profile, every
documentary. It's almost become folklore at this
point, the stabbing story. This is the foundational
myth of XXXtentation. It's his origin story.
The story goes that when he was six years old,
six age, a man was attacking his mother. And
Josset allegedly grabbed a knife or a piece of
glass, depends on who tells it. And he stabbed
the guy. He tried to. He ran at the guy and tried
to stab him to protect his mom. At six years
old, I mean, at six, most kids are scared of
the dark or, you know, worrying about losing
a tooth. They are not intervening in violent
domestic disputes with a weapon. Exactly. Now,
we have to be really careful here. The police
reports from that time don't explicitly corroborate
a six -year -old stabbing someone. But trauma
experts who have analyzed his life suggest that
whether the details are 100 % factual or just
exaggerated by memory, the emotional truth is
what matters. What do you mean by that? He learned
at kindergarten age that violence was a valid
language, that it was a tool, not just for aggression,
but for protection. And more importantly, it
was a tool to protect his mother. That's key.
Even though their relationship is so volatile,
he saw himself as her protector. That set up
a pattern that defined his entire life. I am
the violent protector. But, you know, that kind
of behavior, it doesn't really work in a classroom.
Not at all. And the school records show that
he was a misfit from day one. He was expelled
from middle school for fighting. He was kicked
out of the school choir, which, by the way, the
idea of X in a choir robe is just hard to picture.
His aunt forced him to join to channel his energy.
It didn't last long. He attacked another student.
And the reason he gave is so telling, he claimed
the student just touched him. That seems to be
a consistent trigger for him, the invasion of
his personal space. It's a classic hypervigilant
response. It comes from trauma. When you grow
up in an environment where you witness constant
violence, you develop a hair trigger response.
You start to interpret completely neutral actions
as threats. So someone just bumps into you by
accident. But they aren't being clumsy. In your
mind, they're attacking you. You have to react
with overwhelming force. There's also the physical
aspect we should mention. He wasn't a big guy.
He wasn't physically imposing. Not at all. Five
foot six. Yeah. And he had a ventricular septal
defect, a literal hole in his heart from birth.
So you have the Napoleon complex, this medical
vulnerability, the massive childhood trauma,
and the absentee parents. I mean, it's a cocktail
for disaster. And that disaster manifests, as
it so often does, in the juvenile justice system.
Around 2013 or 2014, he lands in a youth detention
center for gun possession. And this. Right here.
This is the crucible. This is where Josse Onfroy
dies and XXXTentacion begins. Because of who
he meets there. Because he meets Stokely Goldburn,
better known to the world as Ski Mask the Slump
God. It's wild to think about that. These two
kids locked up in a Florida juvie, basically
inventing a whole new subgenre of hip hop while
they're doing time. They bonded over freestyling.
It was their escape. But what's so fascinating
in the detention records and in his own interviews
about it is the deep contradiction in X's behavior
even then. How so? On one hand, he positions
himself as a protector. He tells this now famous
story about defending a gay cellmate who was
being bullied. Yeah. He frames himself as this
righteous vigilante standing up against the bullies.
But. There's always a but with him. There's always
a but. He then admits to brutally attacking that
same cellmate later, nearly beating him to death,
because he thought the guy was staring at him
while he was changing his clothes. There it is
again. The hypervigilance. Don't look at me.
Don't touch me. That hair trigger. It shows the
absolute fracture in his identity. He wants to
be the savior, the hero, but his impulse control
is just non -existent. He later claimed in interviews,
I'm not homophobic, I support gay marriage, but
in that high -pressure, testosterone -filled
environment, his immediate reaction to feeling
vulnerable was extreme violence. You know, the
most important thing to come out of that stint
in juvie wasn't the fights, though. It was the
plan. When they got out, they had a roadmap for
their future. But the roadmap wasn't originally
music. That's what people forget. The plan was
home invasions. Seriously? Yes. He and Ski Mask
were going to get out and just rob houses. That
was the career path they had laid out. Wow, that's
grim. We're going to get out of jail so we can
commit crimes that will put us right back in
prison. It is. But Jasa pivots. A girlfriend
at the time encourages him to focus on music.
He buys a cheap blue snowball microphone. He
decides, I'm going to take all this rage, all
this chaos, and put it into audio. And in 2013,
he uploads his first track, Vice City, to a platform
that would change everything. SoundCloud. Okay,
we have to stop right there. We need to talk
about the sound. Because if you were listening
to the radio in 2013, 2014, you had Drake, you
had Katy Perry, you had the super polished, high
-fidelity production. The industry standard was
clean. Crystal clear. Then you put on an early
XXXTentacion track, and it sounds like you're
listening through broken speakers. That was the
genius of it. We call it SoundCloud rap now,
but at the time, the establishment just called
it bad mixing. X realized something absolutely
crucial, maybe by accident, maybe just by pure
intuition. Distortion feels like emotion. Explain
that a bit more. What do you mean distortion
feels like emotion? When you clip the audio,
when the bass is so loud that it physically distorts
the waveform, it creates a visceral reaction
in the listener. It sounds like the song is literally
falling apart. It sounds like the equipment can't
handle the anger. It sounds like a panic attack.
It sounds like panic. It sounds like rage. He
wasn't trying to emulate the clean million dollar
studio sound. He was leaning into the limitations
of his cheap gear and turning a bug into a feature.
So the whole lo -fi aesthetic wasn't just, oh,
I can't afford a proper studio. It was a deliberate
choice. It was, this sounds more real. Precisely.
It's the democratization of distortion. It's
exactly what punk rock did in the 70s. The Sex
Pistols didn't want to sound like Pink Floyd.
X didn't want to sound like Drake. He wanted
to sound like a riot. And his influences, they
reflect that really weird mix. He wasn't just
listening to Tupac or Biggie. Not at all. He
cited Kurt Cobain constantly. He loved Papa Roach,
Three Days Grace. He was a huge Nu Metal fan.
But in the same breath, he'd talk about loving
The Weeknd and, surprisingly, Lana Del Rey. Lana
Del Rey. That feels like a stretch. How does
that connect? Not if you listen to the lyrics
and the moves. He was obsessed with the melancholic
cinematic sadness she projected. Her whole aesthetic
is about being beautiful and broken, and you
can hear it in his music. X would go from screaming
his lungs out over a distorted 808 bass, essentially
doing nu metal vocals, to singing these incredibly
fragile, often off -key piano balance. It's that
versatility that confused people, right? Was
he a rapper? Was he a punk singer? An emo kid?
What box did he put him in? He was all of it.
Yeah. And the internet, especially the kids on
SoundCloud and Tumblr, they ate it up. He formed
the collective members only with Ski Mask and
they started generating this really intense cult
following in South Florida. But the match in
the powder keg, the song that changed everything,
was Look At Me. I remember the first time I heard
Look At Me. I actually checked my headphones
because I thought the wire was loose. The bass
was so fuzzy, so blown out. It was an assault
on the ears, released in late 2015, but it doesn't
really go nuclear until early 2017. And we have
to address the elephant in the room when we talk
about that, or rather the owl in the room. The
KMT controversy. This is a classic moment in
Internet music history. Drake, the biggest artist
in the world, previews a song called KMT during
a show in Amsterdam. And the flow, that aggressive
triplet flow, sounded suspiciously similar to
the one on... Look at me. That, like a hooligan
eye, I'm just like, ah! That cadence. Exactly,
that cadence. Now, to be fair, the triplet slow
is pretty common in rap. It was popularized by
Migos. But the cadence, the delivery, the aggression,
it felt very, very similar. And Drake denied
stealing it. Of course. But X, X was in jail
at the time, facing charges, and he went on the
warpath from his jail cell. He gave interviews
over the phone calling Drake a bitch. He accused
him of stealing culture from an incarcerated
kid. Which is such a bold move for an underground
artist who's, you know, facing serious felony
charges to just go after the biggest star in
the world like that. But it worked. It was the
perfect David versus Goliath narrative. Suddenly,
millions of Drake fans who had never heard of
X were asking, who is this kid with a half blonde,
half black hair? The Cruella de Vil look. That
branding was just undeniable. It was. But here
is where the story takes a very, very sharp and
dark turn. Because while his Spotify numbers
are ticking up into the millions, his real life
is spiraling into absolute unchecked violence.
And we need to talk about this cycle of violence
section of our research. And I want to be very
clear to you listening. This isn't just he got
into some fights. This is serious criminal behavior.
Yeah, looking at the timeline, the rap sheet
is longer than the discography at this point.
It starts with the robbery in 2016. The home
invasion of a man named Shea Thomas. X and some
associates break in. Pistol whip the guy, steal
an iPad, a PlayStation, and $20. It's gritty,
low -level violent crime. He pleads no contest,
gets probation, but then the table has incident.
Dylan Turner, who is his manager. His own manager.
This one is chilling because it's not random.
It's someone on his own team. There's a dispute
over money, a few thousand dollars. X believes
Turner is withholding cash from him. So what
does he do? He breaks into Turner's apartment.
He holds a knife to his stomach, screaming, what
if I stab you? What if I kill you right now?
And then he actually does it. He plunges the
knife into his abdomen. And the aftermath is
just as indicative of his psychology as the act
itself. X allegedly forces Turner to drop the
charges in exchange for returning his computer,
which held all his music files. But X had already
wiped the computer clean. That's incredibly manipulative.
It's Machiavellian. And then as a final twist,
he pays Turner's hospital bills and apologizes.
It establishes this terrifying pattern, an extreme,
impulsive, violent act, followed by a transactional
attempt to fix it. I stabbed you, but here's
the money for the stitches, so we're good, right?
But even the Tabs Liz incident, as awful as it
is, it gets completely overshadowed by the name
Geneva Ayala. Geneva Ayala. This is the center
of the moral black hole when it comes to XXXTentacion.
She was his ex -girlfriend. And the allegations
she brought forward in October 2016 are some
of the most disturbing I've ever read in any
celebrity case. We have to warn you listening
here. This is graphic. It is. She accused him
of beating her regularly. of choking her until
she passed out, of holding her head underwater
in the bathtub until she nearly drowned, of threatening
to cut her tongue out with a knife. And there
was a specific incident involving, what, a barbecue
fork? A barbecue fork and a wire grill brush.
He allegedly held them up to her face and told
her to pick which one he was going to penetrate
her with. It's torture. It's sadism. And the
charge that stuck the hardest in the public consciousness,
the one everyone remembers, was aggravated battery
of a pregnant woman. Now, there is some dispute
in the sources about the pregnancy itself. Right.
And it's a key point. Later, in secretly recorded
audio, you can hear X telling his friends that
he doubted she was actually pregnant. But in
the eyes of the law, and certainly in the context
of the abuse, the terror he inflicted was real,
regardless of her medical status at the time.
And his fans. His fan base. They didn't believe
her. Or maybe they just didn't care. This is
the cult aspect we talked about. His fans went
after Ayala. They harassed her online. They doxed
her. They showed up at her court dates to intimidate
her. They claimed she was lying for money. They
claimed her very visible injuries were just makeup.
They concocted this entire online conspiracy
that she was framing him to ruin his career just
as it was taking off. But then years later, after
he died, the pitchfork tape comes out. The smoking
gun. There's no other way to describe it. This
was secret audio released posthumously by Pitchfork.
In it, X is talking to some friends and he says
explicitly on tape, I already bashed her face.
I made her look bad. He confesses. It's right
there on tape. It is. And in that same tape,
he alludes to a completely separate stabbing
incident involving eight people in Deerfield
Beach. He says, I got no tear, referring to a
teardrop tattoo, but I done stabbed eight people.
So he was admitting to crimes the police didn't
even have pinned on him. He was bragging about
it. Yes. And this is the fundamental tension
of his entire story. You have this tape where
he sounds like an absolute remorseless psychopath.
And then you have his debut album, Seventeen.
Which came out in August of 2017, right in the
middle of all this. And it is one of the most
heartbreaking, vulnerable albums you will ever
hear. Tracks like Jocelyn Flores, dedicated to
a friend who committed suicide in his hotel room
while he was there. Fuck love. These songs are
raw, open wounds. He is singing about wanting
to die, about being unlovable, about the immense
pain inside him. And that's the hook, isn't it?
That's the core of the paradox. If he was just
a violent thug, nobody would care. But he was
a violent thug who could articulate the depths
of teenage depression better than anyone else
in the entire genre. He effectively monetized
his own mental illness. He created a parasocial
relationship where his fans felt like, he gets
me, he is damaged just like I am. And because
they identified so deeply with his pain, they
felt compelled to defend his violence. It's like,
to them, Geneva Ayala wasn't a victim of his
violence. She was an obstacle to his happiness.
She was the reason their hero was sad. It's a
deeply twisted logic. It's weaponized empathy.
He used his own vulnerability as a shield for
his brutality. That is a perfect way to put it.
Yeah. And it worked. His second album, which
came out in early 2018, debuts at number one
on the Billboard 200. Sad becomes a global anthem.
He is by every metric on top of the world, but
the legal walls are closing in fast. He's facing
decades in prison. The witness tampering charges
were piling up. And this brings us to early 2018,
the redemption arc or. the alleged redemption
the helping hand era suddenly x's social media
completely changes he's posting about charity
he's donating instruments and video games to
foster homes he starts the helping hand challenge
encouraging other rappers to do good deeds then
he gets involved with parkland which was a huge
story at the time the stoneman douglas shooting
happened right in his backyard it was his community
he released a song hope and dedicated it to the
victims He went and visited Anthony Borges, a
survivor who was shot five times, in the hospital.
He announced he was going back to school to get
a GED. He was settling down with a new girlfriend,
Genesis Sanchez. So I have to play the skeptic
here. I look at this timeline and I say, his
massive domestic violence trial is coming up.
His lawyer almost certainly told him to clean
up his public image so the jury sees a philanthropist,
not a monster. That is the cynical and perhaps
the most realistic view. The timing is incredibly
suspicious. If he goes to trial as XXXTentacion
the monster, he clearly gets 20 years. He goes
as Yase the reformed philanthropist, maybe he
gets leniency. It's a classic PR move. But is
it possible it was real? That there was a genuine
change happening? We also have to consider he
was only 20 years old. The human brain isn't
even fully developed at that age. Is it possible
he was genuinely horrified by who he had become?
He talked a lot about wanting to kill his old
self. He said in a vlog, I'm going to stop being
a bad person. I'm going to be a better person.
He was also getting into some really weird spiritual
stuff around this time, right? This wasn't just
like, I'm going to start going to church. Oh,
no, not at all. It was anthroposophy, the philosophy
of Rudolf Steiner. That's a deep cut for a SoundCloud
rapper from Florida. What even is that? It's
very esoteric. It's a spiritual philosophy that
deals with, you know, spiritual science and the
nature of the human being. He was reading books
on the occult. He was obsessed with the concept
of indigo children. Indigo children. It's this
new age idea that certain youths possess special,
almost supernatural traits and are here to like
usher in a new era for humanity. And he believes
he was one of them. And reincarnation was a big
theme for him, too. A huge theme. He believed
in the cycle of death and rebirth. He told people
that he felt he couldn't break the cycle and
move on until he lived one life without harming
other people. Which he clearly had not done.
And he knew that. He felt he had already failed
the test for this lifetime. He was obsessed with
the color blue during this period, dyeing his
hair blue, buying a blue microphone. He was trying
to signal this profound spiritual shift, whether
it was mania or genuine growth or just a really
good PR strategy. We never got to find out. Because
of June 18th, 2018? The day the clock ran out.
Riva Motorsports, Deerfield Beach, Florida. Walk
us through what happened. The sources are pretty
clear. This wasn't a random drive -by shooting.
This was a setup. It was a targeted ambush. X
goes to the dealership to look at motorcycles.
He's with his uncle, and he's carrying a Louis
Vuitton bag. Inside that bag is $50 ,000 in cash.
It's hearing around 50 grand. It's the rapper
lifestyle. It's a flex. He had just gone to the
bank. But it made him a target. He leaves the
dealership, gets into his black BMW i8, which
is a very conspicuous car. It has those dramatic
butterfly doors. He tries to pull out of the
parking lot. And he blocks. A black Dodge Journey
SUV cuts him off, blocking the exit completely.
Two men jump out. They're masked. They're armed.
They don't say get out of the car. They don't
try to carjack him. They go straight for that
Louis Vuitton bag. There's a struggle over the
bag. A brief one. X refuses to let go of it.
And then shots are fired multiple times at point
blank range in the neck. The robbers grab the
bag, jump back in the SUV, and they peel off.
And X is just left slumping in the driver's seat.
And just like that, the most controversial, the
most streamed, the most hated, and the most loved
artist of his entire generation is gone. At 20
years old. The aftermath was just, it was insane.
I remember the videos circulating on social media
before the news outlets had even confirmed it.
It was the first smartphone assassination of
a major star. It was a new level of macabre.
Fans were watching these blurry, horrific videos
of his body in the car on Twitter while TMZ was
still trying to verify the death. It was gruesome
and it was immediate. And the music just exploded.
Sad. Jumped from number 52 all the way to number
one on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the first
posthumous number one for a lead artist since
the notorious B .I .G. in 1997. That puts him
in the history books forever. But the legal system
didn't stop. They did catch the guys who did
it. They did. Four men. Michael Boatwright, Trayvon
Newsom, Badrick Williams and Robert Allen. Took
a long time. The trial wasn't until 2023. But
three of them were convicted of first degree
murder. Life sentences. It wasn't a rival rap
beef. It wasn't some grand conspiracy. It was
just a robbery gone horribly wrong. Just greed.
They wanted the bag. But now we're left with
the legacy. And this is a really hard part. His
estate, his mother, they started releasing posthumous
albums. Skins. Bad Vibes Forever. And this is
where it gets kind of icky for a lot of people.
Skins was barely 20 minutes long. It felt unfinished.
Bad Vibes Forever felt like a Frankenstein project.
They were taking unfinished demos, sometimes
just a hook or a mumble track he had recorded
on his phone, and slapping three or four guest
features on it to create a song. It really felt
like they were milking a ghost. It did. And then
they released NFTs of his old music. It felt
like the commercial machine was just stripping
the carcass for parts. Critics, they hated it.
They called it exploitative. But the fans, they
consumed all of it. They were just desperate
for anything new from him in any form. So where
do we land on this? How do you sum it all up?
We have the diamond records. We have the confirmed
domestic abuse. We have the music that helped
millions of kids. We have the tragic, violent
death. How do we synthesize this? I think X represents
the death of the perfect victim or the perfect
villain narrative. He was both. He was a perpetrator
of terrible, unforgivable violence. He broke
a woman's spirit and her body. That is a fact.
confirmed by his own voice on that tape. But
he also, and this is just as true, saved lives.
Saved lives. You really think that's true, that
it's not an exaggeration? I've seen the letters
from fans. I've read thousands of comments. Kids
who say, I had the pills in my hand, I was going
to kill myself, but I heard Jocelyn Flores and
I realized I wasn't alone. You can't just dismiss
that. You can't take that away from his legacy
either. It's the classic Wagner problem, right?
Can beautiful art come from an ugly soul? With
X, it's even more complex than that. I don't
think you can separate them because the art was
the ugliness. The reason the music worked, the
reason it resonated, was because it was so damaged.
If he had been a happy, well -adjusted kid from
the suburbs, he never would have made Look at
Me or Sad. The trauma that made him a monster
was the exact same trauma that made him a star.
That is a terrifying thought. That we as a culture
rewarded his trauma. We did. We streamed it.
We consumed it. His legacy is a caution. He absolutely
changed the sound of modern rap forever. Everyone
from Juice WRLD to Billie Eilish has cited his
influence. The distorted bass, the emo lyrics,
that's the norm now. But he's also a reminder
that unresolved trauma just destroys everything
around it. He destroyed his victims. He destroyed
his own peace of mind. And eventually the violent
lifestyle he built for himself. Destroyed him.
If he had lived, if that SUV hadn't blocked him
in that day, do you think he would have actually
changed or would we be doing a deep dive right
now on his 20 year prison sentence? That is the
unanswerable question, isn't it? Was the helping
hand era a mask or was it a metamorphosis? We
will never, ever know. And maybe that mystery,
that unresolved question mark is why we're all
still talking about him. A heavy one today, but
a necessary one, I think. Absolutely. Thanks
for listening to The Deep Dive. Take care of
yourselves out there.