DISGRACELAND - XXXTentacion: Mellow Beats and Ultra Violence

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

XXXTentacion was one of Generation Z’s most talented hip hop stars but his ascent was marked by violence and drama; beatdowns, beefs (what’s up, Drake?) and abuse. XXXTentacion’s music quickly rose from Soundcloud to the top of the charts due in part to the relative loneliness and alienation he repped in his lyrics, sentiments his audience quickly latched onto. XXXTentacion’s connection to his audience was (and still is even in death) unique and powerful. Their connection via social media-fueled him, inspired him and ironically alienated him, just like his penchant for violence. What, if any of it, all led to his untimely demise? For a full list of contributors, see the show notes at disgracelandpod.com This episode was originally published on April 30, 2019. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTER Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: Instagram YouTube X (formerly Twitter)  Facebook Fan Group TikTokSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about hip-hop star XXXTentacion are insane. He beat a cellmate to near death, bludgeoned his pregnant girlfriend, and incited riots from the stage during his live shows. He was born into violence, informed by it. It was there for him when nothing, when nobody was there for him.

He was alone, and despite his growing fame or perhaps because of his, it, unable to get a grip on his life, a life that was mysteriously cut short, a life that began and ended in violence, and that produced great music along the way. And that music you heard at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Louis Melo Bellaro, BK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Psycho by Post Malone. And why would I play you that specific slice of imagined minor two cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on June 18, 2018. And that was the day that XXXTentacion went on a shopping spree that turned deadly,

but that ultimately freed him from a world of intense loneliness and pain. On this episode, Psycho Cheese, Ultraviolence, and XXXTentacion. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgraceland. It makes you crazy. Jase Aunfroyd knew this. His father taught him this at a young age. It was probably the most important thing he taught him. In jail, if you're not careful, the crazy will rub off on you.

And no matter what you think of your fellow prisoners, no matter how close you become to them, you're always alone in jail. Sure, technically this wasn't jail. It was a juvenile detention center. But Jasey called it as he saw it, young in jail. He was 16 and had one of the longest rap sheets of any of the kids in lockup. He was in for a year on a gun possession charge,

but everyone who knew him knew that more charges would eventually be handed down to young Jase. He had that complete lack of shits to give vibe, menace bleeding out of the corners of his squinty eyes, an utter lack of respect in almost every one of his mannerisms. Jase was a punk, a high school dropout. But Young in jail wasn't all bad. He met ski there, aka Ski Mask the Slump God, birth name Stokely Goldburn.

Jase and Ski became fast friends, watched each other's backs, vibed on hip-hop. They talked about making music together on the outside. Like Ski or Ski Mask the Slump God, Jase had an MC name as well, XXTentacion or Unknown Temptation. And at this moment, Ski was trying to protect XXX Tentassione,

a.k.a.X. from being subjected to some punk's unknown temptation. There was a purve on the block who was into fresh meat, and in young-in-jail, cellmates were rotated every two weeks, so X's time in the barrel was about to come up. His new cellmate was the creep, ski warned him about. X sat on his bunk, stared at his magazine. His new cellmate stood against the wall,

his head seemingly off somewhere else, but his eyes darting back toward X whenever he thought X wasn't paying attention. And this went on for days, whenever they were alone in the cell, and it pissed X off. Tension, building, like a ticking time bomb. X told one of the guards, Yo, this dude better recognize who he's fucking with.

I'll keep to myself, I'll leave him alone, but if he comes at me wrong, I'm going to fucking kill him. No joke. His dad was right. The crazy had rubbed off on him. And that night, after the warning to the guard, X felt his pervy roommate's eyes leering at him again. First, casually glancing in his direction.

Then, unable to break his gaze at him. X's crotch. Fuck this. X leaped out of bed, snatched the purve by the throat, slammed him hard into the wall of the cell, grabbed him by his crotch, and squeezed him into submission.

His lips inches away from his cellmate's face, he spat out, who the fuck do you think you are? All the purve could say was, no, no, no. X pulled his hand off the dude's crotch and knead him in the nuts. His cellmate fell to the ground.

X went full Tasmanian devil, a whirling fury of fists and kicks, as he proceeded to beat the desire out of his would-be sexual assail, and he lost himself. He was beyond the moment, somewhere else, transported by the violence. Suddenly, he was six years old again, back home with his mom. His dad was in lock-up, again, as he had been for most of X's young life. One of his mom's boyfriends was attacking her,

pummeling her with his fists and his kicks, dragging her about their tiny apartment by the hair, yelling incomprehensively, zero humanity. It was horrifying for little Jasei, but he was determined to do something about it. He grabbed a shirt of glass from the floor, wreckage from the recent melee, and charged full steam ahead at his mom's boyfriend. He dove at him and began stabbing his mom's attacker all over, and the violent act of bravery worked.

His mom's boyfriend got hip quick and split. It taught young Jase a lesson. Violence is effective. It works. It's a means to an end. And when the world won't listen, stab it in the side of the gut with a shard of glass from a broken bottle of St. Iads. Back in the now, in his cell, X is assailant. Now his victim was listening, listening to the sounds of X grunting between a hail of fists and feet.

The thought of stabbing his mom's attacker had him even more keyed up. He was not in control anymore. He was gone. As he administered the beating, his mind drifted further back into the past. And the memory stunk of dank weed, sweat, and mellows. He was back on the streets he was raised up on in the ghetto that they called the four-way, just south of Asuck, Florida and north of absolutely nowhere. His mom took care of him as best she could back then, constantly reminding him of how pretty he was

and encouraging him to get gold teeth and build up his grill from a young age. His mom was full of advice. She's the one who told him that if necessary, he could hit a woman, but he had to be a gentleman about it. Putting his hands on a girl was only allowed after giving her a warning to stop whatever she was doing that was annoying him. And this notion jived with his early experiences with violence, a means to an end.

X was learning. He was also starting to learn something more acceptable, music. Members of his extended family encouraged him to explore this passion. It was clear from a young age that he was obsessed with music. So his aunt signed him up for school and church choir, and X thrived for a while. But eventually, he was killed. kicked out for physically attacking another chorus member over a small slight.

And it wasn't unlike the beating he was now laying onto his cellmate. Relentless, blind rage. In the cell, X was furious, punching, kicking, screaming. Don't fucking touch me. Nobody can touch me. Don't fucking touch me. Nobody can touch me. X grabbed the mangled mess of a body on the floor, still groaning,

dragged his cellmate to the lip of the bed. The bloody jumpsuit slid wet along the hard floor. And when he got under the bed, X lifted his victim's blood-matted head by the back of the scalp and started positioning his face into a bite position over the edge of the steel bed frame. Open your mouth, motherfucker. Open it. X was going to curb stomp the purve's death. In that moment, the cell door is opened and the guards rushed in,

saving X's victim from X and ultimately X from himself, just in the nick of time. A lifetime of violent self-preservation had been unleashed onto this bloody pulp of a kid, all for looking at X the wrong way. And the dude was gurneyed to the ER, but at least his jaw was still attached to his skull. An X would not be adding a murder charge to his already too long rap sheet. As the guards restored order,

X sat on his bunk, appearing somewhat disoriented, he looked up at them, shaking his head. I told you, I told you, was all he said to the guards. The guards threw him into solitary for the night. X smirked while being hauled off. For one precious evening,

he'd be at peace. After days of getting eye-fucked by his cellmate, the alone time was welcome. This was solitude, not solitary. An artist is never alone. Long drives, empty houses, solitary confinement, it doesn't matter. An artist has their thoughts, their ideas, their art to keep them company. In solitary confinement, X could work out the beats and rhymes he had become obsessed with in his head all night long. He and Ski would be out in a few months, and X knew that that would be his time. He'd really be able to pursue his music, gain recognition, and escape this street to school, the street to prison pipeline. He was half right. Once released from Juvie, X realized something. Freedom was lonely, almost like jail. Obviously not as bad, but now that he's a little bit older

and on the outside, the more reality set in, the more it seemed like there was only one constant in this life. Loneliness. You come into this world the same way you go out. Alone. You come into this world. The same way you go out. alone as fuck. X hustled, worked on his music to keep his mind in the right place. The recognition didn't come until he dropped his first SoundCloud track, Vice City, in early 2014. Several EPs followed over the next year, including his first collaboration with Ski. X's dark, moody beats, and unfiltered rhymes won over a passionate following. He was stoked.

He had what most artists never find, an audience. and because of it, he seemed less alone. There were others, other kids who felt left behind by the real world, even though they were born just like X during a time when it was a given that if you were a kid, you were going to have the internet jacked into your veins 24-7 and thus supposedly be connected. Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter,

the father, the son, and the holy ghost of Generation Z, constant engagement, constant envy, constant desire, a sea of like-minded peers, a swipe away, so hard to form a real connection with. Life was complicated, and social media recognition in a burgeoning career couldn't erase an entire childhood of violence and neglect. X's career grew, and so did the pressure. So he dealt with it the only way he knew how, through violence. His rap sheet grew right alongside his startup. Through his music, X became a mirror for his new fans' loneliness and pain. His music had meaning. The views, the listens, the love,

likes, the shares, they all piled up, and soon the money started to pile up too. But it was dangerous. Not in the same way as crime, but dangerous emotionally. Existentially, X felt a growing void inside of him, a gnawing itch that only music could scratch. The solution went like this. Get sad, get high, fuck around with logic, make a beat, get sad again, get high again, write some lyrics, record a vocal, mix it over a beat, Give the track of name, export the file to an MP3, post the song online, and let the internet do its thing. Make him a star. It worked.

Because his ex soon found out the internet is a fucking black hole, just like the hole inside him. And he was trying to fill one hole with another. X knew the truth about the internet better than anyone, that it's an abyss. He knew that when you stare into that abyss, it stares back at you and it's scary as fuck. But like any other Fear X experience, He thought he could fight it. He knew the perspective he repped in his music was unique but universal. And he could feel it in the first crackles of recognition.

He had touched a nerve. After a life of loneliness and violence, his music was his chance to connect and to feel the warmth of belonging. Fuck the fear. X dove into the void head first. On Instagram, Jocelyn Flora's booming follower account knew her as at Real Jocelyn. Most of her internet followers were back home in O'Hicester. Ohio, but she was in the south now, lost in the swampy flatlands of Florida with its sticky air

and starlit nights. She was alone in the backseat of a strange car, staring out the window, being driven somewhere she didn't know by two men she didn't know, and they didn't know her either. The two men were talking in the front, ignoring Jocelyn, making plans to get high and eat some Jimmy Johns once they took care of her. Later, when asked by police if Jocelyn had said anything to them before the incident. All they could remember was her muttering to herself under her breath. Lesson learned. They zipped through the dead Florida air. Jocelyn always hated the quiet, but what she wouldn't do now to be back in her quiet bedroom in Ohio. One good thing about the quiet, she thought, was that it had a way of making the sound of her Instagram notifications

all the more exciting when they rang out on her phone, loud and exhilarating in the dead silence of her parents' house. Just a couple weeks before, she was just a another teen girl sitting on her bed, obsessed with her phone, staring into the void. She'd exhausted her feed, having scrolled down repeatedly for the past 90 minutes. At first, totally engaged, casually liking this, commenting on that, bouncing in and out of profiles she was newly interested in and occasionally DMing friends and even new people she'd maybe like to get to know. This was serious stuff, the DM, the direct message.

It was a high wire act on Instagram. Sure, go ahead and send a message to that person. But if they don't respond, you're dead. There's no coming back from it in the other person's eyes. Jocelyn was careful with who she reached out to. Social media politics were the only politics and scary stuff. Don't get caught begging the void to stare back because that would mean you were totally alone.

For Jocelyn, an aspiring Instagram model from a conservative religious family, social media was a lifeline, a conduit to an imagined, a better life. An Instagram was a portal that reassured her there were other people like her out there, and that she wasn't all by herself. But nothing made her feel more alone than an unreturned direct message. Conversely, nothing made her feel more alive than an unsolicited direct message from someone interesting, particularly someone interesting with a lot of followers.

And someone just like that, I reached out 1,000 miles across the glowing void. He was a rapper from Florida, not much older than her. Not much older than her, but he was hitting critical mass on SoundCloud way faster than she was on Instagram. He had just gotten out of juvie and was still on parole. She had a troubled past just like him. His online presence felt raw and unfiltered, and she felt raw and unfiltered all the time. But this guy, by comparison, was an exposed nerve and she was quickly obsessed. His name on SoundCloud was XXXTentacion, and that's exactly what appealed to Jocelyn.

He was an unknown temptation. In just a few days, they started texting back and forth, even got on Skype and FaceTime together. He was looking to launch a clothing line. He thought she could model for him. Had he just slid into her DMs for sex and business? Their talks didn't feel transactional to her. They had a real connection, didn't they?

They had started chatting so much, so fast. When he offered to buy her a plane ticket to come stay with him in Florida, she gave the phone to her mom so he could ask her permission. She was only 16 after all. Jocelyn's mom didn't know much about the internet, but she knew her daughter, knew how unhappy she was in Ohio. She had been cutting herself and threatening suicide since the age of 12. Maybe a few days in the sunny south with her new quote-unquote friend would help.

Besides, her friend was asking permission, so polite, what was the worst that could happen? But Jocelyn's dreams wilted fast in the Florida heat. X kept her at an apartment with a second, you know, you could be a model too, chick, named Zoe, who he had conveniently never mentioned to Jocelyn. Neither girl was happy about it. By the end of her first weekend there,

a bag of seven grand in cash, X's pay for his most recent live shows had gone missing from his room. He and his entourage placed the two girls in separate rooms and grilled them like cops seeking a confession. Both of them denied the theft, accused the other, and were ready to fight it out. The situation was heated,

and whatever might happen next wouldn't go over well with X's parole officer. Something had to give. Fuck this, X thought. Get rid of them. Both girls. So here she was in a place she didn't belong, being told she didn't belong, kicked out in the backseat of X's boys shipbox, rattling down the road en route to wherever they decided she should be.

The two members of X's crew pulled into a Hampton Inn. They booked a room. What was the plan, she wondered. Was X going to buy her a ticket home? without giving her any information and within an hour of arriving, X's dude split to get high. Apparently, there was no plan at all. But it was clear to Jocelyn that to X,

she had just been a thing, a prop, an object, his boys treating her like contraband at a stash house. After two weeks of sudden, intense connection, the last text X sent to Jocelyn was to tell her that she couldn't stay with him anymore. She felt more alone now than she ever did back in her room in Ohio, isolated, staring aimlessly at her phone. Life was cruel.

Lesson learned. Time to unplug. When one of X's boys returned later, Jocelyn was in the bathroom. The door was locked. The lights were on. Blazed out of his mind, the dude didn't think twice about it

before he passed out on the hotel bed. And when he awoke the next morning to piss, he found that the bathroom door was still locked and that the lights were still on. And Jocelyn was... Shit. Where was she? He banged on the door.

Yo, open up. I ain't trying to piss my pants. Nothing. He banged some more. Nothing moved on the other side. He called the front office, and by the time the maintenance man showed up with the key to the bathroom door, X's dude knew what was waiting for them on the other side. Jocelyn Flores's dead body. The 16-year-old had taken her own life, and there was a note.

It read, I always get let down. Maybe because I expect so much from people who don't give people. of a fuck about me. The note then ended with the haunting line. Well, at least I know who I am. When X heard the news, he was shook. In a haze, it took him a week to address the situation the only way he knew how,

by connecting to his fans through Snapchat in a confessional video. There was this girl. I basically flew down here to model pretty much. Great girl, beautiful girl, wonderful personality. She owed no signs of depression whatsoever. When she flew down here, in an unexplained way, she killed herself when she came down here. It was a devastating situation to deal with.

I basically got on here today to address her and her family because I haven't been able to, obviously, contact her family personally. I'm on here to pay my condolences. Whatever grief X really felt publicly, he appeared to give it short shrift. Pretty soon he was out touring while Jocelyn's family was left with nothing but questions. But there's no denying that this extremely disturbing sequence of events left a genuine impact on X. His first album, 17, came out a few months later and would feature two tracks inspired by the tragic death of Jocelyn Flores, revenge, and another title simply Jocelyn Flores. Both were incredibly raw and painful. And in an unsettling move, the key art for the song, Revenge, was a copy of Jocelyn's suicide note itself, horrifying as it was.

X had transformed an unthinkable tragedy into something relatable. He had taken life-threatening loneliness and transformed it into a connection with his audience online. And when they listened to the track, late at night, alone in their room, staring into their phones, they, like Jocelyn before them, knew that they weren't alone. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. One month after Jocelyn Flores took her life, XXXTentacion took the stage at the Observatory in San Diego. A song he had begun performing wasn't on any album yet,

but his legion of downhearted diehards already knew it well enough to sing along. X wore sandals, bright red basketball shorts and a hoodie. Dressed like a slob, but pulling it off as only a 19-year-old can, he had that gray sweatpants look on lock. X put one foot on the stage and the other up on the monitor wedge in front of him. He looked more creed than Kanye, yet he owned the spotlight. Covered in tats, he held the Mike Jenner. and oozed that sensitive tough guy vibe that his fans couldn't resist.

Self-loathing opening verse was about to hit. Then, from out of nowhere, some dude came bombing across the stage, leapt into the air and came down hard on X with a full-body flying sucker punch. His clenched fist connected straight onto X's right temple. What the fuck just happened? For an instant, the crowd was in shock. X went down like a brick, out, cold. Who the hell just knocked up the star attraction last?

on stage. The crowd didn't know. They went apeshit, flooded the stage. X's crew and members of some other entourage were immediately in a bare-knuckle brawl. Who the fuck were these dudes? Obviously, they were with the stage dive bomber. A security member used his burly body to shield X's limp form and tried clearing a lane to carry the unconscious rapper off stage. The brawl quickly escalated into a knife fight. Screens rose up from the audience near stage right. Someone had just been stuck with a long blade. Chaos everywhere. The tech crew is in the mix now, trying to remove gear from the stage and getting caught up in the melee. Mic stands were weaponized.

PA equipment was trashed. The audience morphed into part Friday night under the lights fight fans and part camera crew. Multiple fans captured the whole incident on their phones. And exes fans who followed every beat closely online knew who the attacking crew was. On mass, they started chanting, fuck Rob Stone, fuck Rob Stone. Rob Stone was a local rapper who had been feuding. with X's crew since back in April when he and Ski started talking shit about him

after sharing a bill in L.A. Adding to the insanity of it all, X's pre-recorded backing track, complete with his vocals and moody guitar from revenge, kept pumping out over the venue's sound system, providing a first-person soundtrack to his own beatdown. Wild!

X had come a long way from his and Ski's days back in Youngen jail, in some ways, and in other ways he was right back where he started, engulfed in violent. He spent three years building a rabid fan base on SoundCloud with solo tracks and EP collabs with Ski. But SoundCloud doesn't pay. Crime does. So while he built his fan base, he paid the bills with a series of home invasions. Robbing was serious business. X was busted back in November. In the following March, he pled no contest to robbery and battery charges. And now he was on probation for six years. Probation or not, X's rise seemed to understand.

unstoppable, and he wanted to make the leap from gangster to mogul. Adam 22 was now his manager. Asap Rocky was tweeting about him. He had a girlfriend, too. Geneva. Someone he picked up at a show, but a girlfriend nonetheless. He was trying to straighten out. Easier said than done. Drake, that Canadian after-school special,

take him home to your parents, pretty boy. That middle of the road Rhymosaurus of mediocrity, released a new song, KMT. And when he did, X's online army freaked the fuck. fuck out. Drake was ripping off X's flow, or so went their gut reactions. Twitter detectives showed that Drake had just started following X on Twitter a month before KMT hit. Hip-hop YouTubers mashed up the two tracks to expose Drake as a rip-off artist. Might be a coincidence, but that dude Drake got a bad history, tweeted Prash Friends.

Drake straight up stealing XXTentacion's flow, I Am Dead A-F, tweeted Tomahalli. X was so pissed he could have murdered Drake. In a radio interview, he called it a quote-unquote bitch move and said Drake wasn't a man. The beef drove a ton of online engagement and there was a fever pitch surrounding X. His fans were Legion and the buzz wasn't just about a new potential voice of a generation.

It felt like more than that because X wasn't their voice. X was more than that. He was their bloodstream. X's fans were turning out to be as violent as him because crazy rubs off on you. The knife fights on stage were bad, but X's fans were likely to riot at any given show. A pop-up performance in Miami that April turned into a full-fledged brawl with police.

X punched a fan in the face in Salt Lake City. In California, he beat another fan in the head with his microphone. In Tampa, a crowd two and a half times the venue's capacity took to the streets after authorities canceled the show for public safety. The mob became a riot. chased X's car as it left, blocked streets, and chanted fuck no over and over. X had survived his childhood and built a hip-hop career by living his life as an exposed nerve. Like a brain cell, he could fire the chemically pure message of his music across the abyss,

across the synapse of the internet, and light up all the other brains around him, his audience. And pretty soon he had set the whole hive mind, his fan base on fire, and they were setting venues of fire with violence in turn. But no matter how much action he said, stirred up, but no matter how much connection it generated, X still felt alone. The gilded cage of fame turned out to be like that night back in Youngen jail with the purve. To X, fame was like being trapped in a cell with that vacant stare. It was a constant paranoid itch that no amount of art or expression could fill. He felt hollowed out and emptied, and the void followed him

wherever he went now, constantly threatening to consume him, and there was no escape. It was at his worst when he was alone or in private moments with this girl, Geneva. She met ex at a show of the previous May, and within a couple of weeks, she moved in with him in his Miami apartment. But theirs was no whirlwind romance. It was a runaway elevator drop into a living hell. Yes, that's a trigger warning for some seriously fucked up abuse that is about to be depicted, so skip ahead a couple minutes if you want to skip out on hearing some truly barbaric shit. According to Geneva's testimony and her eventual deposition for domestic violence charges. Within two weeks of living together, X confronted her with a barbecue fork

and a wire grill cleaning brush and told her she had a choice. She didn't have to deal with both violent instruments, but she did have to choose one for him to fuck her with. She shook with fear. X leaned in close and began stroking the fork along her inner thigh. Geneva passed out before making her choice. Within a couple of months, they had moved to Orlando, where X threatened a killer nearly every day. One night he heard Geneva humming along to another hip-hop star's verse, and in a jealous rage, he headbutted her, threw her into the bathtub, jumped on top of her and beat her senseless.

He then forced her head under the faucet and began waterboarding her. XXX Tentasione, straight, uncut evil. For a few months after Orlando, things got better, but only because X was in jail awaiting his court date on the robbery charges. Geneva tried escaping to Texas and living with friends there while she had the chance. But ultimately, she fell back to Florida and got sucked back into the circle of X's entourage. But once X got out on probation, the chokings, the coat hanger whippings, the threatened stabbings with knives and broken bottles, it all started up again.

In fact, there were two things that made Geneva's situation worse than ever now. Number one, while X was in jail, she had slept with another man. and number two, that fall amongst the beatings and the chaos, X got Geneva pregnant. When he got the news that she was pregnant, his nuclear meltdown reaction to this new information was so vile, so depraved, that it resulted in more criminal charges. Battery of a pregnant woman in false imprisonment. He was arrested again.

But to X, the worst part wasn't the long arm of the law. He cared about that about as much as he really cared about Geneva. The worst part was the constant. controversy that followed, because it threatened to cut short the one thing that gave X a sense of purpose. It threatened to cut him off from his fans for good. A reality that would leave XXXX Tentacion utterly and completely alone. Geneva told X, she was going to have his baby at the beginning of October 2016.

So on that afternoon, XXXTentacion lost his ever-loving shit. At first, he was chill, calm before the storm style, hanging on the bed next to her as she broke the news. He told her to get up. He got up and began pacing around the room. Then he flew into a rage,

screaming, yelling, demanding to know everything about her sleeping with someone else while he was in jail, and threatened to kill her and the baby if she lied. Obviously, reminding him that she'd already told him everything and that she was sorry didn't solve anything. X escalated quickly to fists and elbows to her face, headbutts, strangulation, all to the point where when he dragged her into the bathroom this time, she couldn't recognize the face in the mirror.

Her life was saved for the moment by the return of their other housemates, members of X's crew. They put enough of a check on his inner chaos that he stopped beating her while they were around. Geneva begged them to let her go to the hospital, but X knew her face would be the end of his parole. So he and his boys disguised her in a hoodie and sunglasses, stole her phone and drove her to a different apartment where they could keep her stashed under lock and key while she healed up. They kept Geneva prisoner for two full days. There were bars on the windows,

an ex chilling in the living room on his computer, telling her that if she was smart, she'd stick by him until she had the money to take care of herself or she'd end up homeless. Geneva decided fuck it and made her escape. While claiming she was going to make ex a meal, she opened the refrigerator door to block herself from his sight and made a mad dash for the hallway. Geneva sprinted away from the complex, sure that X would be in hot pursuit. She convinced a bystander to let her use their phone.

She can only remember one number, her ex-boyfriend. She got safely to a police station and filed charges. X was arrested the same day. This deranged tale of kidnapping and gaslighting was a lot for the mainstream music industry to swallow. X's career ascent converged with Times Up and Meetton. movements. And yet, here was America's latest hip-hop sensation, accused of doing things to women as bad or worse than anything in the misogynistic lyrics of the gangster rap era of decades past. Fifteen years earlier, Eminem's dark fantasies of murdering his wife and song had shocked

the nation, but now, the supposed woke Gen Z and millennial fan base of the accused XXXTentasione outright refused to believe the charges against him. It got weirder. Despite the charges of physical abuse, X's online army of fans upvoted him to the coveted people's choice slot in XXL's 2017 freshman class issue. This was a big deal. However, XXL readers and other music editorial sites questioned if X should be celebrated. Complex refused to review his first full album and pitchfork spent their review of it gazing into their navel about whether or not it was morally okay to listen to XXXTentacion. Despite all of this, XX signed a multi-mobile. million-dollar deal with Caroline Records, but he was unwell. If XXXTentacion had taken a rocket ride

to start him, then that rocket was now burning up upon re-entry. The charges, the criticism, the looming prison sentence, the potential loss of his career, it intensified the void. The man who José Onfro had become, the man who caught all the crazy that rubbed off on him, the man who was raised up in violence, the man he was deep down, had now been pushed out into the public, and XXXTentacion could not handle it. His album was charting, and Kendrick Lamar was even boosting it on Twitter, but deep down, X had never felt so alone. By December, he was desperate to feel in control again, and the trial over his domestic abuse against Geneva was delayed, but it loomed like the ghost of Jocelyn Flores. When X and his attorney submitted an affidavit

signed by Geneva to the court, claiming that she wanted to drop the case and stopped cooperating with prosecutors. The judge smelled a rat. It took no time to figure out that X had done it again, threatened Geneva, manipulated her into signing this joke of a document. Suddenly, X was facing even more charges for witness tampering, and now potentially decades, maybe the rest of his life in prison. And yet, the void needed to be fed. And now, signed to Caroline Records, the recording industry machine needed to be fed too. X's lawyers got him out of jail by agreeing to house arrest, And then, after a few months, even got his house arrest lifted so he could go on tour. His second album, titled, was Just a Question Mark,

debuted at the number one spot on the Billboard 200 chart, beating out Metallica, the Black Panther soundtrack, Logic and Migos, all in the same week, making XXXXTentacion the first SoundCloud rapper to have the number one record in the country. But the success was only more isolating. It was more attention, more judgment, more haters. One morning in June of 2018, X posted a live stream from his car. Let's say the worst thing comes to worse and I fucking die a tragic death or some shit.

And I'm not able to see out my dreams. I at least want to know that the kids perceive my message and were able to make something of themselves. And do not let your depression make you. Pain is a sign of progress. When you feel pain, there is progress. I feel so much. And to a degree, I want to feel that pain. I want to always feel attached.

He stumbled over his words. Send me answers, please, that's all I want to say. Retreated further into himself. But it was too late. Too late for privacy and too late for reason. In the spring of 2018, X's Instagram account blasted out several messages in a row pouring gasoline on his long simmering beef with Drake. The most incendiary claim was a message that simply said,

If anyone kills me, I was at Champagne Pappy, which is Drake's IG handle. The message went on to say, I'm snitching him. Almost immediately afterward, X deleted the post and claimed his account had been hacked. Then, in May,

Pusha Tee released his immediately infamous disc track against Drake, the story of Adidon, which had cover art of Drake in Blackface, and in which Pusha lyrically exposed Drake

for keeping a secret love child on the DL. Rumors swirled that X had found out about this earlier, digging up dirt for his own beef with Drake, and told Pusha T about it. As summer approached, the internet did what the internet does best,

lost its fucking mind going down rabbit holes in search of secret codes and hidden meanings. The hide mind read into the lyrics of Drake's look alive and into Drake's most recent single before X's previously mentioned live stream was titled, I'm Upset. And then, just one week after his last live video, XXXTentacion was dead. On June 18th, X had a stash of cash on a month. like usual in a Louis Vuitton bag.

He was out on a spending spree at the motorcycle shop in Deerfield Beach, Florida. He was sitting in his car when two men rolled up next to him, one wearing a red mask, and shot him straight in the chest. They reached through the window to steal his shit and drove off. No Jocelyn or Geneva

to go down with him, no ski masks to ride or die. X died as he feared, alone. Was it a simple robbery? Or was nabbing the bag just to cover for a vast hip-hop conspiracy. In the words of XXXTentacion, send me answers, please. But of course, he was asking the internet, where for every answer there are a thousand new questions, and the truth

inevitably gets lost in the shuffle. The void had finally consumed XXXTentacion. X, the artist, X, the crazy violent thug and despicable abusive human that he was. X needed to be alone to create, to feel safe, to connect to the void. So he pushed the people in his life away until all that was left for him was death. What a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly

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