In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
In his terribly short lifetime, XXXTentacion inflicted monstrous, incomprehensible pain on people around him, and the notoriety associated with those acts helped him to become an outlaw superstar. The young man’s extremely fucked-up acts didn’t have anything to do with his sudden, shocking murder. It was just a murder. The entire story of XXXTentacion is unbelievably depressing. He was a fucked-up kid from fucked-up circumstances who did fucked-up things and died in a fucked-up way. There is no lesson in any of this. It’s just a long, numbing series of dark, upsetting actions. XXXTentacion was both victimizer and victim, and also he made some music. He was only famous for about a year of his lifetime, but he became hugely popular in that year. In the immediate wake of his murder, XXXTentacion joined an extremely small and sad club — the artists who landed at #1 on the Hot 100 after they were dead.
There are six people in that club. Before XXXTentacion was murdered, it had been decades since anyone joined, and all of the previous inductees were canonized figures in one way or another: Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jim Croce, John Lennon, Biggie Smalls (twice). If you relax the admission requirements enough to allow featured guests, the club gains two more names, Soulja Slim and Static Major. Those two weren’t famous in the same way, but they were important figures in their respective subgenre spaces. Each one of these people died in sudden, shocking ways, and all of them were way too young. The final toll is two plane crashes, one overdose, one botched medical procedure, and four murders. At 40, John Lennon was the oldest person to join the club. XXXTentacion was the youngest. He was 20.
When XXXTentacion was alive, I barely wrote anything about him. On this website, every post about XXXTentacion was about violence or about the ways that violence impacted his growing fame. None of the pieces on Stereogum were about his music, even though the music is arguably more interesting than the violence. His music did strange new things with the form of popular rap music, but it always existed in the shadow of the violence. I didn’t write about him as a music critic because I thought that any critical accounting of his work could be perceived as an endorsement of a terrible person and his crimes, or maybe as a minimization of the those crimes. Looking back immediately afterward, I regretted that. When you’re a music critic — especially a music critic with a weekly rap column, as I was at the time — then it’s your job to consider the music that truly resonates in the world, whether or not you find the music or the people making it to be distasteful or reprehensible. XXXTentacion’s music resonated, and its resonance probably had a lot to do with the violence. We need to think about this kind of thing while it’s happening. I never did — not publicly, anyway — and now he’s dead.
I was already writing this column when XXXTentacion died, so I knew that I’d have to get into the person’s life and his song “Sad!” eventually. His story is not an easy thing to get into. The song “Sad!” would’ve never come anywhere near #1 without the context around it, and the context around it is unremittingly bleak from every possible angle. But this column has dealt with bleak stories before, and it’ll deal with bleak stories again. This one just might be the bleakest. It leaves us with a lot to talk about. Let’s talk about it.
XXXTentacion was young, as was the vast majority of his audience. He released “Sad!” just a few months before his death, and he was already a big enough deal that the song debuted in the top 10. After his murder, “Sad!” broke a Taylor Swift record, getting more Spotify streams in a single day than any other song in history. (That record was later broken by a Christmas song that this column will cover soon enough.) In a way, the fact that “Sad!” reached #1 is the least complicated part of the entire XXXTentacion saga. Kids were sad that a rapper died, so they went to Spotify and listened to the song called “Sad!” Simple as that.
But the surrounding context is heavier. XXXTentacion was a big part of a rap generation that never grew old, that never will grow old. He represented a chaotic new generational wave — kids who grew up on the internet and fused rap with things like MySpace emo and mad-at-dad nū-metal. They used hybrid styles to process pain and trauma and excitement and addiction. Their music came up from the internet underground at a dizzying speed, and it had a seismic effect on rap itself — and, by extension, on popular music. Soon enough, that music became known as SoundCloud rap — less a proper genre name, more a catchall term for chattering, incoherent digital squall that found its audience in different online micro-cultures. The initial wave didn’t last. Some of those kids, and they really were mostly kids, stuck around to become solid midcard festival acts. Some of them chased viral fame with unseemly thirst, and they quickly became jokes. And way too many of them died.
Before XXXTentacion, the loose SoundCloud rap universe mourned Lil Peep, a runway-model handsome white kid with an unfortunate face-tattoo collection who usually sang over dank trap beats in a nasal pop-punk howl. Critics like me regarded Peep with a combination of fascination and bafflement. He cranked out tons of music without much regard for quality control, but that music carried the seed of something that could’ve turned into actual pop stardom. Instead, Peep died of an accidental fentanyl/Xanax overdose at an Arizona tour stop in 2017. He was 21. Lil Peep’s highest-charting single is the 2018 XXXTentacion collaboration “Falling Down,” released and seemingly assembled after both artists were already dead. It peaked at #13.
After Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, the SoundCloud rap universe mourned Juice WRLD, a suburban Chicago kid who fused rap with the pop-punk that he learned to love while playing Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero as a kid. Juice WRLD’s style was more polished and less jagged than those of Peep or X, and he actually did achieve pop stardom, at least for a minute. In summer 2018, Juice WRLD reached #2 with “Lucid Dreams,” a bitter post-breakup lament built on a Sting sample. (It’s an 8.) Juice WRLD made a few more hits and even had time to release a collaborative album with Future, the drug-rap elder who will eventually appear in this column. In 2019, authorities in Chicago raided a private plane that Juice WRLD chartered, and he allegedly swallowed all the Percocet that he had on him. The resulting overdose killed him. He was 21. (Posthumously, Juice WRLD once again reached #2 with the Marshmello collab “Come And Go.” It’s a 7.)
I can picture an alternate reality in which XXXTentacion, Lil Peep, and Juice WRLD all survived to become generational figures. Honestly, though, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. After Peep, the drill stars Pop Smoke and King Von were murdered in vastly different circumstances. Then there’s Mac Miller, whose 2018 overdose fit in with that crushing trend but who seemed to belong to an entirely different rap micro-generation. (Mac was 26 — older than everyone else that I just mentioned except King Von but still too young to join the fabled 27 club that he rapped about not wanting to join.) The same day that XXXTentacion was murdered, the 21-year-old Pittsburgh street-rapper Jimmy Wopo was also shot to death. The two deaths were unrelated — just a morbid coincidence, two bodies falling at the same time. It felt like it was happening every day. I would write about an exciting new rapper and then write that rapper’s obituary less than a week later.
There are reasons for all these deaths — the opioid epidemic and the fatalism and violence that surrounded it — but they didn’t mean anything. It was just a constant, ceaseless parade of death. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even at the height of the Seattle grunge era, stars were not dying quite like that. My 12-year-old son has been discovering rap for himself over the past few years, and most of his favorite rappers are dead. Some of them are towering figures from past generations — Tupac, Biggie, MF DOOM. But others are casualties much closer to his age, people who might’ve had legendary runs if they’d survived. These days, many of the most-discussed rap stars — Kendrick Lamar, Drake, J. Cole, Future — are long-term fixtures who are now approaching middle age, if they aren’t already there. Maybe they’ve all stuck around so long partly because the next generation never came along to supplant them. Instead, the next generation died.
This is all heavy shit, but I’m spinning my wheels and procrastinating, shying away from getting into the harrowing particularities of XXXTentacion’s life. So let’s get into it. Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy was born in a city literally called Plantation, Florida, and he spent an unstable childhood moving around different Broward County localities. (When XXXTentacion was born, Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” was the #1 song in America.) Both of his parents were Jamaican, and both of them had serious issues. (When X was a kid, his father was imprisoned on RICO charges, and he was deported to Jamaica shortly before X’s death.) As a result, X was mostly raised by his grandmother. His childhood was not easy.
Later on, XXXTentacion told all sorts of terrible stories about his early years. He said that he tried to stab a guy who was messing with his mother when he was six years old, that he discovered his uncle’s body after his uncle died by suicide when he was a kid. Those stories could be real, or they could be self-invented mythology; we don’t know. But it’s clear that he saw unspeakable things when he was too young to process them. He may have been beaten and sexually abused. He may have witnessed torture and rape. He tried to sing in church and school choirs as a kid, but he kept getting kicked out of different schools for fighting. Ultimately, X dropped out in 10th grade. Around the same time, he was sent to a juvenile detention facility for nine months on a gun possession charge.
In juvie, XXXTentacion beat up another boy, and he claimed that it was because the kid made sexual advances on him. He also became close with another young rapper, now known as Ski Mask The Slump God. (Ski Mask’s highest-charting single is the 2018 Juice WRLD collab “Nuketown,” which peaked at #63.) When they got out, X and Ski Mask had plans to rob people together. Instead, they ended up making music. In 2014, the 16-year-old XXXTentacion posted “Vice City,” generally regarded has his first proper song, on SoundCloud. It’s not a representational X track because there is no representational X track. But in its seething, downbeat, insular tone, “Vice City” at least offers some indication of where X was heading. (In 2022, “Vice City” appeared on a posthumous collection and peaked at #89.)
For a while, XXXTentacion kept posting music online, and that music circulated in internet channels too obscure for me to recognize. He and Ski Mask formed a group called Very Rare and then a loose collective called Members Only. By the end of 2014, XXXTentacion released one mixtape and six EPs — all posted online, without any kind of label backing. His songs were usually short and jagged and dark, purposely recorded with tons of digital fuzz and murk. You could hear the influence of ’90s Memphis rap, by way of Florida underground figure SpaceGhostPurrp and his extended Raider Klan crew. (Onetime Raider Klan member Denzel Curry was X’s roommate for a little while.) But X also dabbled in murky, sleepily sung R&B and in raw, throat-scraping quasi-grunge. Plenty of his tracks are basically screamo. He made a lot of music, and he started to find an audience, but his life wasn’t any more settled.
In November 2015, XXXTentacion allegedly committed home invasion, robbery, and aggravated battery, and he was charged with those crimes months later. Around the same time, he posted “Look At Me!,” the song that would become his breakout hit. “Look At Me!” is a raw, distorted attack. X barks out edgelord threats in breathless syllable-clusters. It’s stark and ugly and lo-fi, and it’s also genuinely exciting — a sharp turn against the sleek, moody melodic sparseness that stars like Drake exemplified. The song got a commercial release, and it used X’s mugshot from that 2015 arrest as its cover art. In 2017, “Look At Me!” broke onto the Hot 100, peaking at #34. When that happened, X was locked up.
Shortly after he released “Look At Me!,” XXXTentacion met the young woman who would become his girlfriend. Almost immediately, he started threatening her with the sort of gruesome, upsetting things that I don’t really want to type into this column. You can find that stuff if you want. It’s out there. Soon afterward, he allegedly punched, kicked, and stomped his girlfriend when he heard her singing along to someone else’s song. According to her account, the beatings soon became constant. X was arrested, first for the 2015 robbery and then for allegedly stabbing his manager, possibly by accident. He was placed under house arrest, and his girlfriend claims that he continued to beat and threaten and strangle her.
In October 2016, XXXTentacion allegedly beat his pregnant girlfriend up severely, worse than he’d ever done, and then refused to let her go to the hospital, taking her phone and keeping her trapped in a bedroom until she escaped two days later. She went to the police, and they arrested X and charged him with aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness tampering. The arrest violated his house arrest, so he went to jail. While he was locked up, the podcaster Adam22 took up his cause and claimed that he’d signed on as X’s new manager. Mainstream rap stars like A$AP Rocky started to tweet about X and “Look At Me!,” and the song gained steam.
Early in 2017, Drake released a track called “KMT” on his More Life project. On that song, Drake used a flow pretty similar to what X used on “Look At Me!,” and people noticed. (“KMT” peaked at #48.) Drake denied copying X, but the conversation helped propel “Look At Me!” Shortly before “Look At Me!” reached its Hot 100 peak, X pleaded no contest and was released on probation. He immediately accused Drake of stealing from him, and he was mad enough that some people later posted half-cooked online conspiracy theories about Drake orchestrating X’s murder. (By now, I think we’ve all seen that Drake isn’t killing anyone over some rap beef.)
I first noticed XXXTentacion because of those biting allegations. I heard “Look At Me!,” and I was impressed. It had ferocious urgency, and it didn’t sound like anything else. Pretty quickly, I became aware of all the charges against X, and so did the rest of the world. Those charges probably helped him find a bigger audience. They added to the fascination. He was a dark and mysterious figure who arrived with a whole lot of disturbing lore, and that grabbed people’s attention. X started playing shows, and those shows were as chaotic as you’d expect. The first gig turned into a riot. Another ended when he got knocked out onstage. Fans started harassing X’s ex-girlfriend online.
XXL selected XXXTentacion as part of its 2017 Freshman Class. He was the last rapper added to the group of 10, and he was the overwhelming fan pick when the magazine opened public voting. Later on, the XXL editors talked about how they had to convince authorities to allow X to travel to New York for the magazine-cover shoot. At the time, I wrote, “You should not be able to beat up a pregant woman and still have a career. We should not continue to make him famous. XXXTentacion should not be on this cover.” In an infamous cypher recorded as part of the whole Freshman-Class promotion, X looms awkwardly in the corner, waiting for three other rappers to finish their enthusiastic, amateurish verses. Then the beat cuts off, and X crouches down and spits an acapella verse that opens with this line: “And if the world ever has an apocalypse, I will kill all of you fuckers.” He just kneels there reciting slam poetry about mass death, and all the other rappers kind of freeze, as if they have no idea how to react. It’s funny, honestly.
One of the rappers in that cypher is Playboi Carti, a guy who would later become a generational star on his own, for reasons that could never be captured in the cypher format. (He’ll be in this column one day.) The other two, MadeinTYO and Ugly God, faded from view soon after. In that cypher video, though, they’re all mere bit-part actors, and XXXTentacion is the undisputed center of attention. A month after that cypher hit the internet, XXXTentacion released his first album, an independent effort called 17. It’s 22 minutes long, and most of its tracks feel like half-finished sketches, many of them in different genres. 17 debuted at #2 and eventually went triple platinum. Its highest-charting single was “Jocelyn Flores,” an ode to a friend who died by suicide; it peaked at #17. X did those numbers without radio play or industry support. He was a grassroots phenomenon, and most of us gatekeepers weren’t happy about it.
You could react to the XXXTentacion phenomenon by moralizing about a lost generation, one more concerned with viral charge than with virtue. I don’t think that’s a very useful way to frame things. A whole lot of objectionable people have made music, and most of us like at least some of that music. This phenomenon happened at a moment when people were being banished from the mainstream because of their detestable actions, and it was strange and jarring to see the reverse happening with XXXTentacion, but I don’t think it’s a reflection on the people who liked that music. Instead, I think it’s an indication that people heard things in his music that they didn’t hear in anything else that they were being offered. The internet allowed people to find X’s music without gatekeepers like me getting in the way, and people found it. From a distance of a few years, it reminds me of the way that the movies in the extreme-gore Terrifier franchise went from crowd-funded cult curios to indie blockbusters. People just want to feel something, and they’ll go out of their way to find something visceral enough to trigger that feeling.
In any event, XXXTentacion was now famous. After releasing 17, he sometimes said that he was done with music, that he couldn’t handle the negativity directed his way, but he kept recording anyway. He signed a one-album deal with Capitol that was reportedly worth millions. He publicly fell out and then reconciled with Ski Mask The Slump God. He moved into a mansion outside Miami. Prosecutors hit X with more witness-tampering charges, temporarily jailing him and then putting him back on house arrest. None of this affected his popularity, and he released his major-label debut, simply entitled ?, in March. That album is just as intense and scattershot as 17. It finds X toying with even more genres — acoustic folk, Latin pop, reggae. On the album intro, he refers to his style as “the alternative sound,” which is plenty vague but probably more accurate than “SoundCloud rap.” At least half the time, X didn’t even rap.
? was a big album upon release. It debuted at #1, and “Sad!,” the closest thing that it had to a lead single, debuted at #7. X recorded that song over production from John Cunningham, an Oakland native who’d just graduated from NYU and found an A&R job. Like so many of X’s songs, “Sad!” feels less than fully realized, though it’s closer to something that you might recognize as pop music. Cunningham’s track is a blurry bounce with a few minimal synth-hooks. It sounds like the first draft of something that could’ve become a Drake song, but only after three or four other producers reworked it. Or maybe “Sad!” sounds like a tropical house track that’s been slowed down and remixed with trap hi-hats. X doesn’t really rap on that beat. Instead, the song is a singsong account of deep depression.
On his “Sad!” hook, XXXTentacion describes himself as “someone that’s afraid to let go,” and he promises “suicide if you ever try to let go.” X’s ex-girlfriend claimed that he would sometimes threaten to kill himself if she left, a common abuser tactic, and that sure sounds like what he’s doing on “Sad!” He also sings that he “gave her everything,” that he won’t fix his broken heart, that he loves when she’s around but fuckin’ hates when she leaves. I always thought that the main hook was “I’m sad I know you,” but it’s apparently really “I’m sad, I know, yeah.” I can’t tell you how I’d hear this song if I didn’t know XXXTentacion’s history. There’s too much real darkness in there for the track to escape its context.
As a piece of music, “Sad!” is sort of grimly compelling. It’s a little more streamlined than most of what X had released up until then, and you can hear a bit of the relatively conventional pop star that he might’ve become if he’d lived and made some radical life changes. The production isn’t as raw, and the beat doesn’t go for pure rupture. Still, this isn’t the kind of song that you can consume passively. The track’s electricity comes from its inherent tension — X trying to translate his depression into a tangible pop-adjacent song while his voice still creaks with pain. “Sad!” barely has a single verse, and it’s mostly just X repeating the chorus a few times. The track ends before it establishes much of a mood, but it does communicate something. You can hear a young person who lives in the darkest depths but who’s still reaching out to the world. That’s not enough to make it a good song, let alone to make up for the charges leveled at X. No song could’ve accomplished that.
Shortly after XXXTentacion released ?, Spotify announced that it would stop promoting his music, along with that of multiple-time Number Ones artist R. Kelly. Spotify wasn’t removing X’s music, but its algorithm wouldn’t push the songs anymore, and the service wouldn’t put him on its playlists. Kendrick Lamar, someone who’s been in this column a few times and who will return, objected. He and his label boss Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith threatened to remove their music from Spotify unless the company reversed that decision, and Spotify complied. Soon after, “Sad!” had the biggest single-song streaming day in Spotify history to that point. Kendrick had already praised the “raw thoughts” on 17, and I hear some echo of XXXTentacion’s messy raw-nerve emotion in his later album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. But keep that moment in mind if you ever find yourself lionizing Kendrick Lamar too much. (Kendrick would probably prefer that you didn’t lionize him anyway.) I don’t like the idea of siding with an exploitative corporate giant over an artist whose work I love, but everything about this shit is uncomfortable.
In the final weeks of his life, XXXTentacion reportedly signed another major-label deal that was worth even more money. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder for a second time — he’d already been diagnosed once as a kid — and he apparently started taking medication. People who encountered XXXTentacion near the end of his life describe him as a humble, caring, positive force. You can see videos of him meeting fans and treating them warmly. Billie Eilish, an artist who will eventually appear in this column, once told an audience that X “made me feel OK when nothing else did.” He made visceral music, and some of that visceral music made a lot of people feel less alone. None of that makes up for the things that he probably did. But I would like to think that XXXTentacion could’ve changed, made amends, and become a force for good in the world. He also could’ve continued his pattern of erratic violence. He could’ve killed someone. More likely, he would’ve just gone to prison for a very long time. But none of that happened. Instead, he was murdered.
In June 2018, XXXTentacion went to a motorcycle dealership in Miami by himself. Maybe he showed some suicidal hubris in going out in public with lots of cash by himself, or maybe he hadn’t really figured out that he could be a target. As he left the dealership, a car blocked him in, and a group of gunmen stole a bag with $50,000 in cash and shot X multiple times. It was a premeditated armed robbery that turned into a murder, not someone out looking for vigilante justice or pursuing some old vendetta. Eventually, police arrested four men, and one of them flipped and testified against the other three. In 2023, those three were all sentenced to life without parole, while the other one pleaded down to second degree murder and got off with time served and probation.
After XXXTentacion was killed, I saw plenty of people online, including in the comments section of this website, saying that it was a good thing that XXXTentacion was dead, that he deserved it. I don’t agree. Nobody deserves to be shot dead in broad daylight before they can legally drink. XXXTentacion seems like he was a miserable, monstrous person. It’s fucked up that so many kids saw him as a romantic outlaw antihero type. It’s fucked up that the music business profited from his infamy. It’s fucked up that he never answered for the crimes that he was accused of committing, that nobody will ever get closure. It’s fucked up that another young person got murdered. There is no silver lining anywhere in this story. It’s all just ugly and dark and, well, sad. I tried to wrestle with his story in the moments after his murder, and I couldn’t get more out of it than that. I still can’t. There’s no justice or poetry or redemption in his death. It’s just as senseless as the things that he probably did.
Naturally, XXXTentacion is more famous now than he was when he was alive. That’s how it always happens. Now, there’s a cottage industry dedicated to him and the music that he left behind. The ? album went quintuple platinum. The “Sad!” single went diamond. A video for “Sad!” came out shortly after the murder, and it’s got X walking into his own funeral and then fighting his dead self. It’s six minutes long and unbearably pretentious, so I didn’t embed it in this article, but you can watch it here. Plenty of XXXTentacion songs charted after his death. He returned to the top 10 once more after “Sad!” Later in 2018, former Number Ones artist Lil Wayne, who’d never heard of X before his death, used unreleased X vocals as the hook of his song “Don’t Cry,” and he also mispronounced X’s name in the lyrics. (“Don’t Cry” reached #5. It’s a 5.)
We’ll never know whether XXXTentacion would’ve made a #1 hit if he’d lived. His legacy is bigger and uglier than the music that he left behind. That music is sometimes interesting, but it won’t redeem him. He didn’t get a chance to redeem himself, either.
GRADE: 4/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s the late Juice WRLD, mentioned so many times up above, freestyling over the “Sad!” instrumental in 2018:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I’m not going to attempt a cute lyric flip today. If you want, you can buy the book here.
