If you’re up to date on your music memes, you’ll know SoundCloud rap is home to the most bizarre-acting and looking musicians of the modern day, all of whom I’ve wanted to grab by the shoulders and say, “calm down.” 6ix9ine, arrested for racketeering and sexual misconduct with a child, will likely not see light of day until the 2040s, Lil Peep overdosed in November 2017 from a combination of nine different drugs, and Lil Pump’s Wikipedia photo switches weekly to his latest mugshot. But, no name in the industry can gather more attention—positive and negative—than XXXTentacion.
XXXTentacion likely needs no introduction. Reminiscent of rappers like 2Pac, just about every part of his life was a headline, from his breakout success in 2017, the extremely harrowing accounts of his domestic abuse and finally his murder and robbery last June. But, his label Bad Vibes Forever made it clear that “more than two albums’ worth of material” still remained to be released. This started with XXXTentacion’s third album and my first real acquaintance with the artist, Skins.
Skins, like just about every other XXXTentacion record, is so brief it feels wrong to call it an album. Almost none of the 10 tracks break the three-minute mark, most of them not even breaking the two-minute mark. It slides by at a quick 19 minutes, which, though not unusual for X, cements even more to the listener that this album is not just posthumous, but possibly even unfinished.
The album opens with the song Guardian angel, which features a reversed sample of X’s 2017 hit Jocelyn Flores. Over this gentle beat, X raps in an apologetic tone, ending with some lines that almost seem to eerily suggest he’s rapping about his own death from beyond the grave. What’s more is that this song’s lyrics are delivered in a fast, straight hip-hop fashion, refreshingly different from X’s usual approach. The same can be said for the following track Train food, which tells the story of X being jumped by the personification of death and being left to die on train tracks.
But, this straight-rapping flavor ends there, giving yield to the two other flavors Skins provides—emotional R&B pop-crooning, and X screaming his absolute brains out. Of the former style, there are three tracks—the lead single BAD!, the barely-song whoa (mind in awe) and the track I don’t let go, the last of which, though short, at least features some legitimate rapping and diverse flows. Still these tracks can come off as just the same song reorganized, playing it safe in territory that X already covered a billion times in past releases.
As for the latter flavor of Skins, boy howdy are there some bad results. In the past, XXXTentacion has pulled from emo and screamo genres by incorporating them into trap, but to my knowledge, he has never written a straight up emo-screamo song—until STARING AT THE SKY, that is. The song opens with an acoustic guitar riff over which X sings lyrics that could be confused with the poetry of an angsty ’90s scene kid, all in his best and most annoying Green Day impression. Don’t worry, though, he proceeds to mix it up by screaming, “we’re gonna break” unimaginably loud over a blown-out metal version of the same riff. If you’re still listening to La Dispute in 2019, you’ll love it. If you have ears, you won’t.
Overall, there’s not much to Skins. It’s anything but consistent, and when it’s not revisiting styles XXXTentacion has done to death, it’s expanding on those styles in the exact wrong direction. There’s a few tracks that stand out as strong, but the fact that these different flavors sit side-by-side with virtually no chemistry is proof that it’s not XXXTentacion who is putting this album together. It’s the producers who control X’s leftovers and who will, hopefully, make the next posthumous release more than merely mediocre.
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