Name: XXXTENTACION: A Tormented Mind
Uploaded: 2018-12-18T08:53:10.000Z
Duration: 16 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So picture this: It's about five months ago, when the school year is ending.

I'm sitting at my lunch table with some friends,

and we're talking about some music were listening to.

Now, I'm over here with some Tame Impala a little bit of Grateful Dead..

Com Truise in there and, of course, There's a bit of a motley group at the table.

There's a few black people, a few white people,

But the black people at the table, see, they're calling me a

C o r n b a l l..  for the music that I'm listening to. And so I asked 'em,

"What do you listen to?" and the one guy says to me, "I'd be bumping a Lil Pump,

XXXTentacion, Ski Mask the Slump god..." "Wait, wait, who?" "Bro..

I knooooow you've heard Lil Pump before."

"no. i'm white" "You ain't heard of my dog XXXTentacion?" "no. i'm white"

"Nigga you a c o r n b a l l. Let me play somethin'"

"Man this sucks.." "No that shit dummy slaps."

But it didn't slap, or at least, it didn't slap yet. A month or so later,

I found my sister listening to the guy, and I gave his music another shot.

And at first, I didn't even think this was the same rapper that had been played for me before.

The song had coherent lyrics with intention behind them and music theory behind the beat.

I read the lyrics of the song after I'd listened to it, and found out that it was practically a poem...

Dedicated to a girl that X knew who killed herself.

but I wanted more, and so I listened to the album that the song was on..

'Seventeen' in just under an hour thereafter.

It was probably both the best and the worst

introduction to him that I could've had, because on one hand you had what he claimed to be his, "Most powerful"

But on the other hand, he had a set of songs that really didn't connect with the rest of his discography.

Hearing those lyrics and those songs created an image of him, to me, that I didn't find in any other rapper that I'd ever listened to.

Clicking from related video, to related video, even listening to such powerful lyrics such as, "

The image of X in my mind, despite the more ghetto sounding material that he produced, still remain distance from everyday rap.

To me, he wasn't identical to the contemporary rappers of the Miami music scene from which he gained his following.

All three of them do share stylistic tendencies unique to the Miami rap,

subculture. A lot of which, come from the earlier Raider Klan and their founder SpaceGhost Purpp,

One of the pioneers of distorted sound effects in rap.

You hear these most notably in his song 'Tha Black God', where a distorted bass

underscores his lyrics about coming to prominence in the rap game.

You hear the same in Lil Pump's 'Gucci Gang' and in Lil Purp's 'Audi' and of course, in XXXTentacion's

But then, when you listen to something like 'Young Bratz' the similarities really begin to fade away and X as an individual artist comes forward.

The first thing that really got to me, was his anger. Lyrics like, "

Don't speak to a simplistic man content with his life in the same way,

do, and the thing is there's a really good reason for that. X has lived an extremely difficult life..

Murders, and rapes, and suicides, have plagued him since he was a child.

It's no mistake, that, when he was younger

He broke a kid's mouth for making fun of his mom, and nearly strangled a homosexual to death for looking at him in the wrong

and I started beating his face in.. like I..like I grab his face, and, like I put it on the corner type shit...and I

and I just started stomping and like, his jaw in type shit, and then as soon as I did that like... I remember like I

and I started stomping on it..so I started stranglin', like, I'm strangling him, like, and he's like.. leaking leaking leaking type shit

I'm strangling him so he doesn't scream, so I'm strangling him...Yeah, like I..

smeared his blood on my face, on my hands.." X is a very angry person.

person, and more than anything, the musicality of his rap reflects that.. because it's genuine to him.

"That's why sometimes the underground, like, rawness of the track" "--Makes the track genuine.

It's a personal thing, because my ears, like, my ears

I want it to fit my ears, because I know if it...bro if it sounds crazy to me

It's gonna sound crazy to everybody else, when it sounded crazy to us

I knew for a fact to other people that just hear it..

It would sound absolutely fucking insane.

And I was always, always right with that."

That distorted bass is a personal choice that reflects him, in the way

he wants the music to sound. Finding that out, really changed the way I understood his music.

That bass isn't just distorted for the sake of adhering to the style of his contemporaries,

but manifesting his own mind in the music that he's creating.

Even in his more vapid music, that anger that I saw

but of a clearly defined reflection of X's mind. And the thing is, he doesn't just leave his mind to the screaming.

Because his mind isn't always the most put together, but at the same time you see currents of his life running throughout every song he's ever made.

whether the lyrics are meaningful or not, it is in the screaming,

Anyone can clearly tell that that screaming of the lyrics draws some inspiration from heavy metal or at least pop metal music which X has actually

mentioned as stylistically formative in the creation of his own genre.

But there's more metal to his music than many would think, he's actually no stranger to sampling from bands like

Slipknot, or excerpts from the works of Marilyn Manson.

But the actual music, not the rap over top that X has originally produced, also draws so much for metal that it's actually kind of

surprising. The most prevalent music device

he uses is what's called 'Chromaticism', which is the same thing you hear in that signature circus music. It's kind of eerie,

but, also kind of inviting. And X makes clear use of it in the song 'Gnarly Bastard'. That beginning ascent you hear kind of like

a winding sound, is a chromatic ascent starting on the F sharp until you finally get into the main riff, that's used throughout the song.

Lot of his basses also make use of this Chromaticism as well. The beat not staying on one particular note,

but rising and falling by one chromatic interval each time

it's hit. For reference, Metallica is just one of many metal bands that makes use of the chromatic scale.

Especially in their songs 'Master of Puppets' and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'

X also makes use of what's referred to as the 'harmonic minor scale' in a lot of his music, too. Giving it that,

dissonant, and eerie sound that 'Gnarly Bastard' and 'King of the Dead' are known for.

Again, you find the harmonic minor throughout the metal music because of the similar dark tone that metal tries to evoke.

Stylistic choices like these, pervade X's music. Even in those songs that aren't specifically

influenced by metal. The clearest example of this is his song, 'Slipknot' where a piano actually runs down the

Subtitles ListPlay Video

XXXTENTACION: A Tormented Mind

literally

absolutely

depression

genuine