Teen spirit | 9 August 2018

In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the amount of online plays they had received. The day after he died, my social-media timelines were full of music writers discussing his death, and the tenor — from those with kids, at least — was clear.

Post after post noted that XXXTentacion was a nasty piece of work, and few should mourn him, yet the writer’s 13- or 14- or 15-year-old was devastated by his death.

XXXTentacion was, it is true, a nasty piece of work. He served time in prison for armed home invasion, robbery and aggravated battery with a firearm; he was also arrested after being credibly accused by his girlfriend of beating her while pregnant.

It was after his arrest that XXXTentacion suddenly, startlingly, became popular, especially with teenagers who discovered his music through the online free music service SoundCloud. The single that broke through during his incarceration, ‘Look At Me!’, is a remarkable and alarming record — dissonant, disturbed and alien-sounding, with lyrics calculated to offend: ‘I took a white bitch to Starbucks/ That little bitch got her throat fucked.’ It’s hard as an adult not to tut. But XXXTentacion always sounded different: ‘I Don’t Even Speak Spanish Lol’, from his final album, sounds like an utterly conventional Radio 1-friendly summer jam; ‘Pain = Bestfriend’ veered from indie folk to nu-metal. XXXTentacion’s was a perfect representation of teenage listening habits: indiscriminately varied.

Though XXXTentacion is an outlier — not least because he became successful in mainstream terms — he exemplifies something that seemed to have disappeared from pop music: the generation gap.