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,
Filipino-- it's a good mix.
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.
She'd been playing 'Jocelyn Flores'
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.
This wasn't rap as I knew it,
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"
intended set of songs to date..
But on the other hand, he had a set of songs that really didn't connect with the rest of his discography.
It was strange.
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.
like Lil Pump and Smokepurpp
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
way when he was imprisoned.
"So I go into the corner,
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
threw his head on the corner,
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
just put his head on the corner
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.
A very disjointed
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
became, not one of a shallow aesthetic,
but of a clearly defined reflection of X's mind. And the thing is, he doesn't just leave his mind to the screaming.
His mind is the whole of his music.
That's probably why you get shit like.."
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.
In his horror music,
whether the lyrics are meaningful or not, it is in the screaming,
but not entirely,
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'
What's more,
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
entirety of the A flat harmonic minor scale.
The pervasive nature of the metal influence in X's music is also demonstrated in 'I Spoke to the Devil in Miami,
He Said Everything Would Be Fine' and actually in 'Look at Me'. Where, twice, he uses a riff
that's almost identical to that used in 'Last Resort' by Papa Roach.
You probably can't hear it exactly, so let me slow things down for you. Here's the riff from 'Last Resort'
Now here's the riff from 'Look at Me'
And here's the riff from 'I Spoke to the Devil in Miami'
The use of the F sharp, the G, the C, and the B in both riffs to evoke a dissonance throughout the song, and the fact that the order of the
notes is somewhat identical, speaks incredibly to X's deep appreciation for the artists
he listens to. The fact that he incorporates a similar riff into 'I Spoke to the Devil' may be misconstrued as lazy music writing,
but there's so much meaning behind it that it might actually make you rethink the way the song is organized.
What's created in this riff between the F sharp and the C is what's known as a
'tritone', the most dissonant sound in western music often called the 'Devil in Music' because of such a
characterization. The way it dissonant-ly rings out against the main melody of the song,
reminds us of dissonance against the consonant harmony. Almost as if the devil himself is in the music..
It is the unstable nature of the tritone, that makes it so expressly dissonant.
And who is saying 'everything will be fine' in the song? Who is saying that X will have stability in his life?
But the king of instability himself, the Devil.
Little meetings like that, are why I've just come to
adore X as an artist. There's a power in what he writes and what he produces,
and he knows this. "What is real will prosper."
"Mm-hmm" "What you feel in the night, what you feel in the morning, what you feel midday..
That you don't think other people have the same thoughts --you feel alone in this thought,
but other people have this same thought, and it breeds..and when you, when you display this thought
It brings a certain amount of comfort
More than people, and people start to feel like 'alright this person understands me, this person is fucking cool'"
'I Spoke to the Devil' is one of the best examples of X's meaning within the music
he writes, as it's completely filled with religious symbolism. The distinction between the wolf, the doer of evil, and the Shepherd, the doer of good,
alludes to Christ as the good Shepherd and Satan as the wolf. Satan ultimately more successful than Christ, at least according to X's perception,
references to both the apple of Genesis and the selling of X's soul to a
Baphomet, a legendary medieval demon. And the Latin phrase "Anima vestra" are all clear allusions to Roman Christianity and,
particularly, X's disenfranchisement with its inability to give him a sense of meaning and happiness.
Well, he's "Trapped in a changing maze/setting his soul ablaze couldn't control the pace/Where is this going?"
For many, this may seem like a one-off song full of emo-isms and esoteric references,
but religion for X is a motif that appears in a surprising amount of his songs.
He actually offers a rejoinder to his thoughts within the song
'Valentine' when he speaks directly to the saint and asks him to make an intercession to God on his behalf.
Making reference to the popular 20th century prayer 'Now I Lay Me Down to sleep' in the process, and while X is unsure whether to
follow Satan or Christ, he remarks that he's "numb to the pain of life" another recurrent theme throughout his music
appearing in everything from 'Snow' to 'Everybody Dies in their Nightmares'.
You also see it used in 'Jocelyn Flores' and of course in the explanation track to the entire album that both songs are in.
As he says himself, "
Here is my pain and thoughts put into words
I put my all into this in the hopes that will help cure or at least numb your depression."
Numbness and the related
depression that exclaims to experience abound in 'Seventeen' as do a lot of references to the struggles and turmoils
he's incurred throughout his life, and as he says in that same explanation, is absolutely with purpose.
"Seventeen..
a collection of nightmares, thoughts, and real-life situations, I've lived
Listening to this album.. You are literally, and I cannot stress this enough, literally entering my mind
And if you are not willing to accept my emotion and hear my words fully,
do not listen."
Taken in conjunction with the theory and influence behind X's other music,
you absolutely get a clear sense that he means what he means in his music.
The writer Charles Haanel wrote over a hundred years ago, that there is a world within. A world of thought, and feeling, and power of..
light, and life, and beauty, and though invisible...
Its forces are mighty. And when you listen to X,
when you read his lyrics, and when you understand the way he has composed his songs, you enter into that world.
It's one of ongoing pain, of numbness, of
confusion, and of depression, it's one of an ongoing cultural synthesis between
African and Caucasian culture. Bringing hip-hop to metal to create an entirely new sound in the process. The problem that many have with X
is that the controversy that surrounds his life rife with crime allegations, murder attempts, and surprisingly odd
Instagram videos, seems to disavow the deeper meaning that you can find in him.
But all of this only further brings that internal world to us, and of course
while it's in a more raw and admittedly low-class manner.. it performs unto us, X's audience, the very same end that his music aims to..
To find X's mind, and to become one with his world. And in bringing that world to us, he's made that possible.
This is Mister Amazing. Thanks for watching.
a y
My boy worked hard on this video, and if you want to go compensate him for them
Then go throw him a buck or something on Patreon. He even remade X's handwriting, too
So if you want to use that joint as a font then go cut that too.
And if you want to go chop it up
Personally then go join us discord. It's been real. It's been fun, but I can't say it's been real fun
You