The greats presented crime as a political act, a means of leveling a playing field that always operated on a severe tilt. Gangsta rap made folk heroes out of men and women who risked their safety to bend the rules and prosper as outlaws. While X and Kodak shine on the album chart, Texas teen rapper Tay-K has crept halfway up the Hot 100 with “The Race.” It bluntly recounts the time the 17-year-old rapper and murder suspect clipped his ankle monitor and tried to outrun the cops: “Fuck a beat, I was trying to beat a case / But I ain’t beat the case, bitch, I did the race.” Kodak’s latest, Project Baby 2, a bleak collection of musings on love and hopelessness, is No. A second similar incident from February has yet to reach the courts.
#XXXTENACION MUDIC TRIAL#
(His “No Flockin’” introduced the rhyme flow Bronx star Cardi B used for her smash hit “Bodak Yellow.”) This year Kodak awaits trial for a 2016 sexual-assault charge. Elsewhere, Florida rapper Kodak Black logged hits in “Skrt” and “Tunnel Vision,” which laced sublime tracks with stark dispatches from his life in and out of jail on robbery and drug-possession charges. While he sat in prison for the domestic-battery charge last year, XXXTentacion-that’s “ex, ex, ex, tentación”-gained a following as his breakneck trap brawler “Look at Me!” took clubs and concerts by siege. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, and Chance the Rapper.) 17 is presently on pace to bow out shockingly close to the top of this week’s Billboard 200 chart. In spite of those allegations, and an interview on BMX star Adam22’s “No Jumper” show in which he detailed beating a gay juvenile detention center cellmate half to death and smearing the blood on his face because he caught the kid glaring, the rapper was recently selected for XXL’s 2017 Freshman List, which celebrates young hip-hop talent poised for superstardom. The person XXXTentacion is talking about is an ex-girlfriend who accused the rapper, born Jahseh Onfroy, of punching, kicking, strangling, and imprisoning her while she was pregnant, charges he will stand trial for this fall. There’s a song near the end of rising South Florida rapper XXXTentacion’s just-released 17 called “Carry On,” where the 11-track mini-album-a ramshackle mix of half-conceived folk musings and confessional depression raps-drops both its amateurish singer-songwriter contrivances and conventional hip-hop rhyme patterns in favor of raw emotion: “Trapped in a concept, falsely accused, was used and misled / Bitch, I’m hoping you fucking rest in peace.” It’s more than just your average jilted breakup rap.
This article originally appeared in Vulture.
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