Ever since the day in May 1958 when Jerry Lee Lewis fetched up for a British tour in the company of a 13-year-old girl who turned out to be his wife, rock and pop music has offered fans ample opportunity to consider the wisdom or otherwise of separating the art from the artist. Music’s history comes liberally sprinkled with paedophiles, murderers, racists, domestic abusers, homophobes and violent criminals, among them some figures of pivotal artistic importance. The question of how the listener deals with their personal lives hangs heavy. Ignore it entirely? Pursue a music collection entirely comprised of stuff made by people whose moral integrity matches your own? Take the fingers-in-the-ears approach and assume innocence? Develop a personal sliding scale, in which some terrible transgressions are more terrible than others?
Certainly, few artists in recent years have provoked those questions quite like the late XXXTentacion, who was shot dead in June. He was clearly an important artist, who almost singlehandedly shifted the way hip-hop sounded with one track: Look At Me!, as avant-garde, lo-fi and extreme a piece of music as has ever made the US Top 40. He was also a man who had experienced an appalling life of neglect, violence and mental illness, which in turn had made him an appalling person: when he wasn’t redefining hip-hop, he dedicated an inordinate amount of time to inflicting misery on other people, from the cellmate he subjected to a violent assault because he thought he might be gay, to the pregnant girlfriend whose grim deposition regarding the horrifying injuries he inflicted on her seemed to be confirmed by a recently unearthed recording in which the rapper also confessed to stabbing eight people.
The position is further complicated by the fact that his fame and his music was bound up with his infamy. He exploded in popularity while he was in prison on domestic violence charges; the chorus of his hit single Sad!, which took up residence in the charts after his murder, depicts him threatening to kill himself if his girlfriend leaves him, something the girlfriend behind the deposition also claimed he would do in real life.
In fairness, his fans seem A-OK with this moral conundrum: he’s currently the fourth most streamed artist in the world on Spotify. But in the event that anyone is still wrestling with their conscience, his first posthumous release brings happy news: it’s OK, Kanye West has got this. Skins is both characteristically short – only one of its 10 tracks lasts over three minutes, half of them are over in under two – and short on guest appearances. But, thankfully, room has been made for pop’s premier blue-sky thinker to share his indispensable thoughts on a track called One Minute, amid a jerking, sickly metal guitar riff and the sound of XXXTentacion himself, in his solitary contribution to the song, offering an approximation of a death metal growl. After some imponderable remarks about anal sex, West announces that it’s time for us to worry no more, because the abuse XXXTentacion meted out was probably all the victim’s fault anyway: “Now your name is tainted by the claims they painting / the defendant is guilty / no one blames the plaintiff.”
It’s difficult to know what to say about this, other than to note that Kanye West has once again managed to make an event entirely about Kanye West, albeit not through a dazzling display of talent, but by his increasingly wearying willingness to say something so asinine, ignorant and toxic that you can scarcely believe you’re hearing it. This now seems to be his full-time job and it’s a desperately depressing way for a talented artist to see out their career. It’s all the more baffling given that the lyrics that come of XXXTentacion’s mouth on Skins are largely devoid of the unchecked misogyny and violence that marked out his earlier work.
One Minute is the most substantial thing here. The rest of Skins passes by in a bitty blur that’s alternately fascinating and confusing. It’s hard to work out if a track such as Whoa (Mind in Awe) is evidence of the kind of fragmentary, wilfully underbaked aesthetic that led some critics to compare XXXTentacion’s work to the early releases of lo-fi indie rockers Sebadoh and Tall Dwarves, or just unfinished: there’s a beautiful keyboard melody, one verse, some backing vocals and that’s it. There are tracks that suggest an artist straining at the confines of his genre – Difference is a really appealing recording of him singing to an acoustic guitar accompaniment, while the similarly acoustic closer What Are You Afraid Of? is a genuinely lovely song.
Some tracks suggest his ambition to cross musical boundaries might have outstripped his ability to do so: a big fan of Kurt Cobain he may have been, but Staring at the Sky is awful, like a snarky parody of a self-pitying grunge track that’s evidently meant in deadly earnest. There are really chilling moments, not least Train Food, with its ominous piano chords and feedback-laden guitar backing given a creepy intimacy by being recorded without reverb, so they appear to be taking place right next to you. Here, a man who clearly had an inkling his time was running out confronts his own mortality and appears to accept that whatever legacy he’s left behind is irreparably tainted: “Ask yourself the final question – is you going down or up? / Recollecting all the moments that you never gave a fuck.” And there is stuff that just seems slight, as if its disjointed brevity isn’t always just an aesthetic decision, but occasionally also a way of covering up a scarcity of ideas, a lack of material.
One unpalatable explanation for XXXTentacion’s success is that there are people out there stupid or disaffected enough to be turned on by his damaged nihilism. But there’s also just enough evidence of a maverick talent on Skins to make you see why others are willing to hold their noses, ignore the stern op-ed pieces and dive in. Whether you can do that is a matter for your conscience.
