Jarett Kobek - Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World

PUBLISHED BY WE HEARD YOU LIKE BOOKS
A Division of U2603
LLC 5419 Hollywood Blvd, Ste C-231
Los Angeles CA 90027
http://weheardyoulikebooks.com/
Copyright 2018 by Jarett Kobek
Decemember 2018 You know how this story ends. Everyone does. With a bullet in the neck. About a month after he died, I decided that I should read his tweets. All of them. From beginning until end.

After three years of fucking with his music, and two years of being irritated by his media coverage, it occurred to me that his Twitter might give some insight into who he was and, like The Bat-Man, how he came to be. XXXTentacions account has over 53,000 tweets. No one can scroll that far back, as itll crash a browser and destroy a mind. And the Twitter API only allows access to any accounts last 3,200 tweets. I found software on GitHub that would search, day by day, through XXXTentacions tweets and capture them into a file readable by Microsoft Excel. But I had no idea how to run the software.

I asked a friend for help. We decided not to capture the retweets. Even I have limits. She sent me the results, which were about four megabytes in size. It contained 26,654 tweets. http://weheardyoulikebooks.com/xxx.xlsx.

The tweets date from 13 August 2012 AD, when his account was @fuckjahseh and the idea of XXXTentacion didnt exist, until 28 June 2018 AD, when his account was @xxxtentacion and his management tweeted on behalf of his grieving mother. 25,882 of the tweets predate his arrest on 14 July 2016 AD for, allegedly, stabbing and robbing his former manager. 771 are after. When the criminal justice system began intersecting with his media coverage, he started deleting tweets. But most of the deletions were recent. 14 July 2016 AD begins the last twenty-three months of his life. 14 July 2016 AD begins the last twenty-three months of his life.

This period contains almost every incident of note. The further arrests, the jail time, the disastrous tours, the models suicide, the worldly success, the album releases, the rise to ultimate and crushing fame. Less than two years. An insane way to live. Those twenty-three months also coincide with almost nonstop media coverage. The vast majority of this coverage was negative in its tone but contained a factual core.

If we combine his tweets with this manufactured morality, we can achieve a portrait of his life from the age of fourteen. But we know almost nothing about what happened before 13 August 2012 AD. On 23 January 1998 AD, he is born. They call him Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy. His infant body emerges from the womb into Florida. Broward County.

The heart of Weird Florida. The Florida Man meme and the perpetual electoral recount. Its where Jahseh Onfroy will live his whole life. And where he will die. His mother is young and named Cleopatra. Shes 18.

His father is named Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy. Hes 24 years old. Hes a Rasta. In interviews before his death, XXXTentacion talked about the difficulties of his early childhood. He painted a portrait of the requisite traumatic upbringingneglect, shuffled from house to house, time in a group home, getting kicked out of schools, the beatings both received and administered, living with a grandmother who herself hasnt broken 35 years of age when he was born, the difficulty and occasional violence of a single mother bringing new men into the home. His father was absent, a casualty of the United States government and its multi-decade War on Drugs, which was, and is, a systemic conspiracy to ruin the lives of several generations of Black men.

Dwayne Onfroy goes down in a sting. This is in Phoenix, Arizona. This is in 2008 AD. He pleads out to two of four charges. Money laundering and attempting to sell hundreds of pounds of weed. His sentence is 108 months in prison.

Much later, on petition, Obama-era changes in sentencing laws reduce his stint by nearly a year. XXXTentacions father is arrested on 19 March 2008 AD. He remains in custody until November 2015 AD. He goes in when his son is ten years old. He comes out when his son is seventeen and on the cusp of worldwide fame. On 6 March 2014 AD, XXXTentacion tweets: so fucking happy , my dad called me , asked me to rap for all his homies on the cell block , and them niggas all freaked out And follows it up with: nigga told me he was proud of me As mentioned: his fathers money laundering charge, and the mandatory drug sentencing, are the products of a governmental conspiracy.

Both derived from legislation signed into law by President Ronald Wilson Reagan. Who loved anti-drug rhetoric and policy. His wife came up with JUST SAY NO. Reagan and his wife spent the 1980s telling kids to not do drugs. At the very same time that the televised President lectured a generation about the evils of drugs, he was overriding the will of Congress. He was funding anti-Communist forces in Nicaragua.

This was actively against the law. By any conceivable measure, he was a criminal. And the worst of it? Reagan, and his subordinates, knew that the people fighting against Nicaraguan communism were also dealing drugs. They were moving cocaine into these United States, a country with an insatiable appetite for blotting out its own horrors through sensorium pleasures. And Reagan and his subordinates looked the other way. They created the crack epidemic.

Which ruined the lives of countless of Black people. Which created the social situations that produced hysterical legislation. Which put XXXTentacions father in a federal prison. This isnt speculation. Or conspiracy theory. This is a matter of public record.

The President was a criminal. His subordinates were criminals. They operated at a level of criminality rare in American life. At best, they turned a blind eye to the creation of a drug epidemic. Some of these Presidential aides were convicted for their crimes. None of them served a day in prison.

One of them, who, as the head of the CIA, had supported the money laundering and drug dealing of Manuel Noriega, became the President after Reagan. His name was George Bush. The first George Bush. And as President, he went to war against Manuel Noriega. For the drug dealing. And he threw Noriegas ass into Federal Prison.

In Florida. And Dwayne Onfroy got eight years in pokey for trying to sell some weed to an undercover fed. And his son lived without a father. This, then, is the story of XXXTentacions early life. It isnt the litany of suffering that is mandatory in every biography. Its the story of how systemic influences in a society shape and create the contours of an individual.

And it starts with the governmental conspiracy to put several generations of Black men into prison. And the pathology that this conspiracy has wreaked on the children of those Black men. The constructed behaviors. And the hypocrisy of a society that tolerates unspeakable crimes from its highest elected officials but brooks no forgiveness for the sins of its poor. Its a story about the kid who gets a call from his father and raps for jailbirds. And its a story about someone breaking out.

And crashing back in.