SITUATION "XXXTENTACION" FROM MY POINT OF VIEW

Lately I have been positively surprised about how much of new albums and music in general has been released in a month or so. When I listen to a good, new (new to me not necessarily it needs to be on the freshest sounds top 20 list) song I can feel energy and satisfaction running through my whole body, that is why I take it seriously and usually spend a lot of time digging through Spotify, Soundcloud, Youtube and the internet in general.

Since there is a lot of albums that I need to listen to, this time I wrote them down in a list. Album “17” by only 19 years old american rapper XXXTentacion was one of them. Album was released on 25th of August, 2017. It has 11 songs on it.

Album Artwork

I listened to it on Spotify and added some songs that I liked to my playlist so they don't get lost. If the song seem interesting to me I almost always look up for the lyrics in genius.com and read them to myself as the song is playing in the background to get a better insight of the song's message.

XXXTentacion

After that I looked up XXXTentacion since I did not know much about him. The first thing that I found was an article in XXL magazines website (XXL is an American hip hop magazine) that said “New Details Emerge in XXXTentacion’s Domestic Battery Case”. It was about XXXTentacion being seued for abusing (hitting, threatening) his ex-girlfriend. You can read excerpts from the alleged victim's testimony in the article here. After reading the article I started questioning if I still want to listen to his music.

Later that day in one post's comment section in Facebook about good music to listen to one guy wrote “XXXTentacion” to which he got a reply – see the screenshots below:

That made me get again interested in this topic, because I still wasn't sure if I wanted to listen to his music, support him or not. So I looked up in google “XXXTentacion fighting” and got this. From the video you can tell that XXXTentacion is fighting someone. In my opinion it is always very important to be critical and to try to raise and answer some questions, for example, in this case – Why the fight is happening in the first place?; Why is nobody getting involved or stopping the fight?; Why are everyone filming it?; Are the fight out of hate?; How did it started and ended?; etc. I couldn't answer to all of those questions, that's why I didn't jump to any conclusions. Nothing in the world is black and white.

The next day I talked to my friends about this and asked their opinion about this situation – music is good, reputation is bad and if I like the music should I take unsure information into my account or should I not, keeping in mind that every time I play his song I am supporting him (artists get money from Spotify).

After the conversation I came to some conclusions about this situation:

1. Music to me don't have a race, country, gender, sexuality and so on.
2. Bad reputation is also a good commercial.
3. It is very important to today artists to create not only music, but also appealing self-image to their main auditory and it is easy to do so since everyone can follow artist's every move on social media.
4. Artist's created self-image should not be taken as the truth about the artist's personality.
5. People usually mix created self-image and the person's real personality and after that jump to conclusions, get disappointed.
6. Good music is good music and I am supporting the music not the actions. In a way of course the money from my pocket is putting the bread in artist's mouth, but it is not possible to know everything, every artist's action and thought about anything.
7. I am not the center of the world and it is okay to disagree with someone, have different beliefs etc. For example, XXXTentacion is fighting in the video, but I do not support fighting. It would be stupid, in my opinion, to judge music or art from that point of view.

In the end of the day, I think everyone just wants to be a better person. You can use your values scale to make your life better for yourself, but it is disrespectful to expect that others have the same values scale or will be willing to always agree to yours no matter how logical your facts are.

Later that day, my friend sent me a video “If You Hate XXXTentacion Watch This Video”. It is a compilation of all the good XXXTentacion's actions. You can make everything look how you want it to look. In reality nothing is just black and white.

In this case I don't think that facts from the internet or other medium can be fully trusted, because through the history everyone has always tried to manipulate and control people. But a lot of topics sure are worth a discussion. Eventually, you will need to choose what to trust or not to trust and why anyways.