XXXTentacion‘s estate have officially released ‘I’m Not Human’, featuring Lil Uzi Vert, in honour of the late rapper’s fifth anniversary.
The track was first teased back in January on the birthday of XXXTentacion – real name Jahseh Onfroy – and leaked afterwards.
Now on Sunday (June 18), five years after the influential yet controversial rapper’s death, his estate officially dropped the acoustic ballad ‘I’m Not Human’.
The track sees Onfroy and Uzi Vert croon over A sombre and minimal guitar instrumental, opening with a reference to Slipknot’s 2008 track ‘Snuff’ from ‘All Hope Is Gone’: “Bury all your secrets in my skin / Come away with innocence, and leave me with my sins.”
In an accompanying statement, X’s longtime collaborator John Cunningham recounted the time he and Onfroy made the track whilst he lived with him in Florida in 2018.
“The day he first sang ‘I’m Not Human’ as I was playing that guitar part, we both looked at each other and cracked a smile, knowing it was special,” he said. “We listened back to the voice memo he recorded and talked about finishing it, but the few times that we tried recording vocals in the studio the feeling was never the same. He always preferred the original voice memo which is why we chose to keep it in the official version of the song.”
Cunningham then spoke about how Lil Uzi Vert got on board after trying to “find the right time and the right song for a posthumous release with Jahseh” before the release of X’s first posthumous album, 2018’s ‘SKINS‘.
In November 2021, Lil Uzi Vert told he felt “really weird” to make a posthumous track with XXXTentacion at that time in a Twitch livestream.
“Yes, I’d love to do a song with him but I’m really weird on stuff like that,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, it took me really long to do that with another artist. I’m really weird because I understand that they’re not here living and what if that’s not the vision they really want? Especially if they really fucked with me. What if that’s all wrong, I’d be pissed off if like they did it all wrong and I’m not here. But you know, if it works out, it works out.”
In late 2022, XXXTentacion’s mother Cleopatra and Lil Uzi Vert allegedly agreed to work on another track together, according to Cunningham. Recalling the time he shared ‘I’m Not Human’ with the rapper, he said: “After one of the few heartfelt conversations we’d have that night, I played the song — which hadn’t been touched since May of 2018— and after seeing Uzi’s reaction to the song it felt as though the past few years of conversations and back-and-forth song ideas had all led up to this.
“That feeling was echoed after hearing Uzi and Jahseh’s voices together in a way that neither of them have ever sounded,” he added. “As complicated and conflicting as posthumous releases can be, I feel I’ll hold this one in a special place due to the fact that I was able to have some small part in connecting two of the most pure and loving people I know.”
Onfroy was shot and killed on June 18, 2018 in Florida outside a motorcycle shop in a robbery gone wrong. In March 2023, the three men charged with the murder of the rapper were found guilty and subsequently sentenced to life in prison. Drake was ordered to appear in court for the trial, but the judge ultimately went against this.
Other than ‘SKINS’, another posthumous XXXTentacion album was released via his estate, ‘Bad Vibes Forever’, in 2019. His old collective, Members Only, released some unreleased verses of X’s on their ‘Members Only, Vol. 4’ record.
Last year, the feature-length documentary Look At Me: XXXTentacion was also released last year on Hulu in the US, chronicling his rise online and in the popular Floridian SoundCloud scene, his struggles with mental health and his history of violence – including domestic abuse charges. In 2018, he confessed to a series of violent crimes in a secret recording.
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