His eclecticism comes, he has said, from learning about music by browsing through YouTube. So the internet’s mythological promise of widening peoples’ tastes has, in this case, been fulfilled. Rock and rap have of course always flirted, but the most high-profile crossovers usually try to reconcile the two styles into a hybrid aesthetic, whether via the early-2000s nu metal that XXXTentacion clearly loves or via new rappers like Lil Uzi Vert, who makes hip hop with emo signifiers. XXXTentacion intermixes like this, too, with his voice taking on the inflections of AFI’s Davey Havok even when rapping. But he also, somewhat unusually, tries on entirely different genre costumes from song to song.

Which isn’t to say his sound lacks cohesion. The production is performatively lo-fi, crackling as if through broken speakers. If that approach begs for comparisons to punk rock, so does his penchant for short song lengths—which is in line with the larger trend toward hip-hop that doesn’t break the two-and-a-half minute mark. Another constant is his voice, flitting between marble-mouthed drawl and whine, and his lyrical concerns, blending raunchy aggression with stark self-pity. On “the remedy for a broken heart (why am I so in love),” he flexes his rap talents as he name-drops wristwatch brands amid laments about lost love. You can hear him as a pop craftsman on “Sad!,” the chorus of which has him inhabiting a few different vocal tones for a delicate, intricate call-and-response effect.

One of his claims to fame is that Drake might have swiped from his flow, but the truth is that XXXTentacion is absolutely one of that rapper’s descendants. You hear it in the passive aggression of his introspection and of his boasts, and you hear it in his mercenary genre-hopping. One ? track, “I don’t even speak spanish lol,” joins the fad of pseudo-Latin pop, and it sounds, more than anything, like Drake’s hit “Controlla”—but unfinished, knowingly shoddier. I’d pick the finished song every time: Drake may be corny, but not as corny as XXXTentacion’s locker-door poetry (“Every single year, I’m drowning in my tears” goes one of ?’s catchier lines). Yet it’s unsurprising that some folks raised in a pop environment defined by Drake’s polish and careerism would gravitate to the rawer stuff.

It’s also clear, though, how a reaction against respectability can justify and even glorify actual cruelty. On the lyrics-analysis site Genius, XXXTentacion’s fans have written annotations insisting that each line about betrayal and heartbreak refers to the ex-girlfriend who has accused him of assaulting her. They’re plainly calling her a fake and a traitor, and XXXTentacion has only encouraged interpretations that see no distance between art and artist (one 2017 song is named after his ex). All of which adds to the queasy sense that he is a product of the internet’s double-edged power: connecting people, as much for comfort as for monstrousness.