Sunday night’s Grammy Awards included, as most award shows do, an “In Memoriam” montage — one featuring notable people from the world of music who had passed away since last year’s show.
This year’s montage included such luminaries as Aretha Franklin, Mac Miller, and Avicii. But one notable name was left out: Rapper XXXTentacion, who died last June at the age of 20.
The rapper, real name Jahseh Onfroy, was shot and killed in Florida last year. But the Grammys organizers decided not to include him in the segment, due to his documented history of domestic violence.
According to Variety , the rapper was left out despite repeated requests from the artist’s representatives, but they ultimately opted not to include him. The Grammy website posted a more extensive list of people the industry lost in 2018, and XXXTentacion was included therein.
XXXTentacion, who broke through as an artist only the year before his death, accumulated a long rap sheet in his short life. He was hit with multiple gun charges as a juvenile, and in 2017 he was arrested — per Jailbase — on charges of aggravated battery of a pregnant woman and of false imprisonment. After the case was repeatedly delayed, a Snapchat video surfaced of the rapper striking a different woman.
A great deal of the rapper’s music was released posthumously, per the Inquisitr , while a son of the rapper was born seven months after his death. Much like with Tupac Shakur two decades earlier, many fans of XXXTentacion believe that the performer faked his own death, per Twitter , but there’s little evidence that that’s the case. Footage of the rapper’s murder was shown in court last September, according to the Inquisitr .
XXXTentacion Left Out of Grammys ‘In Memoriam’ Segment https://t.co/aGsJh2PdF4 pic.twitter.com/fcdkgOsEw9
— TheWrap (@TheWrap) February 11, 2019
Fans of the rapper were not happy that XXXTentacion was omitted from the Grammy telecast, per In Touch Weekly , with some fans even threatening future boycotts of the awards.
“XXXTentacion was not included in the #Grammys In Memoriam and, despite all of his terrible actions, that feels very disrespectful,” Seattle-based editor Quinn Russell Brown said on Twitter in reaction to the omission. “He was a major recording artist whose music meant something to a lot of people, and he was murdered… I have read at length the allegations against him, and I am not a fan. But he was still a person, and he was objectively significant to music.”
Some social media chatter also complained that another rapper, Lil Peep, had been left out of the montage. Lil Peep died in 2017, per Rolling Stone , and had been included in last year’s Grammy show.
