The 2010s File Feature
Changes
Changes — XXXTENTACION "Changes" by XXXTENTACION, born Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy, occupies a unique and emotionally complex position in the legacy of one …
01 The Story
Changes — XXXTENTACION
"Changes" by XXXTENTACION, born Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy, occupies a unique and emotionally complex position in the legacy of one of the most controversial and commercially successful artists of the late 2010s. Released posthumously on the compilation album ? in March 2018, the song had actually been recorded prior to Onfroy's death on June 18, 2018, and gained its most significant commercial traction after he was fatally shot in Deerfield Beach, Florida. The resulting posthumous chart performance reflected both the genuine affection his audience had developed for his music and the particular intensity with which fans respond to an artist cut short.
The song was released on Bad Vibes Forever / Empire Distribution and was written by Onfroy himself alongside producers and collaborators associated with his circle. The production on "Changes" is among the most restrained in his catalog, built around a delicate piano loop sampled from Noah Cyrus's song "Again," which itself samples an original composition. The layered nature of the sample cleared the way for a sound that felt intimate and almost fragile, a stark contrast to the more abrasive and sonically aggressive work that had defined much of Onfroy's early profile.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "Changes" reached a peak of number 13, a position achieved primarily through the streaming surge that followed Onfroy's death in June 2018. His murder provoked an enormous outpouring of grief from his fanbase, which translated directly into streaming activity across his catalog, with "Changes" benefiting particularly strongly due to its emotionally accessible, melodically gentle character. The song's chart performance was part of a broader posthumous commercial wave that saw multiple XXXTENTACION tracks chart simultaneously.
The music video for "Changes" features XXXTENTACION in intimate, domestic settings, emphasizing vulnerability and tenderness over the more confrontational visual presentation that accompanied some of his other work. The video was released while he was still alive and contributed to the song's initial audience, but its streaming and view counts surged dramatically in the weeks following his death as fans sought out his catalog in tribute.
The context of "Changes" within Onfroy's career is significant because it represented a softer, more melodically conventional register than the work that had initially made him a polarizing figure in SoundCloud rap. His earlier tracks leaned heavily into aggressive production and provocative lyrical content, and the critical and cultural debate around his legacy was complicated significantly by serious allegations of domestic abuse that had generated considerable controversy even before his death. "Changes" was often cited in that debate as evidence of a different artistic dimension in his work.
The album ? was itself a statement of artistic range, sequencing between violent and gentle modes in ways that divided critics but resonated deeply with his core audience. "Changes" served as one of the album's emotional anchors, the track most likely to connect with listeners who might not have engaged with his more abrasive material. Its presence on the album was commercially strategic as well as artistically genuine.
In the years following his death, "Changes" has remained among the most-streamed tracks in XXXTENTACION's catalog, regularly appearing on curated playlists of introspective or emotional rap and R&B. The song's longevity on streaming platforms reflects its genuine emotional power, which operates independently of the controversies that surround Onfroy's personal history. Listeners who discover the song through algorithmic recommendation or playlist inclusion often encounter it without the full weight of that context, and the track stands on its melodic and emotional merits in those circumstances.
The commercial success of "Changes" and the broader XXXTENTACION catalog in the years since his death raised important questions about how the music industry handles the ongoing monetization and promotion of work by artists accused of serious misconduct. Several major streaming platforms briefly removed his music in 2018 as part of a controversial hate content policy before reversing the decision under fan pressure. The episode highlighted the difficulty of applying consistent ethical frameworks to music consumption decisions at scale, and "Changes" remained at the center of that ongoing conversation.
From a purely musical standpoint, the song represents a high point of the SoundCloud rap era's capacity for emotional range, demonstrating that the genre's most commercially successful artists could move between aggression and vulnerability with genuine effectiveness. Its combination of simple piano melody, understated production, and emotionally direct vocal performance secured it a place in the canon of late-2010s pop and rap crossover music.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning Behind "Changes" by XXXTENTACION
"Changes" presents a vision of romantic longing and the desire for personal transformation that sits at the most accessible and emotionally direct end of XXXTENTACION's artistic range. The song is organized around the experience of missing someone and the hope that both the narrator and the person he addresses might be capable of becoming different, better versions of themselves within a relationship. The word "changes" functions simultaneously as a description of what the narrator wants and an acknowledgment that he has not yet achieved it.
The emotional tone throughout is one of yearning rather than aggression or defiance, which made "Changes" unusual within a catalog that frequently deployed more confrontational registers. The vulnerability of the vocal performance is striking in context: Onfroy delivers the track in a soft, almost conversational tone that strips away the defensive posturing common in his more aggressive work. Whatever the sources of that vulnerability, the result is a listening experience that feels genuinely exposed rather than performed.
The production reinforces this emotional openness. The delicate piano sample that underpins the track creates a sense of fragility that matches the lyrical content. There is no sonic armor in the arrangement, nothing loud or hard to hide behind. The choice to build a song around such understated production was itself a meaningful artistic statement from an artist whose public persona was often defined by intensity and controversy.
The song can also be read as expressing a desire for self-improvement in the context of love, the idea that being loved by the right person, or loving the right person with sufficient commitment, might catalyze personal change. This is a familiar theme in romantic songwriting, but in the context of Onfroy's biography and the allegations that surrounded his personal life, it took on additional layers of complexity. Listeners and critics who were aware of that context inevitably brought it to their interpretation of lyrics about wanting to change and be better.
That interpretive complexity is one reason "Changes" has remained a subject of discussion in ways that go beyond simple appreciation of the melody or production. The song raises questions about the relationship between artistic expression and personal behavior, about whether a work of genuine emotional sincerity can coexist with a life that contradicted its stated values. These are questions the song itself cannot answer, and perhaps does not try to. "Changes" presents an aspiration rather than a record of achievement, and aspiration is precisely the kind of emotional content that listeners find easiest to inhabit regardless of what they know about the person who expressed it.
The posthumous context in which most listeners encountered the song added another dimension of meaning. Heard after Onfroy's death at twenty, "Changes" became freighted with the awareness that the changes he sang about would never be realized, that the life he was narrating had ended before its story could continue. That awareness transformed the song for many listeners from a straightforward expression of romantic longing into something more like an elegy, both for a relationship and for the potential of a life ended violently and young. The collision of aspiration and finality gave "Changes" an emotional weight that no amount of promotional effort could have manufactured, and it is that weight, more than any formal quality of the recording, that has sustained its presence in the cultural conversation years after its release.
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