One Minute

One Minute — XXXTENTACION Featuring Kanye West and Travis Barker: History

The circumstances surrounding the recording and release of "One Minute" by XXXTENTACION are inseparable from the tragedy that defined the album on which it appeared. The song was included on Skins, a posthumous collection released by Empire Distribution and Bad Vibes Forever on December 7, 2018, approximately six months after XXXTENTACION, born Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy, was fatally shot on June 18, 2018, in Deerfield Beach, Florida. He was 20 years old. The album's release was a collaborative effort between the artist's label and his estate, and it generated significant debate about the ethics and artistic coherence of posthumous releases assembled from material that a living artist might have continued to revise.

XXXTENTACION had been one of the most disruptive and contested figures in contemporary music during the years leading up to his death. His rise through SoundCloud and the broader streaming ecosystem had been rapid and turbulent, marked by confrontational artistic choices, a loyal and intensely engaged fanbase, and serious criminal allegations that generated sustained controversy. Despite, or in some cases because of, this fraught public profile, he had achieved genuine commercial milestones. His album ?, released in March 2018, had debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, confirming a level of mainstream commercial traction that even his detractors could not dismiss.

"One Minute" brought together an unusually high-profile combination of contributors for a posthumous track. Kanye West, one of the defining figures in hip-hop since the mid-2000s, contributed a verse that represented one of his more commercially prominent collaborations of the period. Travis Barker, the drummer best known as a longtime member of Blink-182 and a prolific collaborator across genre lines, handled percussion contributions that gave the track a live instrumental energy distinguishing it from the more purely electronic productions that surrounded it on Skins. Barker's involvement underscored the genre-blurring approach that XXXTENTACION had cultivated throughout his career, drawing on punk, emo, and rap influences without privileging any single tradition.

The production on "One Minute" was intense and confrontational, befitting material that XXXTENTACION had conceived in a period of significant personal and legal strain. The track's sonic architecture combined distorted textures with percussive force, creating an environment that amplified rather than softened the emotional content of the vocals. This approach was consistent with the artistic direction XXXTENTACION had established on earlier material, where discomfort and aggression were treated as valid and even necessary modes of expression.

Kanye West's verse brought considerable attention to the track upon the album's release. West was at one of the more publicly scrutinized points of his own career in late 2018, having generated substantial media coverage through a series of controversial statements and public appearances. His participation on "One Minute" was read by some observers as a genuine tribute to a younger artist he had expressed admiration for, and by others as an example of the complicated calculations that surround posthumous releases. Regardless of interpretation, his presence on the track ensured a level of media coverage beyond what most posthumous albums typically generate.

Skins as an album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 upon its release, making XXXTENTACION one of only a small number of artists to achieve back-to-back number-one album debuts in a single calendar year. "One Minute" was among the album tracks that drew the most attention from critics and fans attempting to assess what XXXTENTACION's artistic trajectory might have produced had he lived. The streaming numbers in the days following the album's release were substantial, consistent with the patterns the artist had established during his lifetime as a streaming-era phenomenon whose audience engaged primarily through digital platforms.

The critical reception of Skins and of "One Minute" specifically was mixed, reflecting the broader disagreements about XXXTENTACION's legacy that divided music journalism in the period following his death. Some critics found the posthumous album's production and assembly to be uneven, suggesting that the material had not been fully completed to the artist's satisfaction before his death. Others argued that even in unfinished form, tracks like "One Minute" demonstrated the creative range that had made XXXTENTACION such a polarizing and compelling presence. The involvement of West and Barker gave the track a specific claim on attention that differentiated it from the album's other contents.

Travis Barker's contribution to the percussion on "One Minute" also reflected his ongoing role as one of the most sought-after drummers in popular music, a figure who had spent years building a reputation for working across genre boundaries with younger artists. His presence on a track featuring XXXTENTACION and Kanye West was emblematic of the genre-dissolving dynamics that defined popular music in the late 2010s, where the traditional boundaries between rock, hip-hop, and pop had become largely nominal.