XXXTentacion's 2018 album ? has surpassed Drake's Scorpion in streams — posthumously awarding the rapper the title of most streamed hip-hop album in history.

It's an enormous feat, speaking to the profound cultural impact the 20-year-old Florida native had on the music landscape — a presence so heavily felt, that he would continue to amass millions of plays in the four years after his death.

The achievement speaks to something else, too. A phenomenon that has wound its way through society, a question that has arisen time after time, again and again. What about his credible pattern of domestic abuse?

In a court deposition conducted in 2017, XXXTentacion's (real name Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy) girlfriend gave a harrowing account of life with the rapper — describing how he continuously inflicted physical and mental abuse throughout the course of their relationship. When asked to pinpoint the days he threatened her life, she responded, "Well, when we lived in Orlando, it was literally like every day."

Where violence often comes to light once a musician has reached fame, Onfroy's celebrity seems to have been born from it.

In one of his stays in a juvenile detention facility, he assaulted one of his cell-mates, who in the words of Onfroy in an interview with the Miami New Times, "did some gay shit, so I had to crack his head open."

It was after he got out that he would begin making music. What began as low streamed, underground mixtapes would eventually evolve into mainstream breakout hits, the first of which being 'Look at Me!' which achieved massive online success. It wasn't until XXXTentacion was in prison, however, that he would ascend to the realm of ultra-famous.

After being arrested and charged for violently abusing his pregnant girlfriend, which included accounts of stomping on her head, kicking and punching her, and frequent threats of suicide — that's when his career began to take off.

While on house arrest, he worked with Diplo to create ?, a record that told the world of Onfroy's struggles with mental health, mentioning suicide and constant, ever-present numbness. His brand, a cocktail of misogyny, violence and intense insecurity became a part of his iconography. It's a big part of why he was famous. It drew people to him.

The larger problem: Onfory's success is far from an isolated incident.

What about Chris Brown's violence against numerous women, resulting in emotional and physical injuries, endless trauma and restraining orders? R. Kelly's trial for countless charges of sex trafficking and child sexual abuse imagery? The mounting, bone-chilling accusations of repeated imprisonment and assault against Marilyn Manson?

XXXTentacion achieved his first No.1 on Billboard's album charts after being imprisoned in 2016 for brutally attacking his girlfriend and stabbing his manager. Chris Brown landed a number 1 hit in 2019, despite strangling a woman the year prior and hospitalising then-girlfriend Rihanna (a hugely powerful person in the music business) in 2009. Manson saw a 7 percent rise in streams in the wake of his abuse allegations. After his guilty verdicts for sexual exploitation of a child and kidnapping, R. Kelly's album sales increased 517 percent.

There's a trend here — and it's not just the music industry's habit of turning a blind eye. It's not uncommon for artist's streams to skyrocket surrounding controversy (see Morgan Wallen, who sales increased by a staggering 1,220 percent after he was caught using a racial slur), but it is incredibly unsettling to see violent men in music repeatedly being elevated to icon status.

People like to say that the modern era is a reckoning, after the #MeToo movement dragged countless assaulters out of the woodwork, 'cancelling' big name celebrities, restoring some sense of justice to a system so internally corrupt that Harvey Weinstein could amass 87 allegations before being thrust into the limelight. And while those things are important and real, they're not absolute.

After the 2019 Netflix documentary Surviving R. Kelly, the R&B singers name became synonymous with the dark side of the industry. Of how fame, opulence and wealth could give men the power to live-out and conceal their violent, abusive fantasies. R. Kelly might be one of the most 'cancelled' living musicians, and yet his streams increased 22 percent in 2021.

The testimonies of Manson's victims — many of whom themselves are famous — are some of the most nauseating accounts of repeated assault and manipulation seen in the entertainment industry. A lawsuit from model Ashley Morgan Smithline attests that she "deals with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and panic attacks," as a result of her relationship with the singer. And yet, months after the accusations were made, Manson collaborated with Kanye on Donda — a project that would break the record for most streamed album in a day in 2021.

It seems that in the new age of cancel culture, the act of socially shunning a musician feels like justice to some, while galvanising others. We watch as one half turns their back in disgust, and the other bows in reverence. What does that say, about an industry and culture that has continually allowed proven abusers to remain, relatively comfortably, in celebrity?

"Separate the art of the artist!" Ah, the gospel of the uncomfortable.

It's true in a sense — allowing a space for art of any kind is incredibly important. How are we supposed develop critical thinking and understand the contours of right and wrong without being exposed to expression from every shade of human consciousness?

Unfortunately, art doesn't exist in a vacuum. We live in a time where your exploration into the mind of Chris Brown, by streaming 'Run It!' on repeat, directly puts money in his pockets and adds influence to his name. Where it allows him to win a Grammy after causing immense physical and emotional damage to (fellow Grammy winner) Rihanna. It's not their art alone receiving those accolades, it's them. The artist. The abuser.

It's comfortable misogyny, sure. Not to sound casual about it — but after the United States elected a man who has on video confessed to assault, and then four years later turned around and elected another one with a harassment allegation — it's a fact that's hard not to resign to.

The news of XXXTentacion's record-shattering achievement prompts an important reflection on how, even in the cancel culture, #MeToo era, the industry we all love frequently elevates men who hate women. And how, even when they're exposed, put on trial, imprisoned — people still choose to put them on their playlists. And finally how, as a young woman just entering the industry, I've already stopped screaming and started sighing.

“Even if you do hate XXXTentacion, you cannot deny his influence on modern rap," wrote NME in a review of his latest posthumous release, Bad Vibes Forever. 

No, you cannot. Shouldn't that be a problem?

If you or someone you know is a victim of domestic abuse, please call the Women's Aid Freephone Helpline: 1800 341 900