Lil Pump on XXXTentacion's Death: "It "F@!ked My Head Up"

Lil Pump and XXXTentacion were friends and collaborators before X's passing in 2018, so naturally, Pump took the loss very hard. He tattooed a tribute to the late artist on himself ("LLJ" which stands for Long Live Jahseh—X's real name) in the months following the loss, and in a new interview Vulture published Thursday (Feb. 28), he opened up about how it affected him.

“It kind of fucked my head up. You was just here yesterday and you just died out of nowhere,” Pump told the publication. “You gotta be safe. After that X shit happened, I knew I couldn’t just be riding around alone no more. People are crazy out here. They look at one thing and think it’s more than what it is. They see me with a chain on and that bitch’ll prolly be like 20 bands [$20K], but they look at it and think it’s $100[K] and they want it.”

XXXTentacion was a rising rap superstar who was shot and killed during an apparent robbery in Deerfield Beach, Fla. on June 18, 2018. The suspects Dedrick D. Williams, Trayvon Newsome, Michael Boatwright and Robert Allen allegedly left the scene with a Louis Vuitton bag filled with thousands of dollars belonging to the rapper.

Because of X's death and the circumstances surrounding it, Pump now makes sure to always have a team with him when he leaves the house. The rapper also believes fame and being popular on social media are making himself and his peers targets for police as well, and he's not happy about it.

“That shit’s weird," Pump said about the cops targeting them. "They look at social media now, on top of everything.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Jetski discusses the importance of clout, shady record companies and his hopes for the future. "My goal is to be the most ignorant, richest rapper I could be,” he said. You can peep the full talk over at Vulture.

See Photos of Lil Pump Behind the Scenes at the 2018 XXL Freshman Class Cover Shoot