Buy a print copy of the Lil Tracy issue of The FADER, and order a poster of his cover here.

ADVERTISEMENT





Lil Tracy presses a button and his pants vanish. He’s rocking a trench coat, boots, and pixelated genitalia as he runs into the street, hops on the windshield of a police car, and thrusts his hips forward. Cops jump out and tase him. He falls to the ground, twitching. A bikini-clad stripper lights up the cops with an Uzi until their blood pools on the concrete.

ADVERTISEMENT

“I probably shouldn’t have been playing this shit as a kid,” the 23-year-old says, grinning.

The pink-haired rapper and I are sitting on the floor in the spacious Bushwick apartment he shares with his cousin, the rapper Buku Bandz. Their living room contains a couch, a TV, a PS4, and not much else. Tracy’s showing me his favorite video game: Saints Row 2, a deranged Grand Theft Auto clone from 2008 that promised on its release to “bring open world thug-driven action to the PS3.” As a teen, Tracy spent many hours creating different avatars in the game. “I made a character with a cheat where if they killed you, you would fly into the sky,” he says. “He had a cane. He was black, but really pale, and really evil.”

There’s nothing on the walls of Tracy’s bedroom, but the floor is a map of his mind. I spy a cowboy hat embroidered with skulls, a Chanel pearl necklace, several cute stuffed animals, a ghoulish white mask, and a pile of boxes of high-end clothes and jewelry with a value Tracy estimates at $15,000. His love for character design lives on.

ADVERTISEMENT

Tracy spent his youth in Virginia Beach, where he ran away from home as a teenager and slept in a tent in the forest (more on that later) before moving to Los Angeles, where he bounced between friends’ living rooms and cars. During that time he’s released music under multiple aliases including Souljahwitch, Yung Bruh, Eblis The Persian Dolphin, and Yunng Karma. Tracy’s varied body of work reflects his renegade lifestyle, motivated by an insatiable desire for freedom — whatever the cost.

The musician recorded his most recent project — the Sinner EP, released in November 2018 — in the same bedroom room we’re sitting in. The EP is a significant return to the emo-influenced style that helped propel him, alongside Lil Peep and the Gothboiclique crew, to cult hero status in 2016. He wrote the project’s gorgeous single “Heart” last summer, shortly after experiencing a near-fatal heart attack. The song’s cover art — a heart with a band-aid listening to an iPod — reflects his belief that “music is what’s gonna help me get better.” It’s a tribute to a year he barely survived.

