WANNA BE

(a hasty foreword)

This one’s gonna be a little different. For one thing, Lil Peep was far too prolific for me to do my usual format– not counting his two studio albums, his five mixtapes, and his eleven EPs, he also released literally countless loosies and collabs, and there’s still probably untold unreleased material– and for another, he wasn’t a band, and this column will probably not be focused solely on him. A long time ago, when my writing was much more flippant and obnoxious, I called Lil Peep’s brand of music the closest thing we would get to a crabcore revival. I’d like to walk that back a little bit– Lil Peep wasn’t so much the reincarnation of Attack Attack as much as he was an update on what “emo” meant in the early-mid 00s (ie, the focus of this recurring column).

To me, the parallels are undeniable; here was a disaffected, deeply depressed teenager making extremely emotive music with an unshakeable DIY ethic, who eventually achieved fame that was ultimately detrimental to him. Lil Peep was objectively talented, an instantly charismatic presence with a knack for constructing indelible vocal melodies. The main difference between him and the kids who, a decade earlier, were forming pop-punk bands, is that he came of age in an era where hip-hop was the most accessible and immediate form of self-expression for the youth. Not only did the advent of simple-to-use and free music software make hip-hop more viable than pop-punk (which requires knowing a whole bunch of people who can play instruments and a studio to record in), but platforms like Soundcloud made it frankly easier to produce and distribute songs than ever before. For someone like Lil Peep, who absolutely wanted to be famous, it was a no-brainer to embrace hip-hop as a dominant musical style.

And yet, his music wasn’t pure hip-hop. Not just because Lil Peep wasn’t really a rapper (he sang more than anything), but because the influence of emo and pop-punk was palpable in everything he did, from his producers’ extensive sampling of artists like Mineral and Death Cab for Cutie to the way that he constructed his vocal hooks. His voice, whiny and youthful, was just more suited to writing blink-182 or Taking Back Sunday-caliber choruses than the mumbly auto-tuned warbling of many of his peers. It’s not that one took more talent than the other, it’s that Peep was of two worlds and fusing them made the most sense to him.

Born Gustav Ahr in 1996, in the town of Allenstown, Pennsylvania, Peep’s early life was defined by his close relationship with his mother, an elementary school teacher, and his grandfather, a Marxist scholar (Peep’s father stopped being involved in his life when he was a teenager; it’s been implied by many that he was neglectful and/or abusive towards Peep). Despite both of Peep’s parents being Harvard graduates, neither was seemingly upset by Peep’s decision to drop out of high school and get his diploma online. In fact, the support of Peep’s mother was a driving force in his public persona– she gave him the name “Peep” when he was a child, after all, and his first tattoo, at age 14, was her birthday and initials, supposedly so she couldn’t be all that mad at him for getting them.

Peep is often incorrectly characterized, after the fact, as “the voice of the Soundcloud generation.” I don’t think this is necessarily accurate– although his music appeals to people across all lines because of its innate catchiness and his almost inhuman likability, Peep himself was far from an avatar of his generation. Instead, I thought of him as the most representative member of a specific subset. Most of his peers were not getting face tattoos to commit to a life of playing music, and his generation is statistically less likely to be having sex and doing drugs. Instead, Peep was part of the most modern iteration of counterculture– he grew up in Long Island and was obsessed with punk music, after all, and self-identified as a loner who made most of his friends on the Internet.

Inspired by the intense work ethic and output rate of acidic DIY rapper Bones and his Seshollowaterboys collective, Peep moved out to LA to start his music career in earnest. He quickly hooked up with internet friend Craig Xen, who introduced him to JGRXXN and Ghostemane, all of whom were underground rappers infatuated with both edgy metal/hardcore aesthetics and the occult-influenced, dirty lo-fi sound of Three 6 Mafia’s earliest work. After establishing those relationships, Peep became the resident singer in their rap collective, Schemaposse. His career was on an immediate upward trajectory after that, with his first solo mixtape Lil Peep Part One garnering impressive play counts and spawning two of his earliest hits, “Star Shopping” (which was not originally on the mixtape, but is included on the official Soundcloud playlist) and “The Way I See Things.” The songs were good, of course– slight, wispy, yet memorable slices of pop-punk misery and ennui clawing their way out of a miasma of 808 beats and hazy, lo-fi guitar samples– but beyond that, why was Lil Peep’s music becoming such a phenomenon? And why would he attract such vitriol from the old guard and young kids trying to suck up to them?

CRYBABY

(kids these days)

There are a lot of audiences who have embraced Lil Peep since his music started to make the rounds in underground hip-hop forums in 2015, but the thing that binds them all, that makes them all part of Lil Peep’s tribe, is that he spoke to the general melancholy and anxiety that has always existed in teenagers and post-adolescents– it’s just that in today’s world, those feelings are magnified and reflected back at you by the 24/7 personal news cycle of social media, and Peep’s extremely blunt lyrics and earnest delivery fit that frame of mind perfectly, while the music itself is laid-back enough to remain broadly accessible (and never, in today’s parlance, “cringe”– a word that used to mean vicarious embarrassment but now refers to anything that seems too excited or genuine). The hooks are there: take one listen to “Kiss,” one of his breakthrough singles, and you’ll see that the dreamy, effervescent, instantly irresistible vocal hooks are there in spades.

That being said, a lot of Peep’s earlier material resonated with a certain type of person (and continues to resonate with that type of person)– extremely lonely (from mostly self-imposed isolation), prone to drug abuse (especially downers like Xanax and opiates), afflicted with depression, anxiety, apathy, vague anger. In times past, these were the kids who would be forming bands of their own, but now they’re making beats in their bedrooms, furthering their own sense of loneliness. If you don’t have to even leave your room to promote or make your music, why would you? When I listen to Lil Peep and think of his fans in the early days, I see people holed up in messy bedrooms, escaping the pressures of the outside world, but also all of its joys. Headphones on and engaged in endless Soundcloud bliss, playing video games and smoking weed until it’s time to go to sleep and start the whole thing over again, wishing for sex and intimacy but never quite approaching it– and if they do, it’s in the form of sloppy and manipulative app-assisted hookups or fleeting DMs from Twitter accounts that will never be attached to a physical presence.

The music of Peep and his peers also feels suffocatingly isolating–producers like Nedarb and smokeasac specialized in making beats that didn’t have to be lo-fi, but were by choice, often muffled and warped to make for an uncomfortable, watery, claustrophobic atmosphere. Peep’s vocals were multi-tracked and then pushed to the very middle of the mix, intelligible and serving as an island among the muck of the beats. Influenced by witch house and cloud rap, as well as the blown-out sound of other underground rap pioneers like Raider Klan, Lil Ugly Mane, and Awful Records, Peep’s songs could have often disappeared into the swirl of the other Soundcloud rappers who were trafficking in similar sounds, but two things set his music apart. For one, his producers often chose specifically obscure samples in order to show how those artists had influenced their artistic sensibilities as well as to give their beats a more concrete sonic identity. And then there’s Peep’s vocals and lyrics, which I’ve already spoken on, but it bears repeating how they elide exuberance and misery, how they’re both addictive and fleeting. Lil Peep songs are best listened to, not on repeat, but in an endless playlist, alternating between him, his peers, and his influences. They’re mood-setting, at once insular and expansive, mirroring the effects of his drugs of choice all at once: the communality of ecstasy; the closed-off darkness of opiates; the drowsiness of Xanax; the easy confidence of cocaine.

There were also his music videos, often shot on grainy, deliberately degraded VHS tape– quick-edited shots of him messing around in the streets and in dilapidated Skid Row apartments, often with friends and frequent collaborators like Lil Tracy (see “Witchblades” for a representative example). They were evocative, Peep’s tattooed-yet-innocent face was pretty to look at, and the aesthetic was by turns bracing, slightly eerie, and instantly (perhaps even predictively) nostalgic. The first time I ever heard of Lil Peep, it was by snarky friends of mine who swore I would hate the kid, but I watched a few of these videos and I was instantly hooked. In fact, this aesthetic instantly reminded me of Title Fight, another act who cross genre lines and manage to evoke that same feeling of manufactured, nay, immediate, nostalgia (it doesn’t hurt that they also shot videos on VHS).

While Lil Peep’s audience wasn’t exactly the same as Title Fight’s, he did speak to something similar, and it makes lots of sense that he could be considered a pop-punk artist, or even (deep breath) an emo revival act. He wasn’t reviving any sound as much as reinventing it– what he was reviving was the connection between artist and audience that flourished in the mainstream emo explosion of the early 2000s. Why do you think Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Lif3” was such a huge hit? Here’s a hint– Uzi tapped into those same feelings, and by his own admission, Hayley Williams is his biggest influence.

Lil Peep’s posses– first Schemaposse, and then GothBoiClique and a litany of assorted hangers-on– reminded me of the California hardcore band Trash Talk, who lived in similarly destroyed LA apartments, skating and writing graffiti, and associating with the rappers and artists in the Odd Future collective. However, while Trash Talk’s music and image were fundamentally alienating, even by hardcore standards (their shows are notoriously unhinged– I’m sure you’ve heard of the dude who pissed in his own mouth in a Trash Talk pit), Peep and his friends were welcoming and inclusive. Peep famously came out as bisexual in the most nonchalant way possible, and that nonchalance extended to his inclusion of a trans woman of color in the music video for his song with Horse Head, “Girls.” While his tall, gaunt frame and adorable facial features lent themselves to modeling, his fashion sense was androgynous, owing as much to the forward-thinking attire of Young Thug as it did to the sartorial flamboyance of bands like early Panic! at the Disco. Peep was also vocally outspoken about the mistreatment of women in the music industry (his posthumous, record-label-induced collaboration with the violently misogynistic and homophobic XXXTentacion would be, I’m sure, deeply distressing to him had he been alive). Fans of his who were in marginalized communities identified on a deep level with his bluntly (dashboard) confessional lyrics about suicidal impulses and drug use, both of which are afflictions that teenagers struggling with self-identity and dysphoria are often victim to. But Lil Peep’s music resonated with so many because pain is universal, and Peep’s mono-articulate straightforwardness spoke to that pain in a universal, plainspoken way. This new wave of hip-hop speaks to the same feelings as pop-punk did in its commercial heyday. Kids will always fundamentally go through the same things, and now that the Internet has been around for three generations of them, they’ll use that in the same way.

Extremely important in Peep’s rise to fame was the Internet– utilizing Twitter, Instagram, and Soundcloud as fan-building tools as well as indulging in every adolescent’s self-revealing, diaristic, and flippant impulses, the Internet presence of Peep and his peers reminded me that the more social media changes, the more it stays the same. Things have become sleeker and the language has updated, but Peep’s feverish cult of personality reminded me of the MySpace scene queens who built brands and loyalty through their appearances and personas, as well as the masterful self-marketing of bands. Kids will still post Lil Peep lyrics to describe their mood on Twitter, in the exact same way that a melodramatic LiveJournal post would be titled after a Say Anything song. Tinder has made hooking up faster and more localized than the days of Makeoutclub, where you would court someone for months before flying a plane across the country to have awkward sex and then leave the next day, but the mechanics are basically the same, sloppy and youthful as they ever were, fleeting as always. The outsized emotions of hormonal teenagerdom, made even more expansive by having a constant audience and mimicking the way they express their emotions, are just as perfect for Peep and emo rap’s rise as they were for Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco.

“Emo rap” as a term has been around for quite some time, going as far back as 1997, when Slug of Atmosphere used it to describe the introspective and cathartic nature of his lyrics as well as his DIY work ethic (founding his own independent label, Rhymesayers, to release his own music and the music of likeminded rappers) and his melodic, hard-hitting production (courtesy of Ant). Being from the Midwest city of Minneapolis, I’m sure he was familiar with the emo coming out of his region, but it was a sight to behold a hip-hop artist associating himself with music that could clearly be derided as “soft.” As Rhymesayers grew, with highly emotive and melodically inventive hip-hop artists like Eyedea & Abilities, Brother Ali, and P.O.S. all being associated with it, “emo” exploded in the mainstream, and by 2008, Kid Cudi and Kanye West’s depressive masterwork 808s & Heartbreak were being described as emo.

I think it’d be myopic of me to assign emo the same meaning in hip-hop as it has in rock music– while deeply intertwined in many ways, hip-hop and DIY/hardcore/etc. are still distinct subcultures and I think there are semantic differences between their interpretations of emo that should be respected. However, with many artists blurring the lines between the cultures and sounds– Lil Ugly Mane, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, nothing.nowhere., SCXRLXRD, and Ghostemane chief among them, helping to popularize the hardcore and emo acts that they tour with along the way– I would point to Lil Peep as the ultimate synthesis of these disparate definitions of emo. Hip-hop and punk-derived genres are both inherently democratizing and populist forms of music, but with the ascension of Lil Peep, the fusion of these two genres finally seemed to become something more than a punchline about late 90s nü metal. It’s more than white kids appropriating black culture***, it’s cultural exchange and synthesis for a whole new milieu of teenagers. This new wave– known by emo rap, trap metal, or shadow rap– was developed by people of color like Lil Tracy, Shinigami, SCXRLXRD, Cold Hart, and Zillakami alongside their white peers, which is demonstrative of how arbitrary the division between hip-hop and rock (a division that has always been implicitly racialized) is. Mutual respect and dialogue is always a good thing, and I have greater hope in this generation of musicians than any before.

***: One could absolutely still argue that black culture is being exploited by white hip-hop artists like Post Malone, who don’t have reverence for the art form or the culture. Lil Peep’s racially-diverse GothBoiClique never seemed to blink at having white members like Peep or Wicca Phase, but hip-hop culture is not a monolith. It’s predominantly rooted in stories of black struggle, but Latino culture also has deep ties to it, and hip-hop artists of all stripes have accepted white rappers like El-P, Mac Miller, and the Beastie Boys, all of whom historically showed deep respect to the culture as well as demonstrated a clear aptitude at the art form. It’s a question of integrity, respect, and talent, and it’s also, to an even greater extent, about class and power. At the end of the day, as my Jewfro indicates, I’m far too white-passing to say anything definitive on the subject– I’m just echoing what I have heard and learned from the people of color around me. Above all else, listen to and respect their voices first in these discussions.

HELLBOY

(the backlash)

By the same token, I feel as if a lot of the vitriol aimed towards Peep often came from older people, especially older white people, and especially the variety who prized the specificity and secrecy of the Midwest emo of their youth, who could not fathom the boundaries breaking down in this way. Around the time that Pitchfork released that infamous “The Future of Emo” article about Peep (a claim that Peep denies in the same article), the backlash reached critical mass. I moderate /r/emo, and there were daily– in fact, near-hourly— heated debates about whether or not to allow emo rap in the sub. The arguments that went further than “Peep is trash” usually boiled down to “It’s just not the same genre.” There is some implicit cognitive bias in this statement– it postulates that not only should hip-hop and emo not blend, but that people who try are committing heresy, as if one DIY art form crossing over into another was anathema to the whole enterprise.

I spoke earlier about the way that “hip-hop” and “rock” as phrases– denoting fanbase– became racialized over time. Despite hip-hop being the most popular form of music in America (a majority-white country), hip-hop is still coded as “urban.” Don’t get me wrong, hip-hop is inarguably black music, but it very obviously isn’t exclusively black, and it hasn’t been for a long time, especially not now; the same goes for rock music, which also began as black music, but was co-opted by white entertainers until it became almost exclusively white, with DIY punk and hardcore music (and their derivatives) often being one of the few spaces where people of color could have a voice in the genre. While early punk and early hip-hop certainly have ties, I find that it wasn’t until the advent of hardcore, the first truly DIY-from-the-ground-up movement in punk rock, that hip-hop and punk culture began to intermingle in a way that was more than a novelty. Hardcore was a genre founded by black people (Bad Brains), and with a rich Latino lineage, so to me, this seems like a no-brainer.

Graffiti– one of the four elements of hip-hop culture– and skateboarding– a sport that gained its greatest foothold in America as more than a passing fad when West Coast hardcore kids adopted it in the 80s– assisted in cross-pollination between hardcore and hip-hop throughout the 90s and early 2000s. Hardcore bands composed of graffiti writers like Downset and Spazz also flirted with hip-hop (Kool Keith even has a drop on a Spazz record, and shouted the band out on the Dr. Octagon track “I’m Destructive”). Downset, for their part, were the one band of the 90s who did Rage Against the Machine just as well, if not better, than Rage themselves (Downset’s “Anger” is a thinly-veiled criticism of Zach de la Rocha talking about a gang life that he never experienced in Rage’s “Settle for Nothing”— compare Rage’s lyric “I got a nine, a sign, a set, and now I’ve got a name” to Downset’s “Whatchu know about a set or a sign? Fake motherfucker, never even seen a nine”). Rage Against the Machine themselves, the oft-mentioned pioneers of rap-metal, were named after a scrapped song from Zach’s former hardcore band, Inside Out. Meanwhile, the massively popular video game series Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater exposed millions of skateboarding youths to underground hip-hop alongside various strains of punk. By the time of the time of the mid-late 2010s, it had become commonplace for Soundcloud rappers to rep hardcore and death metal (Lil Ugly Mane is probably the biggest influence in this regard, always wearing Jesus Piece and Obituary merch), and for rappers to experiment with a hardcore-derived screaming delivery in their tracks. Emo and screamo were simply the next logical step, and at this point the massively popular producer Nedarb is wearing a Saetia shirt on the cover of his solo album.

Collectives like THRAXXHOUSE, GothBoiClique, and Misery Club aren’t just the new incarnation of hip-hop groups like Wu-Tang Clan and Hieroglyphics– they’re part of a generation of groups founded through message board culture. They met or connected musically online, just like newer collectives in the same vein, like the hardcore-affiliated OFWGKTA, Brockhampton, and Injury Reserve. They’re also the new hardcore and emo bands, eking out a whole different kind of DIY circuit, one that navigates the internet just as much if not more than tour cycles. Yes, there’s still bands making guitar-based punk/emo/hardcore music, but when they’re releasing and promoting their music in the exact same ways as these rap groups, on Bandcamp and Soundcloud and Twitter and Instagram, why do those distinctions need to exist, beyond simple categorization? More often than not, the fanbases cross over anyway, so who cares?

The obvious answer, as always, is annoying old people, which finally brings me back to Lil Peep. His track with Gab3, the smokeasac and Yung Cortex-produced “Hollywood Dreaming,” samples Mineral’s “LoveLetterTypewriter,” a seminal Midwest emo song. To me, this was an obvious and good-natured show of affection towards their influences– “showing some love,” as Peep put it. It was released for free on YouTube and Soundcloud. Mineral themselves seemed to be none too pleased that they weren’t contacted about the sample (although now that they’ve reunited and are playing to crowds of both old fans and new kids who may have been introduced to them through Lil Peep’s sample, I wonder if they’re still upset), which set off a wave of angry responses through the old-o-sphere. Much love to Tom Mullen, but when my friend Kyle and I had him on our podcast, the E Word, we got into a brief spat over the subject. His party line is none too dissimilar to most other complaints, which is why I’m using him as an example– they should have gotten the sample cleared, and otherwise they were being disrespectful. My argument then is the same as it is now. For one thing, they didn’t actually make any money off the song, and for another, the sample itself was a show of respect and acknowledgment. Laws against sampling have long been used as an attempt to hold hip-hop production back, but intellectual property is not only an inherently gross and capitalistic concept, it simply shouldn’t hold up when the sample is used in a transformative way (for example, going from one genre to another, creating an entirely new song). Could they have asked for permission for the sample, or used an interpolation? Sure, but it would have been irrelevant, because old people were just going to be angry about kids “co-opting” their culture anyway. It’s sad to see a lot of younger people falling into these arguments as well.

It does bear mention that fans of underground music are often more protective of their genres of choice than fans of mainstream music– there was no major backlash to one of Peep’s best songs, “Yesterday,” which is not only much more straightforward in its sampling of Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” but also features a reinterpreted version of the vocal melody in “Wonderwall”‘s verses (in the context of the mixtape it’s on, Crybaby, it basically functions as an “Anyway, here’s ‘Wonderwall'” joke). I said earlier that Title Fight’s fanbase was different from Peep’s, but it didn’t have to be. I think young DIY rock fans have the capability of embracing this branch of hip-hop, and some of them do, but too many of them don’t want to. For a lot of white and ostensibly well-meaning kids in the DIY scene today, hip-hop is music that they don’t need to care about, or worse, music that they only care about in a tokenizing or condescending way to legitimize their taste in music to themselves and their peers (“My last.fm chart could use a more strategically placed JPEGMAFIA album,” they mumble to themselves). I understand that there’s no accounting for taste, but in a world that is becoming increasingly genre-agnostic, there’s no need to chain yourself to a constructed persona. People are messy and you won’t always adhere to a “brand.” It’s okay.

Some people took aim at Peep’s lyrics as vapid– that misses the point. They were deliberately spartan, as that was the best way of constructing the mood and conveying the feelings that Peep was aiming for. There is a valid argument to be made that his lyrics in songs like “Girls” and the somewhat-reprehensible “Driveway” were sexist. That is fair; as much as Peep, in his personal life, tried to combat the abuse of women in the music industry, his lyrics often portrayed someone who could be very vengeful against women, and that’s something that’s always been endemic in the tortured, toxic masculinity of emo in most of its incarnations. Still, by the time of his later material, Peep was showing signs of growing out of those lyrical conceits, and it’s hard to tell how else he might have matured as an artist in future years. Add to that his unblemished record– in a scene that’s often seen as a hotbed for abuse, Peep was never even thought, much less accused of, being an abuser– and it’s clear that his heart was in a much better place than people gave it credit for. As for the rest– the suicidal impulses, the drug abuse– Peep was singing about his reality, one that many people related to, and I find it hard to condemn that.

Then there was a whole other contingent of gatekeeper who despised Peep (and for that matter, all Soundcloud rappers) for the most predictable reasons: alarmism and forced moral outrage. Face tattoos? Drug use? What is this world coming to? Most people are smart enough to see through this as the same type of faux-anger directed at pretty much every rising subculture once it becomes apparent that suburban children could be exposed to the nefarious and degenerate lifestyle choices of the lower class (the “culture war” narrative that refuses to die has been in existence, in its contemporary form, since at least Tipper Gore and the PMRC). I shouldn’t have to tell you that it’s nonsense, because it should be self-evident. There is a new angle here, as Peep’s death and Soundcloud rap culture as a whole is tied to the opiate epidemic, but let’s be honest, the concerns raised about that are 1. fake non-empathy and judgment directed at drug addicts and 2. the polar opposite of the apathetic and even dangerous response that was directed at the crack epidemic. However, the crack epidemic plagued the black community, while the face of the opiate epidemic is mostly white. Shocking.

BEAMERBOY

(and the rest)

So when you strip away the responses to Peep’s music, both positive and negative, what is left? The material reality of the situation is that Peep was an extremely talented and innovative musician, which his major label debut, Come Over When You’re Sober, Part One proved amply as it became an immediate hit. It was a trap-infused update of the emo anthems of the early 2000s– with the samples done away with, Peep and his producers composed their own beats, which were filled with dark, twisting bass lines and guitar melodies by turns mournful, melancholic, and menacing. Even the most major-key number, the pop-punk-infused banger “Awful Things,” is stacked with Peep’s anguished yowl and a music video that plays with both ironic and genuinely sad iconography. In it, Peep confronts his real feelings of betrayal when he sees the girl he likes flirting with someone else by engaging in a self-aware and over-the-top act of self-immolation (onlookers literally mouth the words “what the fuck?”). It’s a nifty balancing act of self-consciousness, both reveling in and making fun of the emotions that he’s going through, which is instantly appealing to a generation that sees irony as the baseline of contact with the world around them. And yet, Peep’s approach to the music itself is wholly non-ironic, a purging of demons that never seems to end because he’s wallowing in the emotions even as he engages in the catharsis.

There’s a nearly intangible, but extremely noticeable shift in gloss between Peep’s underground material and Come Over When You’re Sober. Call it the damnation of low expectations, but while Peep’s earlier material is infused with the likability of a dirtbag who knows he’s going to flame out and die early (On his breakthrough mixtape Hellboy, he drawls “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself”), it’s always tempered by the fact that Peep was so clearly enamored with fame. From naming a song “Cobain” to his tireless self-promotion, Peep was self-mythologizing to a fault. He was both honest and inscrutable– lines like “I don’t wanna lie, I wanna keep it real/I don’t wanna tell you how I feel” speak to this dichotomy– but more than anything, the thing that kept me invested in the kid was hoping he would overcome his issues and make it. On Come Over When You’re Sober, Part One we’re confronted with the fact that although he had finally made it, he was still just as miserable as ever. Add to that the pressures of touring and the fact that arguably his management enabled his drug addiction, and it was immediately clear that he was going to meet the exact fate that he always sang about.

Whether the music that he made and the people he associated with fueled his disregard for himself is irrelevant. There’s also a multitude of conspiracy theories surrounding his death, none of which I’m particularly interested in. Peep’s death came at an extremely weird time in my life– I was about to descend into some of the worst depths of my own bad decision-making, and the specter of his life and death hung heavy over the following few months. His music soundtracked a particularly hopeless and directionless patch of my life, and I feel like as much as it resonated with me before and after, Peep’s music never meant as much to me as it did in that immediate period. Counter as it runs to the nature of this column, I fear getting too indulgent, so I’ll spare you the details.

Ultimately, this column is about Lil Peep, and it’s difficult for me to think of a more representative performance of his than this video of him covering blink-182’s “Dammit.” His enthusiasm for the track is infectious, transforming what could have been little more than a karaoke performance into a transcendent moment of old and new colliding in a heartwarming and definitive way. “Dammit” occupies an extremely unique space in our cultural fabric– as the first guitar riff that most people of a certain age learn, it’s deeply embedded in our consciousness as a relic of late 90s nostalgia, and yet something about it will always feel timeless and relevant, and Peep’s choice to close his show with a cover of it speaks to both his respect for the pop-punk of years past and the way that those feelings will always remain trapped in time, frozen for angsty teenagers who hate their hometown and love their friends to discover whenever they are ready. It’s a beautiful moment of catharsis and homage.

It’s this image of Peep that I prefer to keep in my mind when I think of him, and not the shameless cash-in of the posthumous collaborations foisted upon his legacy by his record label, who have been pretty shamelessly manipulating the grief of his mother and his friends (like the producer smokeasac or rapper/possible partner iLoveMakonnen) into blatantly obvious cash grabs. “Sunlight On Your Skin” was a clear anthem about love between two men, and it was contorted into a gross mess with obfuscated lyrics and a guest spot by a man who represented everything that Lil Peep stood against, and then given the remix treatment by a desperate-to-stay-relevant Travis Barker (talk about symmetry in the worst possible way). That Fall Out Boy track is better, musically, but completely extraneous. Come Over When You’re Sober, Part Two is another mess of a record; for every strong salvaged song like “Sex with My Ex” and “Cry Alone” there’s a repackaging of a Peep song that was better served in its original form (“Life Is Beautiful” is a confused, I’m-14-and-this-is-deep reconstruction of an old Peep track from 2015, while “16 Lines” was a leaked track that stood much better in its initial incarnation). The song “Fingers” ends with the forced emotional manipulation of Peep saying “I’m not gonna last long”– how much more crude and empty can you get about an artist’s death? Peep shouldn’t be remembered as a martyr or a scapegoat. He was a goth angel sinner.

Am I embarrassed to be a fan of Lil Peep? I never have been, and never will. I will defend his place in emo’s history to my dying breath, as his ascendance was the perfect counter-example to people who claim that the way that fans connected with emo bands in the past could never happen in the age of social media. If anything, social media makes the connection more palpable; for as much as we could talk about parasocial relationships, the youth of many of these performers makes them more open to their fans, makes them more real and knowable. While that may be something of a social construct, social constructs are very powerful and very real. The pain that I and others felt at Lil Peep’s loss was as real as any other relationship that people in America create with a celebrity. It may be passe, but I’d like to conclude this column with two things. First is an arguably overwrought and emotional post I wrote immediately in the aftermath of Peep’s death:

This kid needed help. He posted a video on his Instagram yesterday of himself trying and failing to get Xanax into his mouth. Interviews with him were always incredibly troubling, too. Someone should have intervened. But honestly, an intervention would have been really hard too, considering the crowd he ran with. I’m sick of this shit; we shouldn’t have to try and tell a fucking aesthetic apart from a legitimate problem. Stop romanticizing drug use.

Either show people with addiction some empathy any other day of the fucking week or shut the fuck up, permanently. You’re not helping by offering your empty, hollow sympathies anytime another one of us poor junkies dies. Save that shit for your DARE presentation.

To make things even more crystal clear– Lil Peep wasn’t popping xans because his “music and lifestyle” glorified it. He was depressed as fuck and that’s immediately apparent when you read his lyrics or look at his Instagram; he was asking for help at least half the time. The blame for “glorifying” drug use isn’t on the artists themselves, it’s on the system that banks off the controversy and clicks it gets from those artists being open about their troubles. The blame is on anyone who profited off that shit without once thinking to step in to help him. The blame is on the industry folks– record execs, managers, anyone with a professional foothold in Peep’s career– who saw Lil Peep, mentally ill and killing himself daily with his drug addiction, and instead of trying to help him get clean, forced him to go on fucking tour. The fact that people are still going back to the same hoary old “rap culture” well pisses me the fuck off. Yeah, Peep was a depressed drug addicted musician who hung out with other depressed drug addict musicians… No fucking shit, Sherlock. You’re not a next-level culture critic.

Perhaps a bit too much, but these feelings are still just as strong today as they were in November of 2017. And if nothing else, no one else could have said what Peep and his fans were going through during his and their darkest times than Peep himself, in his song “U Said”:

Sometimes life gets fucked up

That’s why we get fucked up

I can still feel your touch

I still do those same drugs

That we used to do

I was used to you

“What have you been through?” she asked me

Every fucking kind of abuse

Not everyone can say they’ve been through his exact struggles, but everyone can know what it feels like to be at the bottom. And if nothing else, that’s what emo is about: articulating what it feels like to be at the bottom, and rejoicing in the relief that comes with seeing other people come together, hands clasped, shouting your words back at you, and saying, “I know. I’m here. You aren’t alone.”

NEXT WEEK: This column must come to an end, my friends, and I can think of no finale more fitting than the kings of bands that you weren’t supposed to like, the culprits of distorting everything about emo and presenting it to audiences of millions, the enemy of oversensitive authenticity-fetishists everywhere: My Chemical Romance. See you soon.

If you are dealing with drug abuse or mental health problems, please, seek help. Here is a list of international helplines. If someone has a better source for these, I implore them to post it below.