![]() Womack, an intense, fiercely intelligent woman with long gray hair that makes her look more than a little like Patti Smith, lives in a small white house, barely set back from the road in Huntington, New York. On a frigid December evening more than a year later, Liza Womack sits at her kitchen table with the wreckage of her son’s death scattered all around. Peep’s music, says Wentz, “unapologetically traversed genres in a weird way that my generation and generations older than me probably would’ve been too cautious about.” “He had this vulnerability to him, in the same way that Kurt did,” says Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz. Peep idolized Kurt Cobain, and it was easy to imagine him turning into a Kurt-like figure himself: an achingly pretty, blithely self-destructive superstar that a generation of kids could look to and see their pain reflected back at them. In 2017, Pitchfork called him “the future of emo.” Peep, in his song “Crybaby,” tossed off a phrase that fit much of his catalog: “Music to cry to.” ![]() In his lyrics, he talked shit about girls and his favorite drugs - Xanax, weed, cocaine, “cheap liquor on ice” - and grappled openly with depression and anxiety. Peep’s music was often tagged as SoundCloud rap, though he was as much rocker as rapper, sampling his favorite bands (Modest Mouse, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Death Cab for Cutie) and singing over low-fi trap beats in an intoxicating seen-it-all voice. For a 21-year-old who’d only started posting his songs online two years earlier, it had been a head-spinning rise. The shows had been going well - most dates sold out, with mobs of kids trying to get close to Peep. Peep’s tour bus had already crossed North America twice in six weeks, and the Tucson show was to be the tour’s second-to-last stop. “He was the guy who spoke for me, things I could never put into words,” Dowd says. Between him and the fans was a plastic table scattered with lighters, pens, rolling papers, scissors, ground-up bits of marijuana and a black sticker with the phrase alive + well on it.įor then-16-year-old Nick Dowd, a massive Peep fan who’d come to the venue with his friend Mariah Bons, sitting on the bus with Peep was a dream come true. ![]() In the back lounge, the AC was cranked, and Peep, wearing a black, studded vest and multicolored checkered pants, had folded his long, lean frame onto an upholstered seat. This was Tucson, Arizona, in November 2017, and the afternoon heat hovered in the mid-80s. They were smoking dabs, high-potency doses of concentrated weed that are vaporized, then inhaled. ![]() Though his face tattoos and pink hair and Good Charlotte-like flow may have been jarring, Peep represented a fascinating new era of the genre-an artist who understood the challenges of his generation and wasn't afraid to rap about them.It was five hours before showtime and Lil Peep was in the back of his tour bus, getting high with two young fans. On Lil Peep’s “Awful Things,” he begs a woman to tell him all the worst things about her day, because it helps him connect his stage name is a derivative of Little Bo Peep, a nickname his mother gave him when he was little and he’s come out as bisexual and regularly takes homophobes to task on Twitter. As Pitchfork wrote of Lil Peep in a lengthy exploration of the resurgence of rap rock: Whenever there is emotional catharsis, there is also the possibility of tenderness and hope. It's like the Blink-182 era of pop-rap music. Artists like Post Malone, Lil Yachty, and Lil Uzi Vert have embraced a punk-rock approach to rap music-repackaging it to sell at the mall. His music marked a new phase in rap, one in which guitars and emotional anxiety took center stage. In a tragic interview with Lowe on Apple Music's Beats 1 days before his death, the host, noting Lil Peep's transparency with drugs and anxiety, asked how he's coping with fame. "I think that's very much in line with the times." "When you have an artist who reflects that like Lil Peep, who has no problem coming out and talking about his anxiety and depression, that continues the dialogue," Lowe said. For two years he released dozens of tracks online and gained millions of plays, connecting with a young generation captivated by his openness about his depression and drug use.ĭuring a conversation just yesterday with Zane Lowe of Apple Music's Beats 1, the tastemaker told me that Lil Peep represented a trend of musicians in 2017 who created an open dialogue about depression and mental health. to pursue a career in music, where his blend of rap with guitars and emotional honesty made him an early internet sensation. He was raised by a college professor father and an elementary schoolteacher mother in Long Beach, Long Island. Lil Peep was born Gustav Åhr on November 1, 1996.
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