But he also had seemingly countless ways of sneaking and snaking past that. He was a 20-year-old white emo rapper with a tattoo on his chest that read, "Daddy." To not experience a certain dismissive instinct, you'd need to be in the kind of narcotized Xannies-and-blunts semi-coma Peep liked to hover in. If you had or have no impulse to dismiss him, that should probably also concern you. I'm just trying to signal that it's worth checking any impulse you have to dismiss him. Why you would care what my favorite songs are is hard to imagine. He was terribly young, and his music was sometimes so bad that you'd hear it and think more or less, "What is this shit?" Yet a few of his songs are my favorite songs of the past decade. Lil Peep, born Gustav Åhr, who was only 21 when he died last month but had been warning everyone he would die young since teenagerhood-he suffered under volcanic substance-abuse problems that he turned into performance art-was just such an end-times singer.
It's awesome and awful, the world we've demanded they inherit-they are the children of the end of the world, the real end of the world this time, now that not just the prophets but the scientists are saying so-and the way these young people deal with that, stay human in the strangeness of having been born at that moment, seems a drama worth observing. He was very smart, and he was pretty, a sexy angel-boy, vaguely androgynous, vaguely bi- or pan-sexual, seeming both lost and strangely in control, strangely ahead.įor the generation coming up, the one I don't really understand yet, this music speaks to them (to a lot of them), and maybe that's partly why it speaks to me, because I want to understand them better. They are alive, after all, and will be after us, and so they will decide what’s dead and not, and it’s this, that strange power they possess of judgment, that makes the slightly earlier generations fear them so. My sense is that these kids never got a memo saying hip-hop was dead or rock was dead or anything was dead.
Rare lil peep full#
Underground hip-hop has it, or has provided fertile ground for it (the genre is plenty and maybe even mainly full of total awfulness like every other genre).
I look for that kind of realness everywhere. It thinks of itself primarily not as art but as speech. Art like this may, and often enough will, arrive at beauty or greatness, but the forms it takes are shaped by the inner pressures of what its creator must communicate or risk incoherence. Mainly I love its rawness and realness, and by "realness" I mean not authenticity but something more specific: A "real" or living art being one more closely attuned to the urgency of what it feels compelled to say than it is invested in its own status as an art object. Some people hate this “alt-rap.” Sometimes I hate it, and most things. These are wobbly and amorphous but expanding categories. He belonged loosely to an offshoot, a moon, of what people call underground hip-hop, a sub-genre sometimes referred to as SoundCloud rap or sad rap. Not personally, but I knew and loved his music and had kept up with his evolving persona during the previous year and a half. Whereas to actually be so, that would be.human life! Look at us all running around pretending like death isn't soon and forever! "We play at games until death calls us home," said poet and collagist Kurt Schwitters, a pioneer in the field of "art from rubbish." Notice that as always the crime, the great shame, is the social one, to seem pretentious. Generally, though, in these times we live in, when the thing you're doing is sort of too obviously romantically cinematic or could be viewed in that light, you know enough to play it down, to undersell it preemptively as ersatz and banal, in order to not strike others as a pretentious shithead. Don't misunderstand me it's not like this kind of scene-sitting up late in the oldest part of a great capital, smoking hash, and contemplating the death of the young-is "what I do." On the other hand, I guess it's not not what I do. Seems like a dream, but life will do that if you live enough, and long enough. No, now that I think of it, I was in Paris in the atelier smoking the hash, in the wee hours even. I'm messing around, of course! I wish.I was back home in North Carolina, reading to my daughters, glancing over to see if they'd fallen asleep. I was sitting up late by myself in a tiny atelier in Paris staring out the window at the silent courtyard and smoking grams of some truly top-shelf Moroccan hash when I learned that Lil Peep was dead.
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