Remembering Lil Peep through "Lil Peep Part One"

Some second-person musings on an album and an artist you love

intro 

Oct. 10, 2017 when you Ubered to the Echoplex in LA (really Glendale) to see Lil Peep with your now-wife and two of your closest friends, Ryan and Julia. You were the biggest Peep fan of the group, and only knew five or six songs yourself. You went because he seemed cool, and because you were always down for a rap show back then.

Venue dark and cramped, drinks sloshing,  teeth grinding, Peep blew you away. Writhing, androgynous charisma bomb on stage. What you see when you think rockstar, able pull you through the raucous crevices of a banger like “U Said,” and on the other side he’d play a lullaby like “Crybaby” and you were with him all the way. 

You sang along to the songs you knew and you kept your mouth half-open on the ones you didn’t, desperate to be a part of something. You couldn’t sleep that night so you went to a 24-hour diner to stare at quesadillas and talk about the show, the show, the show. 

You and Ryan spent the next month blasting Peep as you cruised around the valley in his ‘03 Explorer, digging for gems in Soundcloud. Sometimes a snippet like “Dying” ft. Coldhart would come on, and you would laugh, amazed by how fucking good it was. You agreed on everything back then, and this wasn’t an exception: the best was yet to come for Lil Peep. 

Nov. 16, 2017, 35 days later, when you scrolled Reddit after midnight to have your heart drop into your stomach, to say fuck and shit, to cry when you saw the news: Lil Peep overdosed on fentanyl in his tourbus in Tuscon, Arizona. 

Lil Peep Part One

Life moves at a different pace for prodigies, and things happened quickly for Peep. It was like a speedrun of the rockstar life cycle, something only possible in the internet era. He started making music in 2014, and moved to LA to 2015 with only a few hundred bucks and a busted cellphone to his name. By the time he died in 2017 he was the voice of a burgeoning underground scene, vanguard of a new genre, on the verge of breaking out into megastardom. 

Before linking up with producer Nedarb and joining GothBoiClique in 2016, Peep’s musical releases were full of creative stumbles and misbegotten attempts to mirror the misogynist strain of horrorcore that was running through Soundcloud (and LA) at the time. There is more than one EP that even the most ardent Peep fans avoid listening to. While a reasonably talented rapper, Bone Thugs-style rapping was never his strong suit, and most of Peep’s creative partners at the time were operating several levels below his frequency. 

The standout from this era is Lil Peep Part One, released in September 2015. There is no tidy artistic growth narrative here, as Peep released mediocre collab tapes right before and right after this one. But Part One remains a stunning time capsule of a young artist in flux, and it still sounds fresh nearly a decade later. The project has it all: that signature Peep blend of rap and DIY pop punk, sing-along melodies, vocal layering, the hard-edged loverboy persona that earned him a generation of young female fans. 

The opening tack on the tape, “Praying To the Sky,” is a real pleasure-meets-pain mission statement:

Young white prick, I get a kick out hittin' licks

Watch how I kick out yo bitch, just so I could cut my wrist

Bitch, I'm tatted out my shirt, so I can't work, I make it flip

Pour my 40 in the dirt, then light my dutch and take a sip

I hear voices in my head, they tellin' me to call it quits

I found some Xanax in my bed, I took that shit, went back to sleep

They gon' miss me when I'm dead, I lay my head and rest in peace

In under a minute, Peep sing-raps his way through a dizzying array of images and feelings. He brags about kicking your girl out of his room so that he can commit suicide. He’s smoking blunts, fighting the voices in his head. But why bother fighting? He just found a Xanax in his bed, so he might as well go to sleep. The bizarre, narrativized blend of rapper swag and suicidal ideation is pure Peep. It’s a dualism he would return to repeatedly in his brief but prolific career.

As a fan, you always knew that Peep was obsessed with suicide and the spectre of his inevitable death. While he was alive, you thought it was just an affect, an aesthetic. But that become harder to believe when he overdosed and died at 21. Difficult questions arise. Did Peep want to die? Did he predict his death? Or did he just like to sing about dying? Peep’s brother, Oskar Ahr, was staunchly in the latter camp. He has said that “You have to be an actor. He gets paid to be sad. It’s what he made his name on...He was not as sad as people think he was.” 

Oskar knew Peep much better than you did. But it’s also hard to square his words with Peep’s final Instagram post, which he captioned: “...I have my pills but that's temporary one day maybe I won't die young and I'll be happy?”

Oskar was right to some extent. You knew Peep; you didn’t know Gus. And Lil Peep was a character played by Gus Ahr, much as Future is a character played by Nayvadius DeMun Wilbun. But the character of Lil Peep, based on numerous interviews and his social media documentation of drug abuse, is a difficult figure to disentangle from Gus. When Peep died he took the answers with him.

Performance or not, listen to the harrowing “The Way I See Things:”

I got a feeling that I’m not gonna be here for next year 

So let’s laugh a little before I’m gone 

I’ve been dreaming of this shit for awhile now

Got me high now 

She don’t love me but she singing my songs

The song is a slow-moving meditation on the experience of mental illness, and Peep gives his best vocal performance on the mixtape.

Walkin' home alone I see faces in the rain

Where did all the time go?

Spend it gettin' high while I hide from the five O

Where did all the lines go?

Now, I'm so high I be fuckin' with my eyes closed

These lyrics don’t impress on the page, and Peep wasn’t a trained singer. But he had a remarkable capacity for expressing emotion with his voice, and he somehow makes this song work. His practice of recording dozens of vocal takes to layer his voice on top of itself lends an haunted, smoked-out gravitas to painfully youthful songwriting. There’s a charisma there that is difficult to apprehend in words but instantly recognizable. 

That charisma saves some of the lesser tracks, such as “Another Song,” which starts with a Cobain monologue about suicidal drug use. Peep sings a plodding tune that he carefully maps to the melody of the beat, a tactic you see everywhere in his early work. The rap verse in the middle is nothing to write home about. But at the tail end of the song, he works his way into a gorgeous singsong pocket: 

Lookin' out the edge, and I'm picturin' the fall 'cause

I don't want to break my legs and have to carry on (Hey)

If I carry on I'm gon' need some marijuana

Put it in my bong, then I make another song

This final verse, and the song literally being titled “Another Song,” gives the impression that Peep himself knew the song wasn’t that good. So he situates the listener within the process of creation, a charming little burst of literary flair.

Listen to “Veins,” which is properly triumphant despite taking place in the same murky soundscape as the rest of Part One. Peep mythologizes his then-girlfriend Too Poor, who always styled herself as the Courtney to his Kurt: 

Watch out for the bitch in the black Range Rove

 Drivin' fast when she listenin' to Max B 

Got the tats on her ass,

And the black ski mask in the back 

If you tryna get your ass beat

The writing and sing-rapping is even more impressive on “Five Degrees.” The pitch-black guitar beat, adorned with horror movie scream samples, provides an unsettling backdrop for Peep’s catchiest chorus: 

Worry 'bout yourself baby, I'll be good

I just wanna die in peace tonight

You can see it in my face, so I wear my hood

Feeling like it's five degrees tonight

Record labels and publishing companies spend millions of dollars chasing hooks, and rarely find one as undeniable as “Five Degrees.” A hook that Peep recorded in a Skid Row apartment, using two hundred bucks worth of recording equipment, mixing his own vocals on GarageBand. 

“Its Me” (sic) is the shortest song on Part One, and while it doesn’t have the bounce or hookiness of the other tracks, it is the most lyrically impressive on the whole mixtape. 

When I’m coming down

The lights real bright and the noises in my head

Did I let you down again? (Did I let you down again?)

If I leave here now, it won’t feel right

With somebody else in my bed (Bed)

And I’m breaking down again (And I’m breaking down again)

Peep showcases a talent for brevity and synecdoche, painting the sensory discomfort of a stimulant comedown (think coke/molly), which is worsened by negative thought loops about a dissolving romance. The use of echoed lyric repetition heightens the theme, and the song imparts an unnerving, edgy feeling to the listener. It’s interesting to think about this song in comparison to The Weeknd’s “Coming Down” from 2012. The Weeknd frames the comedown as a Shakespearean experience full of depth and intense longing, infusing his signature sexy r&b with stabs of 80s pop synths. It’s melodrama, and "Its Me” is the opposite. I would call the Peep track “Soundcloud realism,” as Peep communicates a deeply realistic scene for us. The lights are too bright, noises too loud, and Peep is fighting with his girl. His description of the fight rings true:

But if I need to go just to show you

I don't fuckin' care if you don't give a shit 'bout me

At all, you little bitch, that's cool with me

So act like you don't know

That I don't fuckin' stare at anybody else

The way I do, when it's only me and you

Peep starts the verse in a caustic, hurtful tone that borders on disturbing, as he calls his partner a little bitch. But then it turns to a declaration of love, or at least obsession, rendered in double-negative syntax. He doesn’t say he loves the girl, or even that he only looks at her. Instead he expresses anger that she acts like she doesn’t know that he only stares at her. This isn’t lone on drugs. This is what’s left of love after the drugs have worn off. 

It would be a shame to end without discussing “High School,” one of the best songs Peep ever made. It makes you think of something a Redditor once said: Peep sang like a rapper, and he rapped like a singer. “High School” is mostly sung, and in its catchier moments it could pass for something from the desk of Anthony Kiedis. But it’s also a rap song. You would love to interrogate this tension more, but you never understood the process of beatmaking (or musical theory, more broadly) well enough to do so convincingly.

Have you ever seen a man this rich, this broke?

This lost in the smoke? Please pray for me

I can never hide, my ghost come everywhere I go

Tell Heaven, "don't wait for me"

This incredibly tuneful, catchy start to the song carries you through the whole track, as Peep rolls through a clever lyrical montage. He hated high school in real life, dropped out early, and “High School” features a delightfully abstracted account of his experience there, communicating Xanax-addled pathos:  

Throw me off the edge, I'll fall

Lookin' up at 'em like I never even knew 'em at all

I remember walkin' 'round in the hall

And then the bell rang and I took something then I couldn't recall

outro 

1 year after Lil Peep died, you went to a memorial concert at a warehouse in Los Angeles, thrown by Ham on Everything, primary arbiters of the mid-late 20102 LA rap underground. Arriving to the show, you were thrown off by the line, which stretched a half-mile from the door, bending around the corner and ending beneath a highway overpass. 

You talked to people in line. Most of them eighteen, only recently old enough to attend any thing at all. They spoke about discovering Lil Peep after he passed. About scrolling his Instagram posts and relating to his depression. About watching his live performances on Youtube and wishing they were there.

Eventually you got inside, where Peep’s friends - and friends of his friends, and people who didn’t know him at all - cavorted onstage as the DJ played his hits. Surrounded by blacked-out teens singing their hearts out, alienation swam through you. You were angry, possessive over the memory of someone you didn’t know at all. The warehouse packed tight beyond capacity. The audience at the memorial more than triple that of the show on October 10 2017.

3.5 years after Lil Peep died, you went to a Ham on Everything show featuring emo rappers like Lil Narnia, Lil Lotus, and Gucci Highwaters. All emo rappers in the direct lineage of Lil Peep. The audience didn’t care for them. They focused instead on lighting and relighting their blunts, sniffing powder off dirty fingernails as they politely bobbed their head to the music. 

That changed in between sets, when the DJ decided to play Peep’s “Beamer Boy.” All at once the room filled with energy and audience, cigarettes and drinks getting ditched as a raucous pit formed in front of the stage. You belted the lyrics alongside everyone else, and screeched with joy when the song switched to “Awful Things.” You felt like you had happened upon a spontaneous seance for a friend gone too soon. 

6.5 years after Lil Peep died, you went to a Lil Tracy show put on by Ham on Everything. Tracy was Peep’s most well-known collaborator, although he’s famous in his own right. He started the set with his usual lackadaisical stoner energy, casually rapping half the words to his newer songs as the crowd vibed. You were enjoying yourself just fine. But when Tracy launched into “White Tee,” his first song with Peep, the crowd launched with him. He followed it with “White Whine,” and the floors started to shake. You leapt up and down like a human pogo stick and screamed every word, and so did your friends.

You are older than you used to be, and the teens who discovered Peep after his death aren’t teens anymore. But for a brief, delirious moment these songs - this scribbled-down, grungy emo rap that flowered from a niche-inside-of-a-niche musical movement ten years ago - for a moment these songs allowed you to forget about all of the second-guessing, the hipsterism, the critiques, the miasma of internet bullshit that hovers like a cloud over the things you love. In that moment it was just you and your friends and Lil Tracy and a few hundred fucking strangers, channeling the memory of someone you loved.