![]() ![]() Ortega’s tweet, which is no longer visible to most because the account was made private, vividly illustrates the tensions many fans and onlookers have felt consuming Lil Peep’s music and persona alike: To what extent can listeners be held accountable for the struggles of the artists whose work and lifestyles they revere? With no obvious place to direct their pain, many fans began to lash out at Ortega in the initial hours after Peep’s death. Chase Ortega, who has been described by several media outlets as Lil Peep’s manager, broke the news of his death in a tweet: “I’ve been expecting this call for a year. In one of his final posts to Instagram, Peep, barely coherent, said that he’d taken six Xanax pills. He also had a song called “omfg” that came out in 2016, on which he confessed, over Bandcamp-grade guitars and skittering hi-hats: “Used to wanna kill myself / Came up, still wanna kill myself.” His work, which revolved around a few themes of suicide, drug use, and loneliness, was also accompanied by a sometimes distressing online persona. He died on Wednesday night at the age of 21, and while the cause of his death hasn’t been officially announced, The New York Times reported that there was evidence of a drug overdose, which casts his verse on a song literally titled “Overdose” in a truly harrowing light: His bleeding-heart openness quickly gained him a dedicated following, and he sold out shows playing to massively teenaged audiences after releasing two more mixtapes- Crybaby and Hellboy-in 2016. Gucci Mane and My Chemical Romance held equal sway over young Ahr, who put out his first mixtapes in 2015, under the pet name his mom gave him when he was growing up on Long Island: Lil Peep. New York Times pop critic Jon Caramanica described Lil Peep as “one of the most promising artists in the current generation emerging from SoundCloud.” The generation in question- Lil Pump, XXXTentacion, Lil Xan, and plenty others-grew up with iPhones and without preconceptions about what a rapper is or could be, which is reflected somewhat in the influences they claim. I'm suicidal ☺️- GOTH ANGEL SINNER July 28, 2016 There were more than a million followers on Instagram and 237,000-plus more on Twitter who related to that. … Some days I’ll be very down and out, but you won’t be able to tell, really, because I don’t express that side of myself on social media.” The things that he was prone to say on social media were occasionally chilling, but usually delivered with a wink. “Some days I wake up and I’m like, Fuck, I wish I didn’t wake up. But the rapper, born Gustav Ahr, told Pitchfork in January that his struggles with depression were very real, and not at all an affect. There was an existential glaze over his public persona, like he, the person, was ignoring something the content of his music repeatedly demanded be dealt with. He certainly had a knack for popcraft, but unless you were one of the kids-a designation less determined by age than a willingness to listen and understand-it was tough to say for sure whether Lil Peep could possibly be serious, at least at first. His songs were no hook or all hook, brilliant or maybe brainless, and generally difficult to categorize. It might have also been some mutated species of hip-hop, like if Fueled by Ramen were a rap imprint. ![]() ![]() His music could have been classified as emo punk. The defiantly anti-commercial rapper defied genre and expectations alike. “Get Cake, Die Young” was scrawled across his hairline. Lil Peep was angular and pale, his fingernails always too long, his stringy hair always in various shades of neon, a “Crybaby” tattoo above his right eye, a broken heart beneath it. ![]()
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