Day 56: Lil Peep — Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 1
“Even if I try hard, we ain’t gonna make it.”
Ever since I got a little freaked out seeing System of a Down on MTV for the first time at age 11 only to buy the album a month or two later, I’ve often grown to love music that initially repelled or even repulsed me. Lil Peep was no exception. I can still vividly recall reading this Pitchfork feature on my last Monday at the advertising job that’d left me feeling vacant, hopeless, and washed up at 26. I wanted to hurl my company Macbook out the window not as a premature form of corporate protest, but out of my visceral disgust at Lil Peep’s attempt to reconcile what I thought to be the irreconcilable genres of emo and Soundcloud rap. I viewed him as an affront to good taste, my teenage memories, and my idea of what rap’s future held.
But in the months that followed, I got over my hangups. Any artist that pushes boundaries will be perceived as threatening, and this 21 year old with dyed hair and face tats was no exception. It just took a little time and polish for me to perceive how his music was an earnest attempt to carry the torch for the music that buoyed me through my comfortable, suburban adolescent angst. Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 1 did just that.
Tragically, there will be no Pt. 2. On Wednesday, November 15th, Gustav Åhr passed away from an apparent drug overdose at the age of 21, hours before a scheduled performance in Tuscon, Arizona. He leaves behind four mixtapes, one album, some Soundcloud loosies, and the nagging sense that his best work was still ahead of him.
With the world gradually catching on to the idea that the music industry is filled with shitty people who abuse their status to exploit and traumatize vulnerable people, there’s been a lot of talk about separating the art from the artist. Lil Peep’s deep well of suffering was an inextricable part of his work, perhaps even was his work. Some have rushed to flip that logic on its head, positing that the content of Peep’s art — heavy on drug imagery and suicidal ideation — somehow means he “deserved” to die far too young. After all, what did you expect from a rapper who claimed he was “better off dying” and coped by “getting high all week, poppin’ pills thinkin’ about you”?
But to think that way is to root for someone’s demons to swallow them up, and it overlooks the capacity of Come Over When You’re Sober to offer companionship and catharsis. While there’s no doubt that the glorification of xanax and prescription opiates in rap (a problem that’s been around since Lil Peep was no older than six) merits more serious discussion among industry gatekeepers and enablers, Lil Peep’s raps likely saved the lives of a few younger fans who felt they couldn’t fight their battles alone.
I found in Lil Peep a rapper who shared my (now-former) deep reverence for bands like Brand New, and I grew to admire his earnest (if not always perfect) attempts to reinterpret the music we both loved. Even if I couldn’t always relate to his lyrics, I understood the pain that fueled his earnest delivery, and admired his attempts to rap over beats that few others could or would. Mark Ronson posted the video for “Benz Truck” and said Peep and his team of GothBoiClique producrs showed “flashes of what the future of guitar music might be.” I wholeheartedly believe him.
It’s hard to understand where “emo (t)rap” might go from here, or if it dies with Lil Peep. Outside of nothing,nowhere and his surprisingly enjoyable Reaper, I can’t think of anyone with the combination of clout, vision, and sense of nothing to lose that could pick up where Peep left off. Calling him a tortured soul is a cliche, but maybe Lil Peep really was just too weird to live and too rare to die.
This is Day 55 in my 100 albums in 100 days series, where I review a new album or EP I haven’t heard in full before every day through December 31st. Check out yesterday’s post or see the full archives for more
