And even better, it’s a very specific context in which thousands of followers and fans watched him struggle with all of this. But this isn’t just drug use, this is mental health. In the last week, online discussion has revolved around this incident as a wake-up call for how we treat drug addiction (if it’s not degrading/blaming him for this disease). At best we praise them for it - at worst, we make fun, blame them for what we take as irresponsible recklessness, and further isolate them until these social media outlets are the only places they can address their problems outside their own heads. Whereas with famous individuals the reality of a situation may be a little more obscure, with our friends we often have a clue as to how much they’re really struggling - we know whether the drugs on their Snapchat story are for show, or that their emotional tweets may actually be a small sample of some underlying pain. It’s thousands of my peers across the country. The problem is, it’s not just the Soundcloud famous that behave like this. Hell, his social media persona is the only reason I ever went to Soundcloud and searched him. It was an integral part in his art and his popularity. The detail nobody wants to acknowledge is that his self-destructiveness didn’t play alongside his music. And the “hilarious” behavior he exhibited was exactly what I see in so many of my friends - a public display of sadness and subsequent drug use on social media that somehow gets morbidly tied to significant social media attention. He dated my high school buddy’s ex girlfriend.
However the more I read about the case, the more I realized how close this was to home. My friends and I probably deserve to feel like pieces of shit. In all honesty, I had hardly even given his music a shot-to me he was another character using his drug use for social media clout, another dumb white boy trying to make rap music, or another tongue in cheek style icon. At its most mainstream one might imagine Jaden Smith in his pseudo-deep Twitter phase or, at its most discreet, that strange 17-year-old that pops up in your Facebook feed every so often with clip-art laden “random” profile pictures. Championed by artists like Young Lean of Sad Boy Entertainment just years before, it has become a major trend not only in trap music, but also in the online aesthetics of thousands of my most artistic peers. He was the ultimate internet sad boy, a style that combines references to mental illness, drug use, menages of high and low street fashion and all sorts of cigarette-accented angsty poses in the darkest corners of the internet. In fact, that’s what that group chat was - myself and three friends meme-ifying and re-meme-ifying photos of Lil Peep with Xans over his eyes and bumps of cocaine in front of his cross-eyed face. If you weren’t aware of Lil Peep’s music, however, you might have been aware of the internet meme he had become. A friend of artists spanning from Diplo to iLoveMakonnen, Lil Peep was creating a name for himself with music that revived 2000s emo by mixing it with contemporary trap music.
Wednesday night, ahead of a Tucson, Arizona, concert, Soundcloud rapper Lil Peep was found unresponsive in his tour van, presumably having overdosed from some cocktail of benzos and opiates. But it keeps vibrating longer than I should, and I realize it’s my groupchat blowing up my phone instead of my alarm. My phone, cold and wet from the humid rainy weather vibrates against my sticky face as I try to ignore it and the many responsibilities the day would bring.
It’s 9:07am on November 19th, and my third alarm is going off.
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