Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Llif3” Codified Misery in the Mainstream

Philadelphia rapper Lil Uzi Vert attempts to grab fire with their bare hands.1 They freestyle their music off the top of their head, letting a sporadic delight light up their every song. The artist’s ascendance began in 2015 with a series of colorful and playfully explosive mixtapes. The at-times cacophonous sound would later be understood as a harbinger of rage rap, and many acts would follow Uzi down the experimental fox hole they had burrowed, building out a network of artists and a culture of throwing elbows at even the glossiest of shows. Uzi’s career ultimately unfolded in fits and spurts in the late 2010s and early 2020s. In 2017, though, they were the single hottest performer—the artist who seemed best positioned to unseat Drake as the most-talked-about rapper. Uzi’s jittery and exciting presence was inescapable. Uzi was up next, and it’s true they became a Grammy-nominated, bona fide star, but in the sphere of emo rap, their contributions were even more gargantuan.

Emo rap firmly became a recognized mainstream phenomenon in 2017 thanks to “XO Tour Llif3.” Officially released in March of that year, by May the song would crack the Billboard Hot 100’s top ten and achieve Platinum RIAA certification. Before 2017 ended, the single would be certified Platinum five times. Recorded while Uzi was on tour with R&B’s crooning obsession The Weeknd, the song uncovered the tangles of emo within even the coolest of acts. As one of the late 2010s’ hottest exports, the drones and full-on angst of “XO Tour Llif3” upend the idea of emo rap as the splicing of lameness with the inherent flyness of hip-hop. There is no shortage of cool in the song’s DNA. “I know Uzi wanna go to the clubs,” 808 Mafia producer TM88 shared with Genius about the making of the song.2 The beat was crafted in a pack of twenty, without knowledge of what Uzi would do once they heard the production. TM88’s mindfulness of club BPMs solidifies the backbone of “XO Tour Llif3” being a traveling hit. It was engineered to move people, and the song did just that, codifying the sound of abject misery in the mainstream.

Throwing a dart at the lyrics sheet yields striking results for a song that went on to be a club staple. But this is what the people wanted, especially with the latest political turmoil in America. “It’s odd to hear everyone in the club shouting along to Uzi’s alternately slurred and wailed cries about depression, Xanax abuse, suicidal thoughts, and dead friends. And yet here we are,” Billboard noted when the song was named their fifth best of 2017.3 Odd, yes, but also incredibly compelling. The country was stressed out, the people with the money, the people with time to enjoy music—hell, even the people with little of either who chanced into the song—were instinctively looking for something pretty and gruesome. And Uzi delivered.

“I do think that ‘XO Tour Llif3’ is one of the most significant songs to come out in that whole era,” critic Paul Thompson affirms. “I was in Vegas with a friend in the summer of ‘18 and in the middle of the day, we were at a pool with a DJ. You would see these monied people in their thirties partying, and they were screaming along to ‘XO Tour Llif3.’ I remember both of us being like, ‘This is really, really dark.’ It’s weird that this is not a cult song—it’s weird that this is a plausible number-one hit, and it’s the closest to a big suicidal pop hit in years.”

“XO Tour Llif3” is a nettling masterpiece. When Uzi sings, “I might blow my brain out,” there is less of an insistence that heartbreak and subsequent suicidal thoughts are the fault of Uzi’s ex. Rather, the perfect storm of Xanax addiction (“I’m committed, not addicted, but it keep control of me”) and detachment from reality leave the speaker on the first verse meditating on taking a gun to his temple. This horrific image makes the second hook (“Push me to the edge, all my friends are dead”) appear like a dejected threat. Does it matter if Uzi lives or dies after experiencing such suffering when crippling loss only distorts and displaces any signs of hope? Does hope even exist when Xanax fails to mask the pain? Lil Uzi Vert poses this existential question over a bass-heavy beat the country was singing along to for months—and now, years.

This dichotomy is significant. The disconcerting mainstream success of “XO Tour Llif3” calls to mind Atmosphere’s car-crash aesthetic on God Loves Ugly. Where rapper Slug was wading through a self-inflicted muck and mire, Uzi absconds the slimy textures of emo rap’s past to deliver something a little more polished, but no less fraught. That is, in the earliest days of emo rap, there was a sense of shamelessness and nakedness, matched by the lo-fi nature of the music. Atmosphere’s work was an irresistible series of personal tragedies—no one could look away, and the unease of sinking into the music was integral to the experience.

By contrast, “XO Tour Llif3” is easy to love. The sounds are trendy and captivating. Uzi works with as much bare intensity as Slug, but because of the soundscapes, it’s only after we are sucked in that we realize we’re in a pit of drama. As the single unspools beautiful, brutal nightmares, it’s clear “XO Tour Llif3” landed at just the right time. Much like Kid Cudi’s “Day ‘n’ Nite” captured the isolation of the internet in the late 2000s, Uzi managed to speak for a nation of bugged-out people perpetually on the precipice of crisis, hiding behind glitz with a fear of being seen for who they really are.

The writing and production are just a piece of why “XO Tour Llif3” rang off so immediately. It’s also the way Uzi sings that makes the music near universal in its ability to connect with listeners. “It’s the whiny, pop-punkish delivery of the choicest lines that helped make the song a crossover pop hit,” Joe Coscarelli wrote for The New York Times in 2017.4 Where the late emo rap icon Lil Peep used samples to bring prospective fans into his world, Uzi’s familiar droning—the way they yelped and pitched their voice in that “pop-punkish” effortlessness—helped make “XO Tour Llif3” feel familiar. The kids who grew up on Warped Tour were unknowingly ready for the next generation of artists to hit that raw nerve with their vocals. Uzi’s impish delivery bent time and brought everyone together, from thirty-year-olds on stimulants to lonesome kids in their bedrooms ready to scream.

In her 2018 New Yorker recap of “the Year in Sad Rap,” writer Carrie Battan remarked, “When the song was released, at the beginning of the year, it felt like a revelation: an ode to depression that also got people moving at night clubs.”5 This was the song you danced to, to forget. It was an escape for everyone aged thirteen to one hundred. But there was more to the song than emo posturing. “XO Tour Llif3” had roots in a painful reality, and perhaps the realism propelling the song was the reason it landed in every corner of music, with pop and rap fans uniting under the common need to get wasted and wish for death under the flashing lights of a dance floor.

Looking back, “XO Tour Llif3” felt like one of the last times that the hip-hop monoculture had a consensus hit, and it was an unbelievably sad one. In May 2017, Vulture ran “Lil Uzi Vert Has a Modern-Day ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on His Hands,’” in which writer Frank Guan wrote, “[‘All my friends are dead’] wouldn’t sound out of place on an emo chorus—in fact, it’s a perfect emo chorus—but it takes on new color and depth in a rap context because it isn’t just a metaphor.… By applying the operatic death-courting and death-defying postures of Dashboard Confessional or Marilyn Manson or Smashing Pumpkins to his own lived experience, he’s created a genuinely new version of the hip-hop elegy.”6

Guan is spot on. Emo rock often employs banal writing, to the end that being dumped can only be so traumatic. On “XO Tour Llif3,” death is far from figurative. We are dealing with real loss, real addiction, and nearly insurmountable trauma. It is overwhelming—or it would be if that pain wasn’t also the catchy anchor inspiring online dance challenges.7 The way consumers took to Uzi’s obvious hurt scans as appropriative, but also expected.

“XO Tour Llif3” presents a reality where the jokey qualities of emo can be read alongside the tough nature of some of hip-hop’s most resonant moments. It helps to see Lil Uzi Vert is at least somewhat in on the emotional upheaval of their work. Uzi’s coy shoulder shimmy in the video for “XO Tour Llif3” brims with unexpected snark. The contrast between death and danceability is jarring, but it also speaks to the direction our culture was heading. In the mid-2020s, gallows humor has become the de facto coping mechanism of the younger generations.

It makes sense to see artists following Uzi’s rise being encouraged to bring their wounded experience into the pop arena in order to sell records. It’s not a novel enterprise, but this formula feels uniquely suited to our current American moment. Take a series of unspeakably dark memories, blend them with relatable and crumbly vocals—the kind anyone with a mic can at least attempt to imitate—throw them atop a carefully crafted 808 line, and you’ve got emo rap magic.

The critical praise for “XO Tour Llif3” was aplenty, and the labels were further tuned in to the financial viability of emo rap, especially after their ears were perked up by the boom of SoundCloud hits from rappers XXXTentacion and Trippie Redd. Soon began a scouring of the digital underground for the next “XO Tour Llif3.” According to Thompson, this was just a function of economics. “When SoundCloud became an obvious system for major labels, and when streaming became a source of revenue for artists on a sub-major level, when the numbers proved this was viable, people were not gonna make music that was as obscure.” In the months following “XO Tour Llif3,” a host of artists bubbling online—the aforementioned Trippie Redd, Lil Peep, XXXTentacion—all released commercial debuts. As the years drew on, more emo-skewed rap artists secured major label deals: 24kGoldn, iann dior, and Australian Juice WRLD protege-turned-pop-hitmaker The Kid LAROI.

These artists continued to fly closer to the pop song sun. 24k and iann dior’s 2020 No. 1 hit “Mood” borrowed heavily from the “XO Tour Llif3” playbook with just the right twists—neutering the suicidal motifs and replacing the brooding beat with a lighter guitar riff—to craft a catchy tune about toxic romance. LAROI managed to do the same with his emo-inspired, but clearly pop-minded, project F*CK LOVE in 2021, having the album hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 over a year after release. These new mainstream misery anthems (“Mood,” LAROI’s “Go”) are far more palatable displays of desperation.

“XO Tour Llif3” represents a peak for emo rap in the larger music culture conversation. After hitting such a gory apex, the genre course-corrected to be more accessible. In the post–“XO Tour Llif3” world, death is out on the charts, and yet the backbone of emo vocal delivery remains. The new crop of emo rap hits may be subdued, abandoning the gothic tones of emo rap from the early 2010s, but they represent an important piece of the lineage nonetheless.

These new hits show off the function of commerciality, sanding down a genre to bring it to even more audiences. The rawness of the SoundCloud era could only make so much money. After emo rap bashed into the “XO Tour Llif3” ceiling, it was time for the majors to adapt the culture for even more profits. When “Mood” plays at a coffee shop, I wonder if emo rap has achieved the goal of all music executives: to have their product exist in all spaces for all people. More generously, perhaps these days—in a new era, where COVID-19 has changed our relationship to life and death, both abstracting death in mass numbers and making it extremely personal—the people making this music are ready to be a little less depressed.