I’m shivering on a riverside park bench in New Jersey. Spring hasn’t quite taken hold. There’s snow on the green landing, and the water seen from the lookout point is more a series of frozen ribbons. I turn to my buddy—one day, many years from now, he’ll be the best man at my wedding—and he shows me his phone.
“Have you heard of Lil Peep?” he asks.
YouTube is loaded up and the video for a song called “witchblades” plays on mute. It’s like being offered a rare curio. In the video, Peep and Lil Tracy dance in an alley and in a cramped bedroom. It’s lo-fi. There’s flashes of thin chains, and brown liquor, and switchblades. They look like they’re having a blast. My buddy clicks the sound up and what I hear is transfixing. Dramatic piano notes match right up to Peep’s chanting, “switchblades, cocaine.” The production is slight—just the essentials of a bottomed-out bass line and skittering claps to accompany the melody, if you can call it that. My buddy watches me watch in silence, unaware my brain is being terraformed.
The song ends. My buddy says, certainly, that this music makes no sense and why does anyone listen to this stuff anyway? It’s a good question, but not for the reasons he thinks. I ask him where he found Peep, and he tells me his songs are big on SoundCloud. That makes sense. We get food and drinks and part ways for the night. I tuck into bed hours later, and search up Lil Peep on my phone. I find a mixtape called crybaby. I queue it up and hear a tender roll call for a generation: “she says I’m a crybaby.…” And it’s not that it clicks instantly, but it hooks into my skin. I try to avoid the itch, even try to consider the music kind of lame, but I keep coming back. Eventually, I listen to crybaby every night for a month.
One night, splayed out in my bed with nowhere to go and nothing to do, I find “star shopping” and I well up in tears at the track’s desperation. “Can I get one conversation at least?” is the backbone of a hymn. The sparse guitar strumming and dejected singing leaves enough room for a personal narrative to emerge. I remember every breakup at once. They flatten me and I cry some more, and I listen to the song again. It’s a tipped dart—I never stood a chance. Things start to connect from there. I open myself up to the idea that Lil Peep might just be the voice of a lonely generation.
Summer hits, and the video for “Awful Things” comes out in August. This power-pop-meets-emo-rap ballad, this thing, confirms for me that Lil Peep is about to be the biggest artist alive. His youthful whispers have matured into arena-sized howls. “Bother me / Tell me awful things” is a Madison Square Garden–sized emotion born from a bedroom genre. The video, set in a high school where Peep is a delinquent loverboy meeting his crush in a crusty, strobing bathroom, ends with Peep setting himself and the whole school on fire. He stands center-frame, in a heartbroken inferno, ready to fall in love all over again. The video and song are just a hair over three minutes—I am convinced this is the pinnacle of rap cinema.
In November, when Lil Peep’s death first breaks one night on Twitter, I stay up all night refreshing my feed and waiting for an official source to confirm the clout-chasing gossip blogs are all wrong. It never comes. Too stunned to cry, I will myself to sleep. The next morning, I loop up “Save That Shit” as a companion for a cold morning walk. I angrily mutter some lyrics to myself: “nothing like them other motherfuckers, I can make you rich.” Despite my insistence, he doesn’t come back to life. When I realize Peep’s death is permanent, it swallows me up and the tears come as I’m standing on the sidewalk. The chill cuts my face. The more I sob, the more the oncoming winter wind grates my skin. All the while I have “Fuck my life, can’t save that, girl” blaring through my earbuds. I think of the cord connecting me to my iPod as an IV.
The thing about emo rap is that it’s my music. It’s a massive sigh of relief. When Lil Peep’s songs first flooded my veins, I had no idea the genre would become a focal point of my tastes and obsessions. This stuff was whiny, base, and quiet. Those early Peep singles had no pomp. They were disarming and meek, yet the emotions were elemental. They consumed me. To this day, I see flashes of my ugliest memories in crybaby, and I feel less alone. And that’s the point of emo, right? To be your friend when you don’t really know how to make any, and to help you feel better when being alive feels like wearing hand-me-down clothes.