lil peep's music
Peep’s music was often tagged as SoundCloud rap, though he was as much rocker as rapper, sampling his favorite bands (Modest Mouse, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Death Cab for Cutie) and singing over low-fi trap beats in an intoxicating seen-it-all voice. In his lyrics, he talked shit about girls and his favorite drugs — Xanax, weed, cocaine, “cheap liquor on ice” — and grappled openly with depression and anxiety. In 2017, Pitchfork called him “the future of emo.” Peep, in his song “Crybaby,” tossed off a phrase that fit much of his catalog: “Music to cry to.”
Peep idolized Kurt Cobain, and it was easy to imagine him turning into a Kurt-like figure himself: an achingly pretty, blithely self-destructive superstar that a generation of kids could look to and see their pain reflected back at them. “He had this vulnerability to him, in the same way that Kurt did,” says Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz. Peep’s music, says Wentz, “unapologetically traversed genres in a weird way that my generation and generations older than me probably would’ve been too cautious about.”
