It’s not really about who Gustav Elijah Åhr—the emo rapper known as Lil Peep, who grew up on Long Island and came up on SoundCloud, the more DIY Spotify alternative, singing in his nasally, Good Charlotte register, “Bother me, tell me awful things”—was. It’s more about what Lil Peep was.
He was Gen Z’s own Kurt Cobain: gleefully mischievous and deeply, obviously, troubled, sporting red nail polish and pink hair. Peep—it was a childhood nickname, and a cute rejoinder to the harder rap honorific “Lil”—didn’t reflect the landscape he came from, which included the internet and the suburban mall as much as it did Long Beach, New York, so much as he transformed himself into it. He had a Lisa Simpson tattoo on his neck and another that said CryBaby in big curved letters above his eye. He was always a little bit making fun of the underground rap world that he rocketed to the top of in the late 2010s and was meant to swagger through. His crew was called GothBoiClique, and they rapped about their own anxieties and awkwardness alongside the typical bars about drugs and women. “Never in the streets ’cause I never leave my home,” Peep sang on “Gym Class,” a song he put out on SoundCloud in 2016.
