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. For a 21-year-old who’d only started posting his songs online two years earlier, it had been a head-spinning rise. The shows had been going well - most dates sold out, with mobs of kids trying to get close to Peep. Peep’s tour bus had already crossed North America twice in six weeks, and the Tucson show was to be the tour’s second-to-last stop. “He was the guy who spoke for me, things I could never put into words,” Dowd says. Between him and the fans was a plastic table scattered with lighters, pens, rolling papers, scissors, ground-up bits of marijuana and a black sticker with the phrase alive + well on it.įor then-16-year-old Nick Dowd, a massive Peep fan who’d come to the venue with his friend Mariah Bons, sitting on the bus with Peep was a dream come true. In the back lounge, the AC was cranked, and Peep, wearing a black, studded vest and multicolored checkered pants, had folded his long, lean frame onto an upholstered seat. This was Tucson, Arizona, in November 2017, and the afternoon heat hovered in the mid-80s. They were smoking dabs, high-potency doses of concentrated weed that are vaporized, then inhaled. He rejected it.It was five hours before showtime and Lil Peep was in the back of his tour bus, getting high with two young fans. “He saw how the cool kids who lived in the fancy neighborhoods looked down on his friends who lived in the projects – and looked down on his own family who lived in an apartment and drove an old Nissan. “Gus understood that many good people suffered injustice because of what they looked like or how much money they had,” she said. Womack also remembered her son as someone who reckoned with multiple forms of societal prejudice. “His favorite song to sing was ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ and he was fucking good at singing it.” When Lil Peep tracks like “Star Shopping” or “Save That Shit” played during the service, friends in the audience thew their arms around each other’s shoulders, swayed and sang every word. “You may be surprised to find out that Gus and his housemates had a weekly Frank Sinatra night,” she continued. His mother, Liza Womack, said he often labored through the night, working on music until after the sun rose again next morning. Lil Peep’s rise to stardom was powered by relentless drive. He released music primarily via streaming services like Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and he currently has some four dozen songs on SoundCloud with more than a million streams each. Peep delivered hummable melodies with conversational ease, and his songs included frank discussions of suicidal thoughts, heartache and drug use. Over the last two years, Lil Peep’s music blended rap and rock, often coupling a tremulous guitar line, untouched by distortion or drama, with jaw-rattling bass and hi-hats. Others wore some form of pink – Åhr’s favorite color. Some wore black Come Over When You’re Sober sweatshirts in honor of Lil Peep’s final recording, hoods up in solidarity. The hundreds of fans lined up to pay their respects outside the beachside Allegria Hotel were overwhelmingly young. Lil Peep, born Gustav Åhr, died on the evening of November 15th at age 21 of a suspected drug overdose. One 19-year-old fan named Tim explains why he got a tattoo honoring the singer-rapper on his lower left rib cage. “I have pretty bad anxiety and depression,” he told Rolling Stone. “When that got really bad with a relationship I was in, Lil Peep was my outlet … Like, someone else has been through the same thing.” On a clear December afternoon, friends, family and fans gathered to honor the late Lil Peep in Long Beach, New York.
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