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“WE ALL WANNA DIE, TOO”: RAP AND COLLECTIVE DESPAIR IN ADOLESCENT AMERICA

A thesis submitted to the Kent State University Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for University Honors

by

Nina Palattella

May 2020

Thesis written by

Nina Palattella

Approved by

______, Advisor

______, Chair, Department of English

Accepted by

______, Dean, Honors College

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iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………....v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………….………vi

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………….…1

II. “I WANT EVERYONE TO KNOW THAT I DON’T CARE”:

CASE STUDY OF ……………………………………….….16

III. “BETTER OFF DYING”: DOES ASSUAGE OR AMPLIFY

MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS?…………………………………… 26

IV. “XANS DON’T MAKE YOU”: EMO RAP’S GLORIFICATION OF,

AND RECKONING WITH, DRUG ABUSE……………………………43

V. “WE ALL WANNA DIE, TOO”: HOW IS EMO RAP BRANDED, AND

WHAT KIND OF LEGACY ARE ITS STARS LEAVING? ...………….60

VI. “WHEN I DIE YOU’LL LOVE ME”: WHAT DOES EMO RAP MEAN,

AND WHAT DIRECTIONS MIGHT IT TAKE IN THE ? ….80

WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………………………89

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1. Lil Peep (Gustav Åhr) …………………………………………………17

Fig. 2. Still from “” Video ………………………………21

Fig. 3. XXXTentacion (Jahseh Onfroy) ……………………………………….29

Fig. 4. (Diego Leanos) ……...………………………………………...36

Fig. 5. nothing,nowhere. (Joe Mulherin) ……………………………………...50

Fig. 6. Still from “ Wit Me” ……………………………….52

Fig. 7. (Symere Woods) ………………………………………….76

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who made this thesis possible and who supported me as I completed it. I am especially grateful to Dr. Ryan Hediger for advising this project and encouraging me throughout the long process. I am also grateful to Professor Tammy Clewell, Dr. Timothy Owens, and Dr. Andrew Shahriari for agreeing to serve on my defense committee and for offering their time to read and critique my work.

I would like to thank my friends and family for their encouragement, feedback, and support. Lastly, I would like to thank anyone who has asked me about this topic and listened with enthusiasm to what I had to say. Each one of you also made completing this project worthwhile.

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“Help me find a way to pass the time everybody’s telling me life’s short, but I wanna die.”

-Lil Peep, “The Brightside”

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

“Only once the drugs are done / do I feel like dying, I feel like dying….”

-, “I Feel Like Dying”

Many people think of art as a static object created by one or more persons. While this may be true in some instances, art is also constantly changing, and perceptions of art and of what constitutes art change as well. Music is no exception. Music has long been a vehicle for emotional as well as artistic expression, and one musical genre that capitalizes on the expression of emotion as its defining aspect arguably like no genre has done before is emo rap. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, the components of the name “emo rap” provide ample clues as to the content of the music: songs of the genre harness the raw, often brutal emotional intensity of emo music with the lyrical and delivery style of rap. In order to understand how emo rap has achieved such a stratospheric rise in popularity, it is helpful to look at what has occurred in each of the individual genres of emo and rap that contributed to the formation of a new musical categorization with unique and identifiable features.

In the and early , emo and rap were, for the most part, markedly different in their content and presentation: the rap genre was dominated by artists such as

50 Cent, , and and their club-ready hits about partying, sex, and recreational drug use, while emo artists like Dashboard Confessional, , and

Taking Back Sunday produced music dominated by heavy sounds and emotionally

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pained lyrics. The two genres did occasionally converge: artists like made careers out of blending rock and hip-hop sounds, and more traditional rap artists occasionally ventured into darker topics in their music, as Lil Wayne did in his groundbreaking 2007 song “I Feel Like Dying.” In their article about this song and what it achieved for the rap genre, “Lil Wayne’s ‘I Feel Like Dying’ Changed Rap’s

Relationship with Drugs Forever,” Kramer and Briana Younger argue that it addresses the isolating danger of drug abuse-turned-addiction with a candidness that was unheard of in rap at that time. Other artists, such as , , and , later became notable for exploring a more diverse range of emotions in their work, including loneliness and melancholy, among lyrical displays of traditional male bravado.

Jedd Martinez Roca, in his article “Emo Rap Is the New Emo,” argues that these earlier artists’ forays into more emotional work helped ease emo rappers’ entrance into the rap genre, followed by their acceptance into the mainstream, by lessening the likelihood that they would be criticized for “not being hard enough.” Emo rap is distinct from more typical rap in multiple ways that will be discussed later in this introduction, but its themes are not so unheard of in the genre as to render it completely unacceptable.

Although we can trace the general origins of emo rap by analyzing trends in music that have occurred before, it would nearly impossible to identify a definitive beginning of the genre for a number of reasons. While each of the separate genres has attributes commonly used to categorize the songs associated with it, the distinctions between the genres are not and have never been exact. However, the emergence of sadness as a dominant theme of music performed in a rap style and the influence of

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Internet culture are a few key features that began to distinguish emo rap as a unique musical genre by the mid-2010s. -based (real name Jonatan

Leandoer Håstad) is often as one of the first artists to prominently display what would become hallmarks of emo rap in his music. Håstad released his breakout ,

Unknown Death 2002, in 2013 at the age of sixteen. David Shapiro, in the New Yorker article “Yung Lean, King of the Sad Boys,” explains that while older audiences may have been particularly baffled by Yung Lean’s success, teenagers adopted his music because they could relate to its defining theme, which, unlike the swagger-driven or protest-fueled songs of his rap predecessors, was prominently and undeniably sadness. Ezra Marcus, in a 2013 review of Unknown Death 2002 for Noisey, also observed that Håstad’s music fused together the concepts of media and identity until they were no longer “distinct or tangible” but instead became “interchangeable and symbiotic.” The interweaving of media, and social media in particular, with identity is critically important to current emo rap artists, who regularly communicate to their fans and reaffirm their brands via online platforms such as and . Though Yung Lean is still active as a musician, he remains an obscure name for all but his most ardent fans, but certain aspects of his music and career are reiterated in the work of every emo rap artist who has followed.

Emo rap takes dabbling with dark feelings to a new extreme, as artists of the genre make sadness, angst, and the defining features of their art. If more

“traditional” rap is self-assured, boastful, and boisterous, emo rap takes that attitude and blends it with self-deprecation, hopelessness, and cynicism. This is not to say that sadness and despair are the only topics emo rappers address in their music: a fair number of songs

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also feature shout-outs to fame and luxury brands, “disses” to their detractors, and mentions of women, though the latter are often merely cursory references to those who have wronged the artist in the past or the nameless female who is or will be in their bed tonight. However, even these themes are framed in a broader context of sadness and discontent. In her essay “Lil Xan and the Year in Sad Rap” for the New Yorker, Carrie

Battan highlights “Betrayed,” the breakout single of -based emo rapper Lil Xan

(real name Diego Leanos), as an example of this juxtaposition, as the rapper “warns of the dangers of prescription pills one moment and brags about the women he scores the next.” No matter what events may transpire in the life of an emo rapper, regardless of their diversions into other subjects, the themes of depression, , and general dissatisfaction are ever-present, as evidenced in their music.

In addition to musical context, one needs to also consider the cultural context for emo rap and examine the conditions in which the themes present throughout the genre have formed. The themes that are in emo rap are parts of everyday life for many young people, especially youth whose lives may be affected by issues, violence, and drug abuse or addiction. The message of emo rap songs may resonate with many adolescents because they hear their own lives reflected in the lyrics. In the study

“Trends in Mental Health Care Among Children and Adolescents,” researchers Mark

Olfson, Benjamin Druss, and Steven Marcus found that instances of both outpatient treatment for mental health and prescriptions for psychotropic drugs for teenagers increased between 1996-1998 and 2010-2012 (2030). Rather than simply preaching to young people from a removed place, many of the stars of emo rap are still barely older

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than adolescents themselves. Most occupy the same narrow age group, from the late teens to mid-twenties. Not only are they the same age as a large percentage of their listeners, they also experience the same emotional difficulties and growing pains and are not shy about discussing these topics in their music and otherwise.

It seems logical that individuals who frequently feel sad or depressed would seek out and participate in media, including music, that reflects those feelings. Peter

Rentfrow’s findings from the study “The Role of Music in Everyday Life: Current

Directions in the Social Psychology of Music” suggest that a person’s behavior is also likely to reflect the content of the media that they consume, meaning that an individual who regularly listens to emo rap is likely to also demonstrate feelings and behaviors associated with its themes of sadness and depression (404). It would be extremely difficult to determine any individual’s motivations for listening to emo rap in a quantifiable manner, but there seems to exist a kind of cause-and-effect relationship within the genre: the artists produce the music because they are sad, which attracts listeners who identify with those feelings of sadness, and because listening to the music reproduces those feelings of sadness, the audience continues to feel those emotions and continues to listen, and the cycle repeats. There is a fear among well-meaning parents and professionals alike that an attraction to aggressively melancholic music, especially in adolescents, indicates a higher risk that an individual may engage in potentially harmful behaviors. Research conducted by Kendall Roberts and his colleagues introduces the possibility that a strong negative emotional response to music is correlated with a higher likelihood that one will engage in risk-taking behaviors, but Roberts et al. acknowledge

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that one’s personality traits and personal experience significantly influence each individual’s responses (52). In the case of emo rap, this could mean that the reasons why a person chooses to listen to the genre could greatly influence how the music and its content affect the listener.

Before this thesis continues further, it is important to recognize the role of race in rap music. I fully recognize that the history of rap music is connected to African

Americans and that this history has numerous political, social, and cultural implications.

Due to its primary focus on other themes such as mental health and adolescence, this thesis will not examine the role of race specifically in the reception and impact of emo rap, though this perspective has definite potential for future research. Emo rap is notable because of the intensity with which sadness features in the genre, and it may also be unique in the artists and audiences it allows to partake in such unabashed expressions of sadness. In her article “To Be Young, Angsty, and Black: On Rap’s Emo Moment,”

Briana Younger argues that the emo of the early 2000s could easily frame themselves as victims of the world at large and the specific people, mainly lovers, who had wronged them, but because most rap artists at the time were black men, they were not afforded that same luxury. According to Younger, the latter artists had to frame the expression of negative emotions differently, most often as aggression or hypermasculine swagger. Younger turned to emo music in her adolescent years, though she knew that it wasn’t made for her (meaning that it was made with white consumers in mind), because she could relate to it, and to her it “feels crucial that adolescent rap fans in black communities can readily find songs that speak to their angst—coming from a that

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resembles their own.” In his 2016 article “White Rappers, Clear of a Black Planet,” Jon

Caramanica tentatively proposes that some white rappers in America who were popular at the time, such as G-Eazy, , and , had achieved such a large degree of success because they could deliver their music “directly to white consumers, resulting in what can feel like a parallel world, aware of hip-hop’s center but studiously avoiding it.” Caramanica recognizes that “hip-hop’s center” is not white, but that popular white rap artists are challenging that notion by employing different methods to achieve their fame. Emo rap artists differ from the artists whom Caramanica describes in this article because the overt sadness of their music is the primary reason for their membership in the genre, but, as Younger’s experience exemplifies, race plays a role in the reception and success of emo rap as it has in genres that came before.

When one considers the events in America that have coincided with the rise of emo rap, it makes sense that anxiety forms the cultural backdrop of the genre, along with the drugs prescribed to treat it. Anxiety may manifest as a genuine medical condition, but it can also present itself as “a more general mind-set [sic] and cultural stance, one defined by an obsession with an uncertain future,” according to Lisa Miller in her essay

“Listening to Xanax.” Emo rap artists, like many members of their audience who are similar in age, were teens during the Great Recession. According to the findings of Mark

Olfson and his colleagues, in the study “National Trends in the Office-Based Treatment of Children, Adolescents, and Adults with Antipsychotics,” while instances of mental health treatment, mental disorder diagnosis, and the prescription of medications including psychotropics are still more common among adult populations than among youth

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populations, between the period between 1993 and 2009, the number of visits to a psychiatrist that resulted in a prescription for psychotropic medication significantly increased for both age groups (1247). Additionally, the number of visits resulting in a mental disorder diagnosis nearly doubled for youths while holding relatively steady for adults (Olfson et al. 1247). The landscape of mental health in America is changing, apparently for the worse, for both adults and young people, and according to certain measures, youth mental health has been worsening more intensely over a shorter period of time. Emo rap has exploded in popularity within this context, providing a vehicle to express the emotions of the artists themselves, many of whom openly discuss their experiences with mental health issues, and finding an audience in the growing number of youths who can relate to their sadness and discontent.

While the themes of sadness and depression are most readily apparent in emo rap, several related themes prominently feature in songs of the genre; the frequency and intensity of these topics vary depending on the artist, but, generally speaking, common additional themes in emo rap include drug use, abuse and addiction; adolescence and the struggles of growing up; branding, including social media presence and reputation; and violence and death. Of these subtopics, drug abuse arguably follows mental health issues in terms of its importance to the genre. Of course, as Aaron Williams notes in his article

“Reckoning with Rap’s Relationship to Drugs in the Wake of Lil Peep’s Death,” discussing and arguably glorifying drugs, even hard drugs, has been an integral part of rap music long before emo rap was a recognizable thread in the genre. The primary difference is the shift in the substances, with emerging as the drug of

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choice for emo rap artists (Williams). Benzodiazepines refer to a class of pharmaceutical drugs which are principally prescribed to treat anxiety, though they may also be prescribed to treat other mental health conditions such as depression (Miller).

Additionally, Miller mentions in “Why Xanax is the Most Popular Anti-Anxiety Drug in

America” that the emergence of benzodiazepines gave consumers a less-expensive and less-time-consuming alternative to talk therapy, providing a more convenient solution to an increasingly pervasive . Of the drugs categorized as benzodiazepines, one of the most recognizable and most often prescribed is Xanax (). According to

Andrea Tone, in her book The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers, when Xanax was first introduced, a large part of its appeal was its shorter half-life compared to benzodiazepines like Valium, meaning that “it tranquilized users for a shorter period of time” and seemingly without the risk of hangover or physical impairment (212). However, it eventually became apparent that the half-life of Xanax was so short that it greatly increased the risk of patients becoming addicted, because users eventually reached the point that they had to take doses rapidly throughout the day in order to achieve the drug’s intended effect; this risk was especially pronounced for those predisposed to addiction. As stated by one of Tone’s sources in the book, “It’s the crack [] of benzodiazepines” (214).

The period of transition from adolescence to adulthood is often a difficult one.

According to research conducted by Erika Dugas and her colleagues, many individuals report higher instances of mental health issues and suicidal ideation during this period in their lives (303). Considering this finding, it seems irresponsible to think of emo rap as

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merely a vehicle for catharsis that exists separately from the dominant culture, as opposed to being very much a part of the culture. In an interview with for The

New York Times, emo rapper nothing,nowhere. (real name Joe Mulherin) discusses both his career as well as his own mental health issues, mainly with anxiety and depression.

Though the music he makes as nothing,nowhere. is often identified by its eeriness and its anguish, Mulherin believes the condition of his mental health would be “a lot worse” if he weren’t making music (Caramanica). The experience of seeking catharsis through emo rap is not limited to merely listeners who are in search of solace but can also include the artists themselves.

Some listeners or critics of the genre may be tempted to conclude that emo rap artists’ preoccupation with depression, drug abuse, and the like in their music is primarily opportunistic, capitalizing on the coverage these topics receive and hoping to draw some of that attention to their music. However, a desire for attention does not seem an adequate explanation for why these topics form the crux of the genre. The effects of emo rap and its common themes became more immediate on November 15, 2017, when Lil Peep, whose real name was Gustav Åhr, died due to an overdose of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax and at the age of twenty-one. Though Åhr’s death was eventually ruled accidental, it prompted fans and critics alike to speculate about what his death meant for the future of the genre as well as attempt to reconcile the seeming contradiction of someone who was so open about wanting to die, who arguably structured his music, his career, and his presence as an artist around the facts of his experience with addiction and mental illness, and yet who died accidentally. The next chapter of this thesis will explore

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the life of Lil Peep in and analyze how he and his career exemplify the themes of emo rap and its cultural relevance.

On some occasions, the bleak themes of emo rap have intersected with actual violence. This fact is best illustrated by the life, career, and death of controversial emo rapper XXXTentacion (real name Jahseh Onfroy), who was fatally shot in an apparent on June 18, 2018. The rapper’s fans lauded his music for its confessional-like honesty about his life and personal struggles, including his experiences with mental illness, but many critics and writers who discussed Onfroy’s music expressed feelings of unease about his success. As Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli mention in their report of the artist’s death for The Times, the rise of XXXTentacion’s breakout hit,

“Look at Me!,” coincided with his imprisonment following his arrest for charges including aggravated of a pregnant victim and .

XXXTentacion’s life and career were characterized by extremes, both positive and negative: his sophomore , ?, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts in

March 2018; at the time of his death just a few months later, he was awaiting trial on charges of false imprisonment, battery, and witness tampering (Caramanica and

Coscarelli). Much of XXXTentacion’s music, similar to that of Lil Peep, lamented his depression, his self-destructive tendencies, and arguably alluded to the inevitability of his death from unnatural causes, and XXXTentacion’s career attracted much attention from both those who lauded and those who despised him. The shooting brought a graphic end to the life and career of an artist who was either a charismatic or a violent, misogynistic criminal, depending on who is giving the eulogy. XXXTentacion is not the

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only emo rapper who has been accused of violence— (real name Michael

White) was arrested and charged with allegedly hitting a woman with a pistol in June

2018, as William Trace Cowen reported for Complex when the incident occurred. Still, the heinous nature of the crimes with which XXXTentacion was accused and the coexistence of those allegations with his rapid increase in popularity, culminating in his death, exemplify the fraught relationship between the content of many emo rap lyrics that suggest harm to oneself or others and the actuality of violence committed by some of the genre’s star artists.

Emo rap is no longer a niche movement, if it ever was. Singles from some of the genre’s more popular artists garner millions of streams easily, and music videos have the potential to attract even larger audiences: notable examples include Lil Peep’s “Awful

Things (feat. Lil Tracy)” and Lil Xan’s “Betrayed,” which, as of October 2018, have amassed 122 million and 234 million views, respectively (Åhr; Leanos). The music video for “Lucid Dreams,” the breakout single of -based emo rapper (real name Jarad Higgins), received more than 191 million views in less than five months’ time (Higgins). That emo rap artists achieve sizeable mainstream attention for songs that frequently discuss mental health and mental health issues, whether implicitly or explicitly, is worth investigating, which is the task of this thesis. In addition to emo rap gaining traction because its themes resonate with young audiences, nontraditional music streaming and distribution services, such as SoundCloud, allow music that would be too profane for mainstream media platforms to be published and potentially to flourish.

Another consequence of these services is that artists no longer need to produce a

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large body of work, such as an album, before they can attract considerable attention. For the modern emo rapper, the single reigns supreme, and one memorable song is often enough to begin building a career and secure a loyal following. Micah Peters, in his article “How Losing SoundCloud Would Change Music,” argues that the label of

“SoundCloud Rapper” used to broadly apply to any artist using the platform to distribute their music sans the support of a major or the like. According to Peters, the title describes “a full-on aesthetic” with a rather loose definition and which, depending on the artist, may be bestowed with an air of ridicule. The emo rappers who will be discussed in this thesis include those who have expanded beyond the confines of self- produced music and have entered into popular culture.

Beyond just being a vehicle for creating and distributing music, the Internet is a crucial marketing tool for emo rap artists. The Internet is a prominent feature in the lives of most individuals today, but it is especially important to adolescents and young people because they access the Internet more frequently than any other age group, as research conducted by Emma Louise Andersen, Eloisa Steen, and Vasileios Stavropoulos reports

(431). These researchers state that adolescents and emerging adults—whom they define as individuals aged between twelve to seventeen years and between eighteen to twenty- nine years, respectively—have the highest risk of being affected by negative consequences of “problematic internet use,” which can negatively impact an individual’s interpersonal relationships, emotional well-being, and ability to function (431). Many emo rappers have amassed large online followings, spawning communities around their

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music that they use to communicate with their fans and build upon the images they’ve created for themselves.

Consider another example: on November 15, 2017, only a few hours before his death, Lil Peep posted an image of his torso with the caption “When I die You’ll love me” (lilpeep). Battan would later ponder in her aforementioned essay whether the post served as “a warning shot” or “another exercise in image building” before concluding that it was most likely a combination of the two. As of early November 2018, Lil Peep’s

Instagram page, which remains active despite the artist’s death, had accumulated 3.5 million followers. The posthumous release on November 9, 2018 of his sophomore album, Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 2—featuring “Falling Down,” a collaboration with XXXTentacion that was orchestrated after both artists had died—further demonstrates how, in the modern era, the legacy of an emo rap artist can continue and potentially grow even once the artist is no longer alive (Gore).

In addition to analyzing emo rap in a broad sense and its impact on American culture, this thesis will also focus primarily on six artists whose lives and careers best exemplify the themes and trends that characterize the genre. Those artists are Lil Peep,

XXXTentacion, Lil Xan, Lil Uzi Vert, nothing,nowhere., and Juice WRLD.1 This thesis will explore the complex relationship between emo rap and several themes most present in the genre, including mental health issues, drug abuse, adolescence, and violence. This thesis will also discuss how emo rap is branded and how the audience receives the

1 On December 8, 2019, Juice WRLD died of a seizure at Midway International Airport after swallowing “several unknown pills” to prevent them from being seized by the authorities when the plane landed. Because this thesis was written and defended while Juice WRLD was alive, all mentions of him are in present tense, but I want to acknowledge that I am aware that he is now deceased.

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messages of the artists, through songs as well as through music videos and social media.

Because the genre is still new and is constantly evolving, trends in the genre may change, and significant events may occur in the development of the genre or in the lives of the artists. This thesis will include research from scholarly sources regarding topics such as mental health, drug abuse, and analyses of the impacts emo and rap music have had in the past; it will then synthesize such data with information from articles, interviews, original analyses of primary texts such as music videos and social media posts, and data from platforms such as SoundCloud and YouTube to further analyze the impact that emo rap has on American culture and on youth culture in particular. This thesis will employ traditional methods of literary studies and cultural studies to investigate a new and distinctive art form and its resulting artistic community. The thesis will conclude with tentative predictions of what can be expected of the genre in the future, as well as what a broader audience can conclude about the impact and cultural relevance of emo rap.

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CHAPTER TWO

“I WANT EVERYONE TO KNOW THAT I DON’T CARE”:

CASE STUDY OF LIL PEEP

“I used to wanna kill myself / came up, still wanna kill myself / My life is going nowhere /

I want everyone to know that I don’t care.” -Lil Peep, “OMFG”

“...Cocaine lined up, secrets that I'm hiding / You don't wanna find out, better off lying /

You don't wanna cry now, better off dying.” -Lil Peep, “Better Off (Dying)”

“Woke up surprised, am I really alive? / I was trying to die last night, I survived suicide last night.” -Lil Peep, “Leanin’”

As the introduction established, the emo rap genre is characterized by music that prominently features issues of mental health, drug abuse, and discontent. The artists who make this music are often polarizing figures who command attention with their appearances and social media presences as well as their lyrics; in his article “The Rise of

Emo Rap,” author Michael Gursky comments that emo rap represents the resurgence of emo music “with a vengeance in new, face-tattooed packaging.” Gursky argues, as others have, that the topics that form the core of emo rap have always been made accessible through music, but emo rap presents them in an updated format that takes greater advantage of the rap style and the platforms, namely YouTube and SoundCloud, that exist to distribute it. Another defining aspect of emo rap is the blurring of the artist’s stage persona and their actual personal life, and Lil Peep was among the artists who exemplified this mixing (see Fig. 1 on next page.)

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Fig. 1. Lil Peep photographed in SoHo in April 2017 from: Caramanica, Jon. “Lil Peep, Rapper Who Blended Hip-Hop and Emo, Is Dead at 21.” , 16 Nov. 2017. Image by Chad Batka.

Being a rapper, like any career in which one’s success depends on the amount of attention one can cultivate, demands a certain amount of exaggeration, and this is something Lil Peep understood well. In an interview with ’s Stephen J.

Horowitz in early 2017, the artist likened being a rapper to being a professional wrestler, because “everyone has to be a character.” However, Lil Peep emphasized that the sadness and suicidal thoughts he so often expressed in his music were not part of an act. In the

2017 article “All the Young Sadboys: XXXTentacion, Lil Peep and the Future of Emo,”

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author Lindsay Zoladz observes that “[Lil] Peep makes a point to claim the authenticity of the dark emotions he expresses in his songs.” Zoladz is likely referring to the artist’s openness about his struggles with mental health and addiction outside of his music. Later in the aforementioned Pitchfork interview, when asked if he is suicidal, the rapper responds, “Yeah, [and] it is serious. I suffer from depression and some days I’m like,

Fuck, I wish I didn’t wake up” (Horowitz). Lil Peep’s musical career officially began with the release of his first two , LIL PEEP PART ONE and Live Forever, on

SoundCloud in late 2015; the artist’s work garnered attention both from fellow rappers and from listeners, and he released two additional mixtapes, Crybaby and Hellboy, in

2016, according to Tatiana Tenreyro’s timeline of the artist’s career for Billboard. The artist then entered into a partnership with First Access Entertainment in June 2016 that was meant “to invest in [the artist] and advise him on his career,” according to an article by James Hanley for MusicWeek. Lil Peep’s debut album, Come Over When You’re

Sober, Pt. 1, was released on August 15, 2017; several songs on the album feature samples from other artists, and the album was created with the help of Grammy-winning producer , proving to many listeners that the rapper deserved attention and had progressed beyond his rawer SoundCloud beginnings (Tenreyro).

When Lil Peep’s music began gaining more traction, it was likely because of its frequent inclusion of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts, rather than despite these themes. Not only are suicidal ideation and mental health issues more common among adolescents and young adults than among members of other age groups, but the majority of individuals in these age groups do not seek professional help and instead prefer to seek

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help from their peers, as Lisa Michelmore and Peter Hindley report in their study “Help-

Seeking for Suicidal Thoughts and Self-Harm in Young People: A Systematic Review”

(507). In addition to finding solace in their impression from the music that the artists understand them, listeners also find a community in each other. Joanna K. Vuoskoski and her coauthors propose in their article “Who Enjoys Listening to Sad Music and Why?” that “the enjoyment of sad music may stem from an intense emotional response combined with the aesthetic appeal” of this type of music (315). Individuals listen to sad music because they enjoy the actual music and because they identify with what it represents in an aesthetic sense. Individuals to whom that aesthetic appeals are likely to be drawn to each other: Peter J. Rentfrow, in his article “The Role of Music in Everyday Life: Current

Directions in the Social Psychology of Music,” refers to research stating that “the social connotations associated with a style of music may be one of the factors that people find most appealing” (409). Additionally, according to Rentfrow, studies that examine how affiliation with music-based social groups relates to self-esteem have found that individuals within a group adopt similar characteristics to one another and develop more favorable attitudes of members in the group; individuals with the same interests adapt to be more similar to one another and reaffirm each other’s identities (409).

On November 15, 2017, Lil Peep died of an overdose on his tour bus in Tucson,

Arizona, where he was scheduled to perform a show later that night. Local authorities initially reported that the circumstances of his death were “suspicious,” but Pima County authorities later confirmed that he died of an overdose of Xanax and fentanyl, though there were multiple other drugs also present in his system, according to Kory Grow of

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Rolling Stone in a report on the confirmation of Lil Peep’s cause of death. The rapper, whose real name was Gustav Åhr, had turned twenty-one two weeks prior. The day after

Åhr’s death, Micah Peters wrote an article for The Ringer exploring how fans and music professionals will move on, aptly titled “Lil Peep’s Death Raises Difficult Questions.” Lil

Peep’s music had references to mental illness, drug abuse, and self-harm strewn throughout, from his earliest tracks to some of his last releases before he died. Chase

Ortega, whom many outlets referred to as the artist’s manager, announced Lil Peep’s death in a controversial tweet that has since been hidden to most users: “I’ve been expecting this call for a year. Mother fuck” (Peters).

According to Peters, Ortega’s tweet “vividly illustrates the tensions many fans and onlookers have felt consuming Lil Peep’s music and persona alike: To what extent can listeners be held accountable for the struggles of the artists whose work and lifestyles they revere?” I would also argue that Peters is speculating about how much responsibility fans and observers bear for not only revering but also consuming Lil Peep’s music, especially since so much of the content he created (including songs, music videos, and social media posts) concerned mental health issues, drug abuse, and other potentially dangerous topics, seemingly without acknowledging that the behaviors that the artist discussed were often explicitly harmful (see Fig. 2). Ortega attracted significant criticism from fans because his tweet seemingly confirmed that he knew the artist was in trouble and yet did not intervene, whereas most fans are too far removed from the artist as an actual person to have any influence, no matter their engagement with the content he produced.

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Fig. 2. Still from Lil Peep’s “Awful Things” music video (2:28). In the video, the artist plays a high schooler who pursues one of his classmates; in response to her rejection, he lights himself on fire, burning down the high school in the process.

Ben Beaumont-Thomas, in the article “The Death of Lil Peep: How the US

Prescription Drug Epidemic Is Changing Hip-Hop” for , claims that we, as observers and consumers, are “inured to see Instagram [and other social media platforms] as performative, not real, and its inherently aspirational vibe along with the sheer visual noise of its scrolling feed drowns out individual torment. That named its playlist

[of emo rap songs] Tear Drop, selling back these artists’ pain, doesn’t help.” Lil Peep’s persona of being depressed and using drugs to cope, then brushing aside the potential dangers of this attitude with a shrug and a smile, arguably became, like his music, a commodity that could be marketed to fans as well as used to perpetuate his image.

The relationship between the generally negative themes of emo rap and the positive emotions that listening to the genre can evoke is complicated, but research has

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documented that listening to sad music does not inherently mean that the listener will experience sadness as a result. Despite the fact that emo rap is most commonly associated with sadness, listening to sad music may evoke positively toned emotions based on the aesthetic value of the listening experience (Vuoskoski, et al. 315). According to

Vuoskoski and her coauthors, listeners’ enjoyment of sad music also correlates with certain personality traits, as listeners who are most able to appreciate aesthetic experiences and beauty indicate increased enjoyment of sad music, as do listeners who experience the most intense emotional reactions to music (315). These findings provide additional perspective to the rise of Lil Peep and artists like him: when his fans listen to his music, they are not simply consuming the music as it is, but also engaging with his brand and his image and considering the value of the music based on the value of the associated aesthetic. When enough fans identify with the music and continue to engage with it, there is the potential for community to form. In the case of emo rap, when the artists are separated from their fans by a relatively small or nonexistent gap in age and experiences, the artists seemingly become a part of these communities, rather than merely being the reason for their existence. As Emma Garland writes in the article “Maybe Lil

Peep Really Is the Future of Emo,” the artist’s music was “made by teens, for teens,” and in April 2017, when this article was published, music made in that style of blending artist and consumer was poised to become highly successful.

While Lil Peep may have died when he was at a relatively early point in his musical career, that career did not come to a similarly abrupt end, due to the conscious effort of both family and fellow musicians who were closest to him. His first posthumous

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record, “Spotlight,” was a collaboration with DJ-producer that was released on January 12, 2018, at the request of the late artist’s mother, Liza Womack, according to

Beatrice Hazelhurst of Paper magazine. Several additional singles followed, leading up to the announcement and eventual release of Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2, the artist’s first posthumous album and second full album release, on November 9, 2018

(Gore). Carrie Battan writes for the New Yorker in “Lil Peep and the Dilemma of the

Posthumous Album” that artists have died before achieving what the public believes is their peak artistic potential, but Lil Peep and other artists who have died young in this era of music had “access to technology and distribution platforms that encouraged them to be hugely prolific,” and as a result “there exists a mountain of unreleased music by deceased young stars to be sifted through and pumped out into the world.”

That Lil Peep had been actively working on his music up until he died made it reasonably clear to those closest to him and his music that he intended for this music to be released, but there still remained several considerations, both moral and practical, for how that should best be accomplished. The tracks on Pt. 2 continue Lil Peep’s signature style, discussing the inevitability of his death even as that had already happened by the time this music was made available to the public. When Åhr was alive, the frequent references to his impending death were a manner of establishing his credibility and claiming the emotions he struggled with, but they take on a different tone when one listens to them after he died from an overdose of the substances he often referred to in his songs (Battan). As Battan notes, Lil Peep’s nonchalance about the prospect of death constitutes both the appeal of his music and the difficulty of approaching it in the current

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moment, when his audience has more proof that the content of his music was sincere, but when the artist is no longer alive. If Lil Peep had produced music in a different time period or even in a different genre, his death may have reasonably meant the end of his opportunity to strengthen his reputation as an artist, but the current era of quick production and easy access to these songs means that there exists a substantial amount of music to still be distributed and a number of ways to distribute it.

Some observers and critics have questioned the motives for releasing Lil Peep’s music now that he has died. At a listening party for the release of Come Over When

You’re Sober Pt. 2 in New York, Womack told those in attendance that the album is important because her son is dead, but “it’s the album he would have made if he were alive,” as Marianne Eloise reports for The Guardian in “Lil Peep: How to Handle the

Release of an Album Shrouded in Tragedy.” In this article, Eloise also broaches what is arguably the album’s main source of controversy: “Falling Down,” a collaboration between Lil Peep and XXXTentacion that was created by splicing vocal samples from each artist together to form a whole project; the track was not created until after Lil

Peep’s death and not released until after both rappers had died. Artists close to Lil Peep insisted that he would not have approved of the collaboration and that he had openly expressed discontent for XXXTentacion during his lifetime due to the allegations of violence and against the latter artist, and they urged fans not to support the song. Womack acknowledged this controversy, as well as her son’s distaste for adding features to songs without proper reason that he expressed throughout his career, but she insists that she would know what her son would have wanted (Eloise). While it is unclear

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exactly how Lil Peep’s legacy will evolve in the future, Come Over When You’re Sober

Pt. 2 debuted at No. 4 on the charts, demonstrating that posthumous can have significant commercial appeal; the importance of an artist’s reputation and legacy, both living and posthumous, will be discussed in more detail later in this thesis.2

As I have explored in this chapter, the life, career, and death of Lil Peep illustrate many of the themes most characteristic of the emo rap genre and the artists included within it. The following chapters will discuss particular themes in detail, including how they appear in emo rap songs, how the artists talk about them, and how these themes impact the broader culture. The topics are interrelated and often appear in connection with one another; for example, discussions of mental health and drug abuse in emo rap frequently appear simultaneously because the substances mentioned are often used to treat mental health conditions such as anxiety. Mental health is related to adolescence, another prominent aspect of emo rap that will be explored within this thesis, because individuals often experience mental health problems and suicidal ideation during adolescence, topics which they can then identify in emo rap songs. The next chapter will delve into mental health as a topic in emo rap songs and the impact its prominence has on the genre and on the culture.

2 It is worth noting as a poignant observation that Lil Peep did not have an entry on the Billboard charts prior to his death. In addition to this album, his song “Awful Things” peaked at #79 on December 9, 2017, and two posthumously released singles, “Falling Down” and “I’ve Been Waiting,” peaked at #13 and #62, respectively.

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CHAPTER THREE

“BETTER OFF DYING”: DOES EMO RAP ASSUAGE OR AMPLIFY

MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS?

“Told her if I die / I’mma die young…” -Juice WRLD, “Lean Wit Me”

“You can see the void in my eyes / I know you know I’m lying when I say that I’m fine.”

-nothing,nowhere., “Deadbeat Valentine”

“Suicide if you ever try to let go / I’m sad, I know, yeah / I’m sad, I know, yeah.”

-XXXTentacion, “SAD!”

The ease of access to music in modern society makes it simpler than ever for people to immerse ourselves in virtually any music we desire whenever we desire it. It also makes it possible to use music as a vehicle to express or soothe almost any emotion.

As Lauren Cassani Davis writes in the article “Is It Harmful to Use Music as a Coping

Mechanism?” for in 2015, music’s therapeutic effects have long been recognized, even before music therapy became a sanctioned form of psychological treatment. However, Davis also discusses whether using music to cope with one’s feelings can possibly have a negative impact on mental health. Davis cites the results of a study that examined the effects of listening to music based on three strategies that people use to process negative emotions: diversion, in which music distracts a person from their negative emotions; solace, in which music is used as a source of comfort and a medium through which a person can accept their negative emotions; and discharge, in which a person releases their negative emotions through music. According to the results of this study, whiconducted by Emily Carlson, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Jyväskylä

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in Finland, participants who listened to music for the purpose of discharge exhibited higher levels of anxiety and neuroticism than other participants. These findings were especially true for male participants in the study (Davis).

Using music for catharsis is common behavior, particularly for adolescents and young people. However, parents and psychological professionals have expressed concerns about the risks of engaging with certain kinds of music—such as rap, hip-hop, punk, and emo—and the potential correlation between listening to these genres and an increased risk for dangerous behavior. In the study “Problem Music and Self-Harming,” researchers Adrian C. North and David J. Hargreaves analyze responses from more than four hundred undergraduate students to a survey that asked about students’ self-esteem, propensity for self-harming behaviors and delinquent behaviors, history of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and their musical preference, with a focus on the relationship between negative thoughts and behaviors and “problem music,” which in the study refers to the , hip-hop/rap, and punk genres. This study found that preference for problem music was positively correlated with all of these behaviors except for actual suicide attempts, though the researchers acknowledge that the relationship between a preference for problem music and actual harmful behavior is complicated, and the strength of the relationship depends on a variety of associated factors (North and

Hargreaves 588). This complex relationship is especially important to consider in the case of emo rap, when it can be difficult to determine how much of the appeal of the genre can be attributed to the catharsis it provides to the listener versus its aesthetic appeal.

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Emo rap artists use their music as a medium through which they can release large amounts of intense emotion. Furthermore, emo rap artists often directly invite their audience to participate in their expressions of emotion with them. Rapper XXXTentacion

(real name Jahseh Onfroy; see Fig. 3 on next page) often encouraged this intense emotional involvement from his fans, as Hannah Giorgis explores in the article “How

Will XXXTentacion Be Remembered?” for The Atlantic. In the song “(instructions),” the first on the late rapper’s sophomore album ?, XXXTentacion implores his fans to listen with an open mind and reminds them that they are entering into his thoughts, privy to both his “genius” and his “insanity” (Giorgis). The artist promoted his music as a platform to connect with fans who struggled with the same issues as he did. According to

Giorgis, many of the rapper’s young fans “have come of age in an era that confronts them with unimaginable terrors far more quickly than it offers guides to process those horrors.”

The solace that fans receive from XXXTentacion’s music in particular is a complicated issue, due to the violent allegations against the rapper at the time of his death in June

2018.

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Fig. 3. Photograph of emo rapper XXXTentacion from Kornhaber, Spencer. “The Unsettling Familiarity of

XXXTentacion.” The Atlantic, 26 March 2018. Image by Jack McKain.

Though XXXTentacion’s music and career represent extremes even for the emo rap genre, as noted above, the genre as a whole is characterized by an intense focus on sadness, despair, and suicidal thoughts, often accompanied by talk of risky behaviors like drug abuse and suicidal ideation as responses to mental health problems. Because these themes are defining aspects of the genre, rather than occasional occurrences, it is more logical to hypothesize that emo rap songs are popular because they feature mental health, rather than in spite of this fact. Andrew Matson, in his article “Should You Listen to

XXXTentacion’s ‘17’?”, implicates the artist’s music in what he calls the “trendification of suicide,” expressing the concern of many critics that the creators of emo rap promote sadness as an aesthetic more than they try to promote actual discussions of mental health.

According to Matson, the most popular emo rap artists are “competing for who can be the most depressed, who can have the most fucked-up life, and who can create the most

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uncomfortable art that strangely captivates.” Matson is well aware of the performative aspect of emo rap, and the more controversial the performance, the harder it can be for critics and listeners to determine how to interpret it. As discussed in previous chapters, the reasons a listener engages with sad music have a significant impact on how they receive this music, especially for adolescents navigating the often-difficult transition to adulthood.

Katrina Skewes McFerran and Suvi Saarikallio, authors of “Depending on Music to Feel Better: Being Conscious of Responsibility When Appropriating the Power of

Music,” discuss the idea of music as a “badge of identity” for adolescents, suggesting that music has a particularly strong influence on individuals at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives (89). McFerran and Saarikallio also refer to research that indicates that

“shared music preferences for problem music also fostered bonding [among young people] and created a social network for those who felt isolated” (89). According to the researchers, it is the listener’s responsibility to engage with music—and especially sad music—in a conscious and active manner, rather than receiving the music and its messages passively, and if the listeners engage with the music responsibly, “they can use it to negative as well as positive effect” (95). This argument seemingly implies that sad music is not inherently harmful or helpful, provided that the listener knows their purpose for listening to it. Having a purpose for listening to this music, rather than consuming it passively, is very important, because “a lack of consciousness and intentionality in a risk- filled context has the potential to lead to negative consequences” (McFerran and

Saarikallio 95).

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While the establishment of the adolescent music market in the 1950s caused concern among some parents about the negative influence that popular music might have on young people, parents and activists alike became more invested in the cause of

“[limiting] access to music that might pollute the minds of young people” during the

1980s (McFerran and Saarikallio 89). Research into a possible connection between teenage consumption of “problem” music, a designation most often bestowed on harsher, more disruptive genres such as punk, rap, hard rock, and hip-hop, and antisocial or otherwise unhealthy behavior began in the decade following and has continued into the twenty-first century. Some of this research is cited within this chapter and throughout this thesis in order to illustrate the suspected negative effects of alternative music on consumers and their behavior, as well as to connect these studies to emo rap in the present day. Emo rap is not different from its musical predecessors because it incorporates mental health and other serious topics into its most popular songs, nor because it appeals primarily to adolescents while often confounding or horrifying their parents. It is different because new methods for music distribution allow artists to communicate more directly with the consumer and because the proliferation of social media allows artists to deliver messages and content to fans apart through mediums other than just recorded tracks.

Many critics highlight emo rappers’ honest discussions of mental health as one aspect of the genre that has the potential for positive impact. In the article “Lil Peep’s

Honesty About Mental Health Inspired a Generation to Accept Themselves,” Francesca

Donovan discusses how the late emo rapper’s career, with his genre-bending approach to

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music and his openness about mental health, allowed for a new understanding of what a popular rapper could be. Donovan claims that, by using his music to honestly discuss his struggles with mental health rather than to obscure them, Lil Peep provided a model for his fans who may be experiencing the same difficulties. Brian Bailey, author of “Emo

Music and Youth Culture,” suggests that learning more about emo music might provide parents and educators with some insight into what it is like to grow up in today’s world.

The most popular emo rappers are older adolescents themselves, approximately the same age as the majority of their listeners, and thus their messages feel genuine to their audiences. Bailey also refers to the expansion of texts that are considered literary and discusses emo music as one of the “texts” that permeates youth culture. The idea of emo rap songs as texts that have cultural value in the lives of young people lends a sense of legitimacy to the genre and gives artists cultural authority from which they can contribute to discussions about serious topics such as mental health and drug abuse. My decision to explore the connection between emo rap and topics such as mental health and drug abuse, especially in connection to adolescent lives, was prompted by what I saw as the ubiquity of these texts in young-adult culture and my impression that they were becoming increasingly more popular and more influential, not less, even after the passing of some of the most prominent artists in the genre. I became convinced that a phenomenon with that degree of continued appeal and cultural pull deserved attention from a critical and academic viewpoint.

The frequency with which emo rap artists discuss mental health issues, both through their music and otherwise, lends some amount of justification for the cultural

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influence and authority these artists have. As Gary Suarez states in the Forbes article

“Emo Rap Builds Momentum on the Billboard Charts,” the “themes of heartache, mental health and other deeply personal concerns [serve] as common ground” between the emo rap artist and the listener. The experiences which emo rappers supposedly share with their audiences—as well as the relative closeness in age of popular rappers to their target demographics, which Suarez indicates as a factor in emo rap’s popularity—give the artists a sense of both relatability and legitimacy. Artists’ claims of sadness and angst in their music are corroborated by statements in interviews and on social media that further attest to the authenticity of these negative emotions.

However, the true honesty of an emo rapper’s message is more difficult to define: as the genre grows in popularity and garners more commercial success, many observers question whether artists who have made careers with “sad rap” are producing songs based on their genuine feelings or whether they are capitalizing on the popularity of sad music that exists in the market, as evidenced by comments such as Andrew Matson’s regarding a potential “trendification of suicide.” The popularity of both emo bands in the early

2000s and the emotional content produced by rappers such as Drake, Kid Cudi, and

Kanye West throughout their careers, to name a few, demonstrates that the content of emo rap is not totally unprecedented, and fans have always admired those who manufacture the content they enjoy. The broad reach of emo rap allowed by social media and new music streaming services, combined with the intensity and often brutality with which the genre’s star artists focus on negative themes, are what set the genre apart.

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The consequences, both positive and negative, of emo rap’s popularity are likely still beginning to develop, but the widespread reach of the genre is no longer in question.

Tom Breihan, in his profile of Chicago-based emo rapper Juice WRLD (real name Jarad

Higgins) for , considers SoundCloud rap “quite possibly the de facto sound of teenage America in 2018.” Breihan also states that the genre is populated by “a new generation of male rappers embracing their own victimhood,” blaming others for causing the undesirable feelings that so frequently appear in their music. As an example of this phenomenon, Breihan refers to “Lucid Dreams,” stating that Juice WRLD’s top-ten single is “an oddly pretty song about taking pills and contemplating your own death, all because some girl did you wrong.” Breihan argues that, while emo rappers like Juice

WRLD are sincere in the intensity of the emotions they express, that should not excuse the fact that the content resulting from feeling those emotions can be questionable and set a poor example for listeners.

The notion of emo rappers “embracing their own victimhood” and using drugs to cope with or surrender to that feeling of animosity, as Breihan alleges, is even more intriguing given how it contradicts Andrea Tone’s description of early tranquilizer use in

The Age of Anxiety. According to Tone, the anti-anxiety drug Miltown “meshed easily with the convenience mentality of the 1950s, the therapeutic ethos that sanctioned changing oneself rather than the world, and the sociopolitical uncertainties that kept

Americans on edge” (103). Consumers viewed Miltown and other breakthrough tranquilizers as devices that transferred the power to change their perspective (if not their environment) into their own hands, rather than those of therapists or other authorities.

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Contrary to taking drugs to spark change, no matter how small or how personal, drug use in emo rap is often portrayed as a method to cope with the harsh reality of living and the feelings that result by numbing oneself and by disengaging from the possibility of personal responsibility.

As discussed in previous chapters, the emotional content of emo rap is expected to provoke some kind of response in the listener, though the nature of that response varies according to the personality of each listener and their reasons for engaging with the music

(Roberts et al. 52). However, observing the effects of emo rap on some of the individuals responsible for creating it also provides some potential insight into how the subject matter affects those who associate with it most closely. A readily apparent example of this is the late Lil Peep, whose experience with mental illnesses, drug abuse, and suicidal ideation is deliberately and extensively preserved through his music and remarks he made during his life, which the previous chapter discussed in detail. In addition to Lil Peep, other artists in the genre have implicated issues related to mental health issues or drug abuse (or both) as the impetus for creating music; other artists, including Lil Xan, Lil Uzi

Vert, and nothing, nowhere., have also experienced negative events or setbacks in their careers as the result of these same issues.

On November 15, 2018, California-based emo rapper Lil Xan (real name Diego

Leanos; see Fig. 4 on next page) announced on social media that he planned to take a hiatus from music and check into a rehab facility for addiction, according to

Michael Saponara in an article for Billboard. Leanos cited the deaths of Lil Peep and Mac

Miller (a rapper who died of a in September 2018) as his motivation for

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seeking treatment, despite struggling with addiction previously; Leanos remarks that

Miller’s death “hit too close to home. I know we struggle with the same problems and I just feel like it’s time to get better” (Saponara). Leanos’s announcement was made on

November 15, 2018, the one-year anniversary of Lil Peep’s death from an accidental overdose of Xanax and fentanyl, which, intentional or not, likely did not go unnoticed by fans of the genre and which Saponara also mentions in his article. As with other emo rappers, the themes in Lil Xan’s music reflect events and corresponding trends in the broader culture. Cameron Crowell, in a short profile of the rapper for The Stranger, writes that current emo rap “reflects the experience of kids growing up in the Great

Recession, the foreclosure crisis, the opioid crisis” and other difficulties facing America.

In addition to the effects which emo rap has on the listener, Leanos’s decision to enter rehab as a response to deaths of other artists within the genre demonstrates that the genre

and its themes have an impact

on the artists themselves.

Fig. 4. Lil Xan, from Barbour,

Shannon. “Lil Xan Was Admitted to

Rehab on Sunday.” Cosmoplitan, 3

Dec. 2018. Image by Matthew

Eisman.

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Vermont-based emo rapper nothing,nowhere. (real name Joe Mulherin) expresses to Jon Caramanica of the New York Times that music provides an outlet for the “worst” emotions that he feels: “I just put [them] into a song so I don’t have to feel [them] elsewhere.” Mulherin’s approach to emo rap as a form of catharsis has earned him critical acclaim and recognition: while he began his career by posting tracks to SoundCloud, he is now signed to DCD2, the record label imprint (formerly known as Decaydance) owned by of . On the evening of July 30, 2018, the day before nothing,nowhere. was scheduled to begin a summer tour in the , Mulherin canceled the tour, according to a report by Philip Trapp for Altpress. Mulherin posted an explanation for the cancellation on Twitter, stating that he had “been battling severe anxiety and depression” and had “decided the best option is to leave for a while and seek professional help” (Trapp). The catharsis provided by creating emo rap does not necessarily salve the emotions which facilitate it, at least not completely. This effect was further exemplified by the announcement from emo rapper Lil Uzi Vert (real name

Symere Woods) in January 2019 that he had decided to quit making music, citing a desire to be “normal,” according to Jordan Moreau of Variety magazine. It is implied in

Woods’s statement that it is difficult to be “normal” or happy when one continues to immerse himself in negative emotions and dissect negative events in his life for the sake of producing music on those subjects.

As this thesis has already established, emo rappers are not the first musical artists to use music to explore negative emotions and difficult social issues in their art. Just as emotional content in music is not a new phenomenon, neither is another definitive

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characteristic of the genre: drug use and abuse, particularly concerning prescription anti- anxiety drugs such as benzodiazepines. In her book, The Age of Anxiety, Tone charts the rise of the Miltown (meprobamate), an anti-anxiety drug which was approved for sale by and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1955, five years after the discovery of meprobamate in 1950 (27). Though Miltown is no longer among the most recognizable tranquilizers today (including those most likely to be mentioned in emo rap songs), it was an incredibly popular drug both by the standards of its era and those of the current pharmaceutical age: according to Tone, one in twenty Americans had tried Miltown by

1956, a greater ratio than that of any other drug that has debuted on the American market

(27).

Miltown became available to consumers during a period of heightened national fear, primarily concerning the possibility of nuclear warfare; it “arrived in a society preoccupied with anxiety and committed to its containment” (Tone 100). That general perception—of American society as one characterized by the presence of conditions like anxiety and the search for methods to treat it—is replicated in a similar upward trend for prescriptions in the twenty-first century. According to Lisa Miller, prescriptions for benzodiazepines, a class of drugs that includes Xanax, Ativan,

Klonopin, Valium, and others, have increased seventeen percent since 2006 to almost ninety-four million prescriptions a year as of 2012, the year that Miller’s article

“Listening to Xanax” was published in New York magazine.

What is interesting is that the notion of employing benzodiazepines as a means of

“containing” mental health issues such as anxiety, as Tone describes it in her book, does

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not seem to apply to these drugs as they are used by emo rap artists in the same way that it explains how they are used by most individuals in society. Emo rap artists do not conceal their use of and problems with prescription drugs, but most of the usage as it is discussed is not in terms of medically regimented doses: Lil Peep, despite his well- documented history of drug use and mental health issues, stated in an interview with

Pitchfork before his death that he was not consistently medicated for depression, despite the encouragement of those close to him, preferring instead to use “whatever drugs came

[his] way” (Horowitz). Lil Peep’s brand, according to Francesca Donovan of Unilad, was one which “desperately sought acceptance despite [people’s] differences”; the artist put mental health issues and drug abuse at the forefront of his music rather than trying to obscure them. Within the emo rap genre, the goal seems to be less to contain the anxiety and depression rather than to allow it to spread, particularly if its diffusion reaches the fans who are attracted to the genre because of their own struggles— “embracing the outcasts,” in Donovan’s words—and provides them some kind of comfort.

After the deaths of Lil Peep and XXXTentacion in November 2017 and June

2018, respectively, one of the issues that remained for those closest to these artists was what to do with the wealth of unfinished or unreleased music each of these artists had at the time of his passing. As an answer to this dilemma, at least a partial one, posthumous collections of each rapper’s songs have been released: the first of them, Lil Peep’s Come

Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2, a follow-up to Come Over When You’re Sober Part 1, was released on November 9, 2018. In the article that she wrote about the impending album after its release date was announced, Sydney Gore hints at what fans can expect

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from the album and also includes quotes from the late artist’s mother, Liza Womack, and

Smokeasac (real name Dylan Mullen), one of the producers with whom Lil Peep worked most closely during his lifetime, each of whom offer their opinions about why the album needs to exist. While Mullen says that finishing the album without the artist’s presence and input was incredibly difficult, he felt that he “really had no choice [and that] it had to be done” (Gore). Similarly, in a press release about the album, Womack refers to the album as a “powerful collection of songs” that came together as a “labor of love.” The musical and lyrical content of this album is similar to the content of other albums released when Lil Peep was still alive, since it comprises music that he created before he died that was polished and distributed after his death. However, Mullen and Womack’s remarks convey that the meaning of the lyrics as well as the significance of an album release have evolved now that the artist is no longer alive to personally modify and add to his catalogue beyond what he created in his lifetime. When one’s career was so heavily predicated on drug abuse, depression, and suicidal ideation, analyzing such content once the artist has died becomes still more complex.

XXXTentacion’s reputation throughout his life was more unpredictable, the result of rapidly increasing fame that coincided with allegations of violent crimes against the artist. While critics hesitated to review and report on XXXTentacion’s career and his music because of the controversies that surrounded him and the wildly varying nature of his music, the rapper’s seeming lack of stable, defining characteristics earned him the admiration of both fans and his peers in the rap community. XXXTentacion exhibited

“moral contradictions like a badge of honor, something that was reassuringly human to

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his fans and was respected by peers such as [rapper] ,” according to

Thomas Hobbs in his review of XXXTentacion’s first posthumous album, Skins, which was released on December 7, 2018. XXXTentacion’s music often broached the themes of

“mental health issues and feeling isolated” in addition to those of violence and anger

(Hobbs). Hobbs claims that the creation and release of Skins is an act of “dangerous revisionism,” and that it exploits the rapper’s death as an opportunity to “mold [him] into a mythical, legendary figure.” While critics are primed to be skeptical of such an attempt, fans are less likely to question their inclination to value his music and the presence he had throughout his life. Young people often listen to music as a means to console them without considering their interpretation of and response to the music as an important factor (McFerran and Saarikallio). As such, they may be predisposed to accept the attributes of an artist’s music which are useful to them—those related to mental health, with which they can identify—and to disregard (or welcome the absence of discussion about) the attributes or themes that complicate the act of using this music as a means to provide solace.

As this chapter has explored, the theme of mental health is not incidental in emo rap music; on the contrary, it is one of the defining characteristics of the genre and contributes greatly to its popularity, especially among young people. While it is tempting to conclude that a genre which so prominently features discussions of mental health issues can have only negative effects on its listeners, some effects of emo rap are arguably positive, as young listeners may find solace in hearing problems which they also experience represented in the genre. However, some critics also argue that emo rap artists

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do not treat the theme of mental health as responsibly as they should, especially considering the vulnerable audience their music often attracts. The mental health content of the music has evolved in meaning since the beginning of the genre, due to the increasing popularity and commercial success of emo rap along with the deaths of artists in the genre. The following chapter will explore the influence of drugs and drug abuse on emo rap, another theme which is characteristic of the genre, controversial in nature, and also reflective of current trends in broader American society.

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CHAPTER FOUR

“XANS DON’T MAKE YOU”: EMO RAP’S GLORIFICATION OF,

AND RECKONING WITH, DRUG ABUSE

“I don’t wanna die alone right now / I just did a line of blow right now.”

-Lil Peep, “Cry Alone”

“Xans don’t make you / Xans gon’ take you / Xans gon’ fake you /

Xans gon’ betray you.” -Lil Xan, “Betrayed”

“RIP to too many young legends that left us early. If you or somebody you know is suffering from addiction call 1-800-662-HELP to take the first step.” -Message that appears at the conclusion of the music video for Juice WRLD’s “Lean Wit Me”

As the introduction of this thesis discussed, Lil Wayne’s admission of drug abuse in the 2007 song “I Feel Like Dying” marked a significant shift in the expected trajectory of rap music. While previous rap songs established the rapper as a distributor of drugs, in control of the chaos that surrounds him, Lil Wayne (real name Dwayne Carter Jr.) revealed his status as a consumer reliant on drugs and the relief they provide and set the example for the generation of emo rap stars who would follow him. Benzodiazepine use tripled in the decade between 1998 and 2008, according to a statistic which Kramer and

Younger cite in their article; from a medical standpoint, Lil Wayne was pointing out a trend that had been snowballing for years, but he was one of the first rappers to bring the news to masses of fans. His message, in a cynical way, democratized the notion of drug

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abuse: fans had so often seen drug abuse portrayed for them in rap songs, but he was offering them an easy point of access through the role of the user. The rapper’s public ownership of drug abuse “blurs the line between glorification and uncomfortable truths,” which was a landmark step for those hearing such a caveat to drug abuse likely for the first time more than a decade ago (Kramer and Younger).

Given the prominence of drugs in American society, the realization that even rap stars had succumbed to the allure of consuming drugs should have surprised no one.

According to Joseph A. Califano, Jr., author of High Society: How

Ravages America and What to Do About It, Americans constitute approximately four percent of the world’s total population but consume more than half of the world’s mood- altering and painkilling prescription drugs, as well as more than half of the world’s illegal drugs (9). Furthermore, the extent to which drugs have permeated common awareness is not limited to adults: for more than a decade, students from ages twelve to seventeen who responded to the annual back-to-school survey administered by the National Center on

Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University have indicated drugs as the greatest problem they face (Califano 9).3 Drugs pose a yet more serious risk to individuals who experience mental health issues such as depression during adolescence.

According to Corey Keyes, author of “Mental Health in Adolescence: Is America’s

Youth Flourishing?”, depressed youth are more likely to report use and abuse of substances among other difficulties (395).

3 It is of potential interest to note that Califano’s book was published in 2007, the same year in which “I Feel Like Dying” was released.

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According to some metrics, the repeated references to mental health issues and drug abuse strewn throughout emo rap are in keeping with trends throughout rap’s history, but by other standards, the subgenre has charted its own path with the substances and behaviors it emphasizes and how it emphasizes them. Kyle J. Holody and his coauthors, in their article “‘Drunk in Love’: The Portrayal of Risk Behavior in Music

Lyrics,” observe in their analysis of lyrics across a variety of genres that mentions of drugs in rap lyrics increased six-fold from 1979 to 1997. Furthermore, the occurrence of positive connotations along with these mentions also increased, from 16% in 1979 to

58% in 1997 (Holody et al. 1099). The portrayal of drugs, including the increased depiction of prescription drugs, arguably takes on a more nuanced portrayal in emo rap, now that the transition from drug seller to drug user has been fully realized and positivity associated with drug abuse is often nowhere to be found. When it comes to today’s popular emo rap and its portrayal of the issues that plague stars and fans alike, the line between glorification and uncomfortable truth often seems to hardly exist at all. Past and current drug abuse, along with experience battling mental health problems and other woes, is often incorporated into an emo rapper’s brand from the start of his career and exemplified as a marker of authenticity.

A prime example of this is Lil Xan (real name Diego Leanos), whose stage name immediately implies a connection to prescription drug use. Leanos has spoken publicly about multiple substance abuse issues, but most notably about the Xanax addiction he developed as a teenager. Writing about a Lil Xan concert which took place shortly after the death of Lil Peep in November 2017, Carrie Battan remarks in “Lil Xan and the Year

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in Sad Rap” how Lil Peep’s death from an accidental overdose of fentanyl and Xanax affected both the crowd and the performer on this particular occasion, exemplifying how the artist’s death complicated emo rap’s attitude towards drugs as a whole:

Onstage, Lil Xan wore a pink hoodie bearing Lil Peep’s image. Just as he was

about to finish his set, he launched into a tirade about the pitfalls of Xanax abuse.

Artists of the sad-rap movement possess a world-weariness that makes them seem

older than they are, and Lil Xan has spoken many times, in a harrowed tone, about

battling a Xanax addiction. “Fuck Xanax 2018!” he told the crowd. But he added

a footnote, lest he start to sound like too much of a killjoy: “I’m still Lil Xan,

though, at the end of the day.”

This excerpt from Battan conveys an apparent contradiction in emo rap: many of these artists feature discussions of drug and alcohol use in their songs, and have become famous as a result, but using and abusing these drugs can have consequences. Events such as Åhr’s death have made ignoring the risks of drugs seem even more irresponsible.

Furthermore, Leanos has made drugs an immediate part of the conversation about his music by recording under the name “Lil Xan,” and his quote included in Battan’s article conveys both an awareness of the harmfulness of drugs like Xanax and the extent to which drug abuse is engrained in the career for which he has become famous.

The use of drugs to cope with or simply to ignore larger cultural worries is a practice nearly as old as drugs themselves, and benzodiazepines are closer to the rule than the exception. When Miltown was first introduced in the mid-1950s amid shifting cultural conditions and major national security concerns, it was a “part of a tide of new

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material and social comforts” that also included other American staples like fast-food hamburgers; the convenient solutions to problems that these items offered, whether those problems were temporary hunger or prolonged fear for the future, were “trumpeted as a particularly American answer to a peculiarly American set of woes,” as stated in The Age of Anxiety (Tone 103). Benzodiazepines were marketed as a solution to the problems of all Americans, whether unruly children or anxious adults, but Tone makes a point of mentioning the gendered divisions of these medications’ applications, even before gendered marketing of benzodiazepines became standard practice by the late 1960s. Men who took Miltown did so, according to cultural understanding, to cope with the stress of being a high-powered career professional, enabling them to do what they needed to get done; contrasting this viewpoint was the opinion that “tranquilizers [were] a medical technology hatched by men chiefly to pacify women,” keeping housewives distracted from the underlying causes of their discontent through medication (Tone 106).

In “Addict Rap?: The Shift from Drug Distributor to Drug Consumer in Hip

Hop,” published in the Journal of Studies, author CalvinJohn Smiley identifies several notable changes within the rap genre and in the broader culture that result in some way from the shift to “the perspective of the drug consumer as opposed to the traditional drug distributor” (94). Research suggests that consumption of pharmaceutical drugs has increased because these drugs can be obtained legally and inexpensively with a medical prescription and because consumers are often more likely to perceive them as safe; these drugs do have side effects, some of them potentially serious, but consumers may be more likely to ignore the possible consequences of these drugs because of their impression that

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they are less harmful than “hard” drugs (96). Referenced in Smiley’s article is “License to Pill,” an essay written by Canadian DJ and producer A-Trak (real name Alain

Macklovitch) for HuffPost in 2013, in which the author ponders whether it is possible for him to reconcile his considerable respect for the rappers with whom he works and his admiration for their music with his personal distaste for drug use and for a rap culture that he believes has been dangerously permeated by drug abuse. Macklovitch asserts that rap has progressed from “glorifying selling hard drugs to glamorizing their effects”; he accepts that drug abuse has long been incorporated into the fabric of the genre but expresses discomfort with the emerging role of rap star as enthusiastic drug consumer.

Macklovitch’s article concludes with a realistic and optimistic approach to what he observes as the new status quo: “We can rap about it, but let’s also talk about it.”

Project Know, an online resource that offers information about substance abuse and addiction, conducted research investigating the frequency of drug slang and drug references in rap lyrics over time, the conclusion of which was that mentions of substances such as alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana remained reasonably consistent between 1988 to 2013, but mentions of substances such as , pharmaceutical drugs, and MDMA (“ecstasy”) have increased in recent years (Smiley 97). According to

Smiley, the statistics this research provided are valuable, but only to a point, as the context from which these references derive much of their meaning is not included in the report (97). The transition from the rapper as drug distributor to drug consumer is an important one because, among multiple reasons, rap is a “performed identity,” and one’s acceptance into the genre and their success within it depends heavily on their ability to

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“authenticate” and defend their worthiness to belong in the genre (Smiley 98). Sometime during the mid-to-late-2000s, the definitive performed identity for rappers in relation to drugs shifted, from the distributor who sold or otherwise distributed drugs to the “other” to the consumer who describes drug use from a first-person perspective (Smiley 100).

While Smiley confirms in his article that the trope of the artist as superior drug distributor still exists, the newer role of rapper as drug consumer is widespread throughout the emo rap genre, ranging in degree from begrudging acceptance to, in many instances, veneration (100). Many emo rappers, including some of those who are most popular, regularly refer to drug use as a means to cope with life’s disappointments, obtain a euphoric high, or simply get through the grind of everyday life. It is worth noting that one prominent exception to this rule is nothing,nowhere. (real name Joe Mulherin; see

Fig. 5 on next page), who has been open about his adherence to a vegan and lifestyle since the beginning of his career, which he discusses in an interview with Anna

Scholfield of Ones to Watch. It is interesting to consider that, though the identity of

“straight edge” defines a person as free from drugs, such meaning of that identity can only exist in a culture where drug use is the norm; otherwise, there would be no reason for this distinction to exist. Mulherin aside, most artists in the genre express some kind of relationship with drugs in their music, whether one marked by regret and self-loathing or by something approaching unabashed reverence. One popular instance of the latter is portrayed throughout the song “Lean Wit Me” by Juice WRLD (real name Jarad Higgins) and the accompanying music video, which, as of February 2019, has been viewed more than thirty-eight million times since it was uploaded in August 2018 (Higgins).

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Fig. 5. Vermont-based emo rapper nothing,nowhere. is notable for his identification as “straight edge” in a musical genre where drug and alcohol abuse are the norm, from Caramanica, Jon. “nothing,nowhere.

Blends Hip-Hop and Emo to Make Tomorrow’s Pop.” The New York Times, 20 Oct. 2017. Image by Greta

Rybus.

The video for “Lean Wit Me” intersperses realistic and negative portrayals of drug abuse with positive or otherwise unconcerned reactions, preventing the possibility of concluding decisively whether it glamorizes or demonizes drug abuse. The video opens with the artist attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, which transitions into footage of individuals taking pills and the artist singing. The music then stops to introduce a short yet ominous narrative: Juice WRLD tells a 911 operator that he thinks his girlfriend overdosed and that she is not breathing; he hangs up without answering any more of the operator’s follow-up questions. He is escorted into the back of a police car while the song

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resumes, but even this seemingly serious consequence is contrasted by the artist hanging his head out of the window, as if on a joyride, and singing and gesturing along with the music while seated on top of an ambulance with its lights flashing (Higgins). In this display, drug abuse ceases to have primarily negative consequences: it facilitates this carefree display, mocking the forces that want to punish the artist for any possible wrongdoing. The dramatic and frequent shifts in visual technique throughout the video— from color to black-and-white, high-definition quality to grainy footage resembling that of a home video—reflect the inconsistent tone of the video and depict the abuse of drugs in a light that never lingers on the subject long enough to condemn it as a problem (see

Fig. 6 on next page). The cautionary message that appears at the end of the video, urging viewers concerned about their own drug abuse or that of a loved one to call a toll-free number for help, is one last complicating factor in a performance laden with contradictions (Higgins).

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Fig. 6. A still (1:39) from Juice WRLD’s “Lean Wit Me” music video, in which the artist (center of frame) alternately mourns and mocks the consequences of his drug abuse.

Juice WRLD’s music is, for the most part, par for the course in a genre so steeped in mental health issues and drug abuse and with little incentive or intention to obscure these themes. What makes Juice WRLD unique, according to writer Andrew Unterberger for Billboard, is how quickly and smoothly the artist bridges the often-substantial divide between SoundCloud rap and mainstream commercial success. Artists whose beginnings were firmly rooted in the SoundCloud community have appeared on the Hot 100 before—including Lil Uzi Vert with “XO Tour Llif3” and XXXTentacion with

“SAD!”—but the extent of Juice WRLD’s success is unprecedented even in the company of his peers. “XO Tour Llif3” peaked at No. 30 on the Hot 100; at the time when

Unterberger’s article was published in early October 2018, “Lucid Dreams” had reached a new peak of No. 2 on that chart. Unterberger suggests that “Lucid Dreams” exemplifies the possibility that streaming platforms and traditional radio could boost one another

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rather than exist only as competing mediums: he believes the song “may represent a rare midpoint in the Venn diagram between top 40 radio and SoundCloud rap, and perhaps a suggestion of how the two worlds can compromise to work better in tandem.”

What made “Lucid Dreams” so primed for commercial success, according to

Unterbeger, was that the song contains the same messages—seething resentment over heartbreak, resulting in drug abuse and despair, muffled by the instrumental—as many emo rap songs and the emo songs before them, but these messages were less explicit than in songs such as “SAD!” and therefore less likely to need extensive censoring in order to be suitable for the typical radio station. Some critics argue, however, that just because these messages are contained within less overtly offensive language does not mean they are any less harmful. Tom Breihan, in his article “Juice WRLD Turns SoundCloud Rap into Toxic Emo-Pop,” argues that emo rap takes the anti-woman sentiments that lingered within the emo music of the early 2000s and ratchets up the hostility to a level that is without precedent, even within rap, “a musical tradition where ferocious has long been the rule, rather than the exception.” The ensuing “Lean Wit Me” is arguably more damaging in its toxicity because it incorporates the notion of using drugs as a coping mechanism into the scheme of getting high and leaving behind the troublesome women who have morphed throughout the decades between emo music and emo rap from mere objects to “actively hostile forces” (Unterberger). Furthermore, the song’s title and repeated chorus invite the audience to participate in the activities described, making drug abuse both a point of authentication on the part of the artist and of the listener: “get high with me if you rock with me” (Higgins).

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The portrayal of prescription drug use and abuse, whether with a positive or negative connotation, throughout emo rap is mirrored by the prescription drug epidemic, which in recent years has received the designation of being one of the most severe public health challenges currently afflicting the United States. While substances that pose risks of abuse or addiction have long existed throughout history, opioid pain reliever use in the

United States was shocking due to its incredibly rapid and widespread increase in use. In the past fifteen years alone, consumption of (Vicodin) more than doubled, while consumption of (Oxycontin) increased by more than five hundred percent, according to research presented by Andrew Kolodny and his coauthors in their article “The Prescription Opioid and Heroin Crisis: A Public Health Approach to an

Epidemic of Addiction” (560). Furthermore, there is a concerning correlation between opioid sales, overdose deaths related to opioid use, and the seeking of treatment for opioid addiction (Kolodny et al. 560).

Both federal and state lawmakers have introduced efforts to combat opioid abuse and its many negative effects in the past, but trends of morbidity and mortality continued to worsen despite these measures. Kolodny et al. attribute the absence of a positive impact on opioid abuse to policy makers’ focus on reducing and restricting nonmedical or recreational opioid abuse while ensuring access to these substances for individuals who have been prescribed them; this focus overlooks that these substances can be extremely addictive even for those individuals who take them for legitimate medical reasons (563).

While individuals ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-four—an age group that corresponds to the probable majority of both emo rap artists and listeners—were

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responsible for the majority of nonmedical opioid use as of 2011, individuals aged forty- five to fifty-four were most likely to die of an accidental opioid overdose. Additionally, individuals aged fifty-five to sixty-four have experienced the greatest increase in the rate of overdose mortality (Kolodny et al. 564).

The use of pharmaceutical drugs as described in emo rap is portrayed as almost certainly nonmedical, though artists often still justify their use of these drugs for the treatment of mental health problems; for example, Lil Peep admitted in interviews that, despite his often-discussed struggles with mental health, he had never been prescribed any drugs to remedy these problems, preferring instead to use “whatever drugs came [his] way” (Horowitz). The frequent references to drug abuse, combined with flippant tones or aesthetic concerns that may distort the seriousness of the consequences of drug abuse, may have an especially negative impact on younger listeners. According to Kyle J.

Holody and his coauthors, rap music is positively associated with illegal drug use, and it is also the favorite genre among adolescents and young people (1099). In their analysis of songs from different genres, Holody et al. also concluded that rap songs featured lyrics which mentioned alcohol, marijuana, and non-marijuana drugs most frequently (1101).

Given rap’s history, these observations are not necessarily surprising, but they may be concerning, especially in the context of the rise of emo rap. Listeners who identify with the artists—many of whom are little older than they are—and find solace in their music may not acknowledge the dangers of drug abuse as fully as they should if messages about drugs are nestled in dismissive or even celebratory language.

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Some aspects of emo rap and its presentation seemingly make interpreting the total implications of drug abuse, particularly as it is portrayed in songs of the genre, deliberately more difficult. In his article, “The Death of Lil Peep: How the U.S.

Prescription Drug Epidemic Is Changing Hip-Hop” for the Guardian, Ben Beaumont-

Thomas argues that Xanax and similar drugs have become the hallmarks of the emo rap genre, like alcohol, weed, and crack were of the rap genre in past decades, due to an abundance of prescription drugs throughout the culture and a pervasive lack of moral concern for how they are used. Beaumont-Thomas argues that the availability of these drugs promotes and enables a lack of introspection, which correlates with complaints often leveled against emo rap, especially by members of older generations. Because of the drugs and the fact that they are profitable, according to Thomas, “people are allowed to get on with just self-medicating, without trying to understand the reasons for their sadness.” Despite the decades between the eras and the drugs on which the authors focus,

Thomas’s words in many ways reflect Tone’s description of fed-up housewives in the

1950s and ‘60s who were encouraged to self-medicate with Valium, rather than analyze the underlying causes of their discontent.

Another complicated concern regarding drugs and emo rap is that references to drugs that could indicate potential real harm are ignored because discussing drugs and the prospect of harming oneself are defining staples of the genre. Thomas believes that the death of Lil Peep highlights a “numbing effect on the wider culture”; his article was published a day after the artist’s death. Lil Peep publicly discussed and frequently posted about drug use and suicidal thoughts on social media, and these themes were constantly

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strewn throughout his music as well; instead of these aspects of the artist’s life and work becoming causes for concern, they instead became selling points. Also, the music emo rap artists produce mimics their lives, including their drug use: the “deadened flow and sad, anxious production [of emo rap songs] replicates the anti-high of Xanax in sound”

(Thomas).

Emo rap artists are generally open about their drug use and abuse, whether past or present, and authenticity is a valued characteristic in the genre. However, the performative aspects of the genre and its relatively rapid increase in popularity also create an environment primed for exaggeration, meaning that authenticity, or at least the impression of it, is all the more important. According to Thomas, “It can be hard to tell which of [these artists] are genuinely troubled and which are…trading off the glamour of drugs and pain.” While drug abuse in the emo rap community has garnered much attention from critics, drug abuse has long been both celebrated and lamented in the rap community; in the article “Reckoning with Rap’s Relationship to Drugs in the Wake of

Lil Peep’s Death,” author Aaron Williams bluntly states that “the fans loudly bemoaning

‘hip-hop’s drug problem’ have either been asleep for the past three decades or haven’t wanted to acknowledge what’s been there all along.” Though the substances which emo rappers put at the forefront of their music may be different from those of their predecessors, the highly complex relationship to drug abuse within the genre is not new by any means.

As this chapter has explored, drugs have been a substantial component of rap music throughout the genre’s history. In this context, emo rappers who frequently discuss

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drug abuse in their music are not creators of a new trend so much as they are followers of a model which has long been established; within the existing idea of drug consumption as a rapper, the substances which are not as relevant to their personal lives, such as crack cocaine, have been replaced by the substances which are, including benzodiazepines. Not only do these altered trends reflect the current state of the rap genre, they also reflect the quickly rising use of benzodiazepines in American society, as well as the consequences associated with abuse of these drugs, including addiction and death. Early pharmaceuticals to treat mental health issues, such as Miltown and Valium, were initially exalted as medical breakthroughs before professionals and the public began to recognize the real dangers of these substances; a similar phenomenon arguably has occurred with and their stratospheric rise in popularity, but health professionals are beginning to treat the epidemics of abuse, addiction, overdose, and death as seriously as they deserve to be addressed. Kolodny and his coauthors believe that public health authorities should approach treating epidemics of prescription drug abuse in the same manner as they have approached other outbreaks of diseases, “[making efforts] to reduce the incidence of opioid addiction, identify cases early, and ensure access to effective treatment” (569). As with the treatment of all mental health problems, undertaking efforts to combat the abuse of pharmaceuticals and other drugs will be costly and necessitate significant investment from many facets of American society.

The effectiveness of any helpful measures is still to be determined, and whether or not these efforts will have any influence on the emo rap genre and its artists also remains to be seen. After Lil Peep’s death, Micah Peters pondered the possible accountability of

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fans and other emo rap artists for popularizing and eagerly consuming content that discussed and arguably glamorized dangerous behaviors such as suicidal ideation and drug abuse. These themes have been built into the brand of emo rap from the genre’s inception, constituting some of the main reasons why emo rap is popular, as opposed to it gaining popularity despite its frequent engagement in such dark themes. The next chapter of this thesis will explore the branding of emo rap in greater detail, including how artists portray themselves and their experiences to fans, both through music and social media, as well as how fans respond. The chapter will also incorporate analyses of the legacies of emo rappers who have died, specifically Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, and how their brands have been impacted by their deaths and continue to evolve posthumously.

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CHAPTER FIVE

“WE ALL WANNA DIE, TOO”: HOW IS EMO RAP BRANDED,

AND WHAT KIND OF LEGACY ARE ITS STARS LEAVING?

“How come every song I write I say I wanna die?” -nothing,nowhere., “changer”

“Cocaine, all night long / When I die, bury me with all my ice on…” -Lil Peep feat. Lil

Tracy, “Witchblades”

“Worst thing comes to worst, I fucking die a tragic death or some shit and I’m not able to see out my dreams, I at least want to know that the kids perceived my message, and were able to make something of themselves, and able to take my message and use it and turn it into something positive and to at least have a good life...” -XXXTentacion in a live video recorded and posted to Instagram sometime before his death on June 18, 2018

Like all cultural creations, music is meaningful not just because of songs and their content, but because of the meanings that we as members of a culture ascribe to those songs and how we situate them in our understanding of the world. Music is unique as an influential cultural force because of its ubiquity and portability, especially among younger people: as reported by Kyle Holody and his coauthors in “‘Drunk in Love’: The

Portrayal of Risk Behavior in Music Lyrics,” teens and young adults consume the most music of any age group, amounting to an average exceeding four hours per day (1098).

The extent of this exposure, combined with the importance that teens and young adults assign to music, causes authorities such as parents and medical professionals to worry

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about a corresponding increase in exposure to negative mental health messages (Kolody et al. 1098).

For artists aiming to make music their career, it is as competitive a field as any other, and Donna Wells argues in an article for Inc. that, in recent years, the competitiveness has greatly increased: ten years ago, according to Wells, the top twenty percent of musical artists earned half of the industry’s revenue and profit; now, that same percentage of profits is earned by the top one percent of musicians. Wells suggests that the most lucrative artists achieve their success because they have a well-defined brand; while her article focuses on applying the same strategies as these high-earning musicians to one’s own careers in the hopes of achieving favorable results, it is worth examining her recommendations in the context of the emo rap genre and its success. Wells’s first suggestion, that musicians understand their audience, readily applies to emo rap, a genre populated by disaffected young adults making music for their peers. The themes of mental health issues, despair, and suicidal ideation that occur often in emo rap resonate with young adults in the artists’ audiences, who face the unique challenges associated with transitioning from youth to adulthood and for whom suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, according to research that Erika N. Dugas and her colleagues report in “Recurrent Suicidal Ideation in Young Adults” (303). Emo rap captures the uncertainty and turbulence of being a young adult in an auditory format, catering to audience members who seek out the music not only for aesthetic reasons, but also because they identify with it.

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Wells’s second suggestion is to “tempt” one’s audience with singles, which, in the era of self-distributed music, has become easier than ever; it has also become a necessity in order to increase one’s chances of success in a crowded industry. The “traditional” method of achieving a successful career in the long involved being signed to a major label, releasing full-length albums, and relying on the label to promote and distribute them. However, the album as a collection of music, whether in CD, digital, or vinyl format, has experienced a steep decline in recent years; album sales for the first half of 2018 had declined by 25.8 percent compared to sales during the same period of 2017, according to Tim Ingham in an article for . Ingham cites examples of hip- hop’s “biggest names,” including , Drake, , and others, releasing anticipated new projects on streaming services first, then making their LPs available in physical formats only after the initial rush of digital sales had subsided.

Services like Spotify seem like the logical answer to the album’s decline and a haven for artists like emo rappers who thrive on singles instead of albums. While the

Swedish music giant “is largely responsible for pulling the music industry back from the brink,” its structure and monetary viability “[remain] fragile,” Ingham writes in another article for Rolling Stone in early November 2018, titled “Spotify Can’t Keep Losing

More than $1 Billion Per Year. Can Podcasting Rescue Its Business Model?” Spotify’s primary issue, according to Ingham, is that the service in its current form is obligated to pay major record companies, who hold the rights to the music, the majority of its revenue so that the music can be available to listeners. To resolve this problem, Spotify can try to

“sign” artists itself, eliminating the need for companies to act as the middleman. In late

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2018, Spotify announced that it would allow indie artists to upload directly to its service, but Ingham says this strategy is risky in another way: if major music labels such as

Universal Music and become frustrated enough by this initiative, they could theoretically opt remove their content from Spotify, which, Ingham writes, would

“devastate” the service. Despite Spotify’s supposed desire to facilitate the careers of indie artists, music distributed by major labels accounted for close to ninety percent of streams on the service in 2017 (Ingham).

Enter SoundCloud, a music-sharing platform that, since it began in 2008, has been

“a space for diverse music cultures to flourish, far beyond the influence of mainstream label trends,” writes Jenna Wortham in “If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its

Music Culture?” for the New York Times. SoundCloud was different, according to

Wortham, because it “took a community-first approach to building its business, prioritizing finding artists to post on its service over making deals with music labels to license their music,” which is how Spotify built its empire. Unlike other music distribution platforms such as YouTube, , and Spotify—which still function largely like search engines, driven by algorithms that provide users with results based on what they indicate that they are looking for—SoundCloud and other successful online

“communities” feel like “public spaces, where everyone can contribute to the culture”

(Wortham). This approach has resulted in cultural recognition: Wortham references an article by Jon Caramanica, titled “The Rowdy World of Rap’s New Underground,” in which he describes the rise of “SoundCloud rap,” a label referring to a subset of rap, characterized by unpolished lo-fi aesthetics, an aggressive musical style, and produced by

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charismatic and often violent star personalities, which could not have first gained traction in the mainstream.4 Once this style was enabled by an online medium suitable to house it, the creation of an offline culture and sizable fanbases for prominent artists followed

(Wortham).

Emo rap artists often brand their music as being relatable to their audience, which has both positive and negative implications considering the genre’s popular themes. In an article for the , Jessi Roti discusses the journey and appeal of Juice

WRLD (real name Jarad Higgins), who signed a multimillion-dollar record deal with

Interscope Records following the success his EP, Juice WRLD 9 9 9, garnered on

SoundCloud, driven largely by the popular singles “Lucid Dreams” and “.” His debut studio album, Goodbye & Good Riddance, had reached No. 7 on the Billboard Top 200 charts by the time Roti’s article was published in late June 2018, a month after the album was released; the rapper was also named an Apple Music “Up

Next” artist. Higgins acknowledges the stigma surrounding artists whose careers are launched on SoundCloud, but he argues that both the positive and negative aspects of the medium’s culture have helped his career and that his goal is to “create a fellowship where people can relate to each other” and “let [his audience] know they’re not alone in going through the things that they go through” (Roti). Higgins’s music is heavily centered around themes such as depression, romantic rejection, and self-medication—themes that

Roti and others recognize are not new, even to hip-hop music, but which take on new

4 This article does not focus on emo rap specifically, but rather on artists in general who became popular largely with the help of SoundCloud and whose musical styles share similar qualities, often aggression and vulgarity.

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significance when placed at the forefront of emo rap’s success, particularly in the context of deaths of popular emo rappers such as Lil Peep and XXXTentacion.

While artists in some genres would want to avoid their music being blatantly associated with feelings of sadness and anxiety, emo rappers accept, embrace, and arguably encourage this association by putting a spotlight on mental health and related issues in their music. Some critics argue that this focus represents a positive development, even a necessary one. In “Lil Peep, Mental Health and the Music Industry,”

Angelique Shawnell argues that mental health is vitally important in the music industry, but that it is not talked about often enough or in a comprehensive enough manner that addresses the concerns of both artists and fans. Shawnell writes that the “promotion and exploitation of mental health within the music industry makes it seem ‘cool’ to suffer,” which is unfair to those who genuinely struggle with any number of mental health issues on a daily basis. Shawnell’s post, published on Medium one day after the death of Lil

Peep in November 2017, has the informal grammar and confessional tone of a plea to a friend rather than a polished article, reflecting the author’s impassioned opinions about the mishandling of mental health in the music industry. Shawnell also claims that many artists such as Lil Peep who prominently feature issues such as loneliness, drug abuse, and depression are not taken seriously until after their untimely deaths, often as a result of struggling with the very issues for which their music receives so much attention.

Sometimes, qualities that are not revered or considered important within the dominant culture can be influential to identity formation within a subculture. In the previous chapter, it was mentioned that the emo rap artist nothing,nowhere. (real name

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Joe Mulherin) notably abstains from drugs and identifies as “straight edge.” The straight edge movement emerged out of the subculture: the original countercultural movement encouraged youth to be individuals and to resist dominant culture, but some members questioned the group’s self-destructive ideology, fueled by alcohol and drugs and driven by the belief that there is no future, according to Ross Haenfler in his article

“Collective Identity in the Straight Edge Movement: How Diffuse Movements Foster

Commitment, Encourage Individualized Participation, and Promote Cultural Change”

(786). Individuals who identified as straight edge believed that there was an inherent contradiction in a movement that prized individualism and yet promoted another brand of conformity through drug and alcohol use and aggressive nihilism (Haenfler 787).

In an interview with Jack Angell of Fader, Mulherin discusses the straight edge identity he has had since his early teen years in nonchalant terms, without condemning individuals (including most of his emo rap peers) who partake in drinking and drug use.

J. Patrick Williams, in his article “Authentic Identities: Straightedge Subcultures, Music and the Internet,” asserts that subcultures are an integral part of social and identity development for many youths, especially as they are related to music. It is equally important, however, to recognize that any subcultural or countercultural movements are significant because they designate deviation from the mainstream. The label of “straight edge” to mean that one abstains from drugs and alcohol is only noteworthy in the context of a larger culture in which drug and alcohol use is the established norm—as it is in

American culture and especially within the context of emo rap.

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In response to Shawnell’s allegation that music producers and consumers do not take mental health seriously—especially as emo rap is concerned—one might argue that the artists themselves purposefully frame their mental health struggles in a less-serious light, whether as a coping mechanism or to preserve the aesthetics associated with the genre. It is also possible that the potential implications or consequences of emo rapper’s lives do not fully become apparent until after their deaths, though emo rap artists often incorporate awareness of their mortality into their music and their image. In the article

“Rapper XXXTentacion Foreshadowed His Own Death,” Lisa Respers France discusses an Instagram Live video that the artist posted sometime before his death; the exact date the video was originally posted has been disputed, as the video has recirculated many times, particularly in the months following the rapper’s death. The first lines the artist

(whose real name was Jahseh Onfroy) says in the video are quoted at the beginning of this chapter; he continues to say, “I, at least—if I’m gonna die or ever be a sacrifice, I wanna make sure that my life made at least five million kids happy.”

The story of the South rapper’s career is a complicated and often uncomfortable one, as Corinna Burford documents in her article “The Complete History of XXXTentacion’s Controversial Career” for Vulture. Onfroy admitted in interviews that his upbringing was unstable, and the artist had a history of violence starting at a very young age: he allegedly attempted to attack a man who was “‘messing’ with his mother” at the age of six, and there are also multiple reports of him being violent and attacking classmates during his middle school years (Burford). Burford reports that XXXTentacion dropped out of high school while in the tenth grade; at around the same time, he spent

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nine months in a juvenile detention center as a result of a gun possession charge. He released his first known song, “Vice City,” on SoundCloud on March 5, 2014; he then posted three solo EPs (two of which he later deleted) before creating two joint EPs,

Members Only Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 with fellow SoundCloud rapper Ski Mask the Slump

God, whom he met during his aforementioned time in juvenile detention. Later, in

November 2015, he was charged with multiple crimes, including , robbery, and aggravated battery, a little more than a month before “Look At Me!” was posted to

SoundCloud; this track eventually became XXXTentacion’s breakout single and the artist’s first to receive an official release as a digital download (Burford). At this point, the artist was still only seventeen years old.

In 2016, as XXXTentacion’s fame and reputation grew, so did the allegations of violence and criminal behavior against the rapper. Burford’s timeline details multiple occasions on which Onfroy supposedly committed against his then- girlfriend, both during and after the conclusion of their relationship. Following a series of particularly brutal events that took place in early October of 2016, during which Onfroy allegedly assaulted and threatened to kill his ex-girlfriend, he was arrested on charges of aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness tampering. Despite the allegations, rappers such as A$AP

Rocky expressed their support for the artist during his incarceration and expressed the hope that he would soon be released, and his music continued to gain popularity: “Look

At Me!” entered the Billboard 100 charts on February 17, 2017 at No. 95 (Burford).

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Many individuals would consider it unthinkable to promote an individual who had been accused of violent acts such as these, but Spencer Kornhaber, in his article “The

Unsettling Familiarity of XXXTentacion” for The Atlantic, argues that XXXTentacion’s fans were not ignorant of his alleged acts of violence during his rise to fame; even if the artist’s rise in popularity was not positively correlated to his reputation for violent behavior, the allegations did not prevent his rapid ascent to rap stardom. This rise to fame was not without obstacles, and Kornhaber mentions several instances of developments in the artist’s career that were lauded by fans but questioned, if not outright denounced, by critics. One prime example of this difference in opinion was represented in the reaction to

XXXTentacion’s inclusion in XXL magazine’s 2017 “Freshman Class” feature, regarded by many as an influential designation for new talent in the rap industry. What exacerbated the conflict was the fact that XXXTentacion earned the tenth and final spot on the magazine’s list (and thus its cover) because the artist’s fans voted for him to occupy the one place on the list that is not solely chosen by the magazine’s editors. The artist’s young fans propelling him to success despite significant controversy, according to

Kornhaber, reflects a trend of “the weakening of old gatekeepers that the public sees playing out in politics.” In either arena, preconceived notions of what is acceptable as a matter of principle appear to be up for debate.

Stephanie Smith-Strickland, in her article “Should XXL Have Included

XXXTentacion in its Freshman Class?” for Highsnobiety, proposes that the reconsideration of longstanding opinions about media might be a positive change. She writes that media consumers have long adhered to the general rule of separating art from

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artist, but “that mindset is being increasingly rejected as fans and consumers put pressure on brands and properties to hold entertainers accountable for egregious behavior in their personal lives.” While the idea that Strickland-Smith proposes would seem to be universally desirable, especially as it pertains to emo rap, the question remains: is it truly becoming a reality? Strickland-Smith’s article was published in late June of 2017; in

March of 2018, XXXTentacion’s second album, ?, would debut at No. 1 on the Billboard

200 charts, indicating that the artist’s peak mainstream commercial viability was still to come, though the allegations against him remained public and a point of contention among commentators. Strickland-Smith also suggests that the proliferation of social media has created an expectation that celebrities would be “decent people” even when fans and the general public are not explicitly watching, but fans’ loyalty to

XXXTentacion (who, as with virtually all currently popular musicians of any genre, had a significant online presence) despite an apparent lack of decency suggests that fans are less attracted to displays of decency from the figures they look up to than they are to perceived honesty and connection. When fans have such unprecedented access to what artists are supposedly like as “real” people via social media, the distinction between

“brand” and “persona” becomes murky, and the person essentially becomes an embodiment of their brand, as any of the artist’s words or actions to which fans have access through any means inform their impression of the artist and their image

(Strickland-Smith).

There was previously an expectation, or at least the impression of one, that celebrities or anyone whom the public reveres at least in part because they are famous for

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something are different; this difference meant that there would always be aspects of them that fans, as ordinary people, cannot access. The vast expansion of social media has made celebrities seem more “knowable” than ever; especially for emo rappers, most of whom originate as independent underground artists in communities like SoundCloud, connection with fans is vital to their brand and their reputation. Their honesty about personal struggles with issues such as mental health and drug abuse within their music can also persuade fans that they are more connected with emo rappers than the typical musician or celebrity. In her article “It’s Time to Stop Pretending Mental Health Doesn’t

Affect the Rich and Famous” for Unilad, Francesca Donovan quotes Clare Scivier, a behavioral psychologist with twenty years’ experience in A&R, who says, “The internet business is rife with sex scandals [and] heavy alcohol and drug use…As the work of musicians, actors, and performers is consumed in the public’s spare time confusion occurs and blurs lines between work and play.”

While artists putting their struggles with mental health and drug abuse at the forefront of their music is a common characteristic throughout the emo rap genre, one artist who has undeniably made this a branding strategy is Lil Xan (real name Diego

Leanos), though the nature of the artist’s brand related to the substance has evolved even throughout the duration of his relatively short career. His stage name originated when he was still using the drug recreationally, which he eventually quit and now warns of in his music, including in “Betrayed,” his most popular single to date; Kyle Hodge, in his article “Lil Xan is the Unlikely Inspiration for Getting Kids Off Xanax,” writes that the artist’s renunciation of the drug comes at “a particularly crucial time in hip-hop,” a

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musical genre in which Xanax has had a notable presence in recent years. Leanos cites

Lil Peep’s death from an overdose of drugs including Xanax as one motivating factor in his decision to stop taking the drug. Lil Xan and associated musicians form the collective known as “Xanarchy,” further co-opting the name of the drug to promote an anti-drug message that might surprise some observers.

Some critics may argue that using the name of the drug in any context is a form of promotion, and others have expressed concerns that Leanos’s anti-Xanax message might get lost or diluted within a genre that is laden with so much drug discourse. However,

Leanos’s now-sizeable platform, regardless of whether it was earned due to his connection with benzodiazepines, may be significant enough to attract members of his adolescent audience’s attention. David C. Giles and John Maltby, in their article “The

Role of Media Figures in Adolescent Development: Relations Between Autonomy,

Attachment, and Interest in Celebrities,” state that more than three-quarters of young adults reported having a strong attraction to a celebrity, such as a musician or movie star, at some point in their lives in a survey regarding media influence (814). Giles and Maltby also indicate that this reverence can lead in some cases to positive behavioral changes, as more than half of the respondents claimed the figure they admire had spurred them to make a behavioral change in their life, most often for the better (814). of other artists, including rappers and , that they will stop using

Xanax in the wake of Lil Peep’s death also demonstrates that the argument may have some traction within the genre (Hodge). However, an anti-drug branding stance remains relatively rare throughout the genre as a whole.

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One of the potential functions that emo rap serves for its audience is to provide solace for listeners who experience the same difficulties and emotions, though the productivity of this idea has been debated. Annemieke J.M. van den Tol, in her study

“The Appeal of Sad Music: A Brief Overview of Current Directions in Research on

Motivations for Listening to Sad Music,” writes that some research on the subject suggests that validation of sadness or anger through music may promote listeners to feel more understood and less lonely (46). Van den Tol also cites research that proposes four possible rewards of listening to sad music: a lack of “real-life” implications, in which sad music is rewarding because it is disconnected from actual situations which may cause sadness in a listener’s life; assistance in regulating emotions and moods; facilitation of the listeners’ ability to engage their imaginations; and empathy, which encompasses “the pleasurable effects of experiencing music-evoked sadness due to mood-sharing and virtual social contact through the music” (46). Of the four rewards theorized, a lack of

“real-life” implications and empathy applied more to sad music than to happy music (van den Tol 46).

Of the ways that van den Tol proposes listening to sad music can be rewarding, the ideas of “mood-sharing and virtual social contact through the music” are especially applicable to emo rap specifically (46). In his article, “Lil Peep’s Death Raises Difficult

Questions,” Micah Peters describes the conflicting feelings “many fans and onlookers have felt consuming Lil Peep’s music and persona alike,” feelings which the artist’s death from a fatal overdose made that much more urgent and in need of resolution. The description of the artist’s “music and persona alike” as the products to be consumed is

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telling: Peters suggests that both of these are created and available for purchase in a public setting, though fans are likely to only recognize one of them as the result of actual labor of creation. The music obviously must be orchestrated into being, though fans want to believe it is assembled from honest material; the persona is meant to be the actual person, presented to the audience as a relatable human being who truly exists and whom they can follow and possibly even interact with online. Peters mentions multiple rappers who have died of drug-related consequences as evidence that the genre has a systematic problem not only with drugs but with consumers “turning a blind eye to the suffering of their idols,” but where emo rap is concerned, the idols in question often manipulate that suffering themselves, whether for aesthetics or solace or any number of reasons. When the person is examined separately from the persona, the consequences become more complex and more severe.

The difficulty of reconciling the person with the persona, the life with the art, became even more apparent after the sudden death of XXXTentacion. Almost immediately after the rapper’s death, the question of what form his legacy would take emerged, indicating that critics knew that his posthumous legacy would be less straightforward compared to other celebrities who have died at similarly young ages.5 In her article “How Will XXXTentacion Be Remembered?” for The Atlantic, Hannah

Giorgis writes about the artist’s messages to his fans, such as those in the Instagram Live video and in the introduction to his second album, ?, and the function that these messages serve: to “invite his audience into the interior of his mind, pointing to dark corners and

5 Onfroy was twenty years old at the time of his death.

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encouraging listeners to accept their existence without interrogating what Onfroy has only partially hidden behind the shroud.” Though his career was relatively brief, the music Onfroy made as XXXTentacion became harder to extract cleanly from the alleged actions of Onfroy as a person, effectively forcing fans to choose between abandoning the art because of the artist or to reaffirm their loyalty, either denying the allegations, ignoring them, or dismissing them as less valuable than the art (Giorgis).

The theme of violence is one of the more concerning threads that runs through the emo rap genre, whether it real or threatened, self-inflicted or outward. In his article “The

Rise and Importance of Emo Rap,” Michael Beausoleil discusses the juxtaposition of positive and negative aspects in Lil Uzi Vert’s hit single “XO TOUR Llif3” and the accompanying music video: the artist (real name Symere Woods) raps about the money and material gains he has received as a result of his fame, but his interpersonal relationships have suffered, and the song includes references to his girlfriend’s threats to harm herself (see Fig. 7). Jon Caramanica, in his article “Lil Uzi Vert and a Generation of

Rap Stars Looking Beyond Hip-Hop,” adds that emo rap artists “tend toward the self- lacerating,” expressing the same emotions—pain, hatred of the self as well as others—in varying degrees. One might argue that to listen to emo rap is to be involved in these artists’ pain as much as they are, because they are willing to display it to their audiences in the most intimate of ways; some artists, such as XXXTentacion, make it apparent to their audiences that such a close involvement is one of the goals of the music.

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Fig. 7. Lil Uzi Vert, from Holmes, Charles. “Lil Uzi Vert Releases Two New Songs About Racks.” Rolling

Stone, 9 April 2019. Image by Spike Jordan.

The flippant tone with which serious topics such as violence, mental health, and drug use are often discussed throughout emo rap may concern the adults in the lives of adolescent consumers: Brian Bailey, in “Emo Music and Youth Culture,” writes that the contradictory portrayals of emotional reactions in emo music may communicate to young listeners that maladaptive coping mechanisms are appropriate: burying the emotions, reacting with violence, addressing the emotions with sarcasm as opposed to genuine reflection. As Katrina Skewes McFerran and Suvi Saarikallio establish in their research

“Depending on Music to Feel Better: Being Conscious of Responsibility When

Appropriating the Power of Music,” adolescent listeners are capable of conscious reflection regarding “the actual impact of the music” to which they listen, but they are likely to only engage in such critical thinking when explicitly prompted (92). Especially when the music concerns such heavy topics as violence, both interpersonal and self- inflicted, conscious reflection and discussion of the music’s effects are necessary

(McFerran and Saarikallio 95).

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As discussed in previous chapters, the untimely deaths of Lil Peep and

XXXTentacion and the subsequent release of new material from these artists offered insight into what form an emo rapper’s posthumous legacy might take. A collaboration between the two, “Falling Down,” highlights the complexity of handling an artist’s work after that artist has died, relying on the opinions and beliefs of those closest to him to determine how to proceed. The song was assembled following Åhr’s death in November

2017 but while Onfroy was still alive, though it would not be released until Onfroy had also died in June 2018. According to the article “XXXTentacion and Lil Peep’s

Posthumous Collaboration ‘Falling Down’ Drops Amid Fan Controversy,” Chris Mench and multiple coauthors report that the song originally featured Lil Peep and the rapper iLoveMakonnen, with whom Lil Peep closely collaborated before his death. Makonnen then volunteered to replace his vocals with those of XXXTentacion; that decision was the former artist’s alone, according to Liza Womack, Lil Peep’s mother. The status of Lil

Peep and XXXTentacion’s relationship to each other was “unclear” at the time of Lil

Peep’s death: some of his collaborators stated that Lil Peep disagreed with or “explicitly rejected” XXXTentacion, possibly due to the allegations of domestic abuse and violent homophobia attributed to the latter artist, but others claim that the two artists were planning to make amends with one another (Mench et al).

In an interview conducted in September 2018, iLoveMakonnen (real name Sheran

Makonnen) tells Peter A. Berry of XXL that Onfroy viewed his involvement on the song as a form of tribute to Åhr, and Makonnen states that he believed everyone involved in creating the song was involved in “the same mission of just wanting to make good

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music.” Makonnen also states in the interview that, while he never met Onfroy in person, the one time the two spoke over the phone, the artist seemed positive about what he was doing with his music. The eventual releases of posthumous albums following Onfroy’s death, beginning with Skins and continuing with Members Only Vol. 4, which includes content from XXXTentacion and additional artists, indicates that fans continue to be interested in emo rap artists’ music following their deaths; the legacy of these artists has a significant impact on fans’ lives, and the wealth of content they produce during their lifetimes creates a very real possibility of continued posthumous releases.

Though emo rap has experienced evolution throughout the past few years, it remains a newer musical genre, and further change is expected to happen in the future.

Whether the newest artists to become popular within the emo rap genre will be more polarized, following the example set by artists such as XXXTentacion, or whether their style will tend toward the more refined and commercialized, is yet to be determined. The conclusion to this thesis will reflect upon the past events in the emo rap genre and the cultural conditions that formed it, as well as examine the possibilities of how the genre might evolve given expected social conditions and changes to the cultural environment and possible changes to the methods of music production and distribution.

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CHAPTER SIX

“WHEN I DIE YOU’LL LOVE ME”: WHAT DOES EMO RAP MEAN,

AND WHAT DIRECTIONS MIGHT IT TAKE IN THE FUTURE?

“I know it sometimes, but you’ll get over it / You’ll find another life to live / I swear that you’ll get over it.” -Lil Uzi Vert, “The Way Life Goes”

“I’m still Lil Xan, though, at the end of the day.” -Lil Xan, concluding an anti-Xanax speech he delivered at one of his concerts in New York in late November of 2018

“I don’t want to go to school, I don’t like that / Everybody think I’m cool, I don’t like that

/ Codeine by the pool while I write raps / Spend money like a fool, I’mma make it back /

I’mma have a couple million when I’m twenty-one…” -Lil Peep, “Nineteen”

As multiple sources throughout this thesis have attested, emo rap in some ways represents a new direction for the rap genre, one characterized by gloomy, lo-fi aesthetics and populated by artists who are as likely to use drugs to forget their troubles as they are to have fun. However, the darker themes and self-soothing drug abuse that serve as hallmarks of the genre have their roots in works that artists created many years prior to emo rap receiving mainstream attention. In their article “Lil Wayne’s ‘I Feel Like Dying’

Changed Rap’s Relationship with Drugs Forever,” Kyle Kramer and Briana Younger emphasize the momentous implications of that particular song for the rap genre: when Lil

Wayne, during the period that many considered to be the peak of his career, declared in “I

Feel Like Dying” that he was addicted to prescription drugs, “the dealer became the user, and rap became that much more accessible.” The song’s combination of languid, dreamy

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and foreboding lyrics “create a fun house effect that juxtaposes allure and dread” (Kramer and Younger). Lil Wayne provided the foundation for rappers to present a more nuanced discussion of drug use and its negative impact, including the effects of prescription drug use, at a time when the problems of benzodiazepine use were not yet widely acknowledged in popular culture; the shift in this discussion was crucial to the development of emo rap, a medium in which “rappers can express the pain of their addictions alongside their pleasures” (Kramer and Younger).

The themes of prescription drug dependence and gloom that Lil Wayne arguably first explicitly introduced in present-day rap have flourished throughout emo rap, both for aesthetic reasons and also because of the culture in which the artists, as well as the rest of

Americans, live. Prescriptions for drugs to treat mental health conditions have substantially increased in America as a whole: since 2006, prescriptions for benzodiazepines have increased seventeen percent, totaling nearly ninety-four million each year, while prescriptions for generic Xanax (alprazolam) have increased twenty- three percent over the same length of time, making it the most frequently prescribed psycho-pharmaceutical drug, according to Lisa Miller in “Listening to Xanax.” The only drugs prescribed more often than Xanax are those used to treat chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol (Miller). According to a study conducted by

Mark Olfson and his colleagues, though adults make considerably more medical visits with a prescription for antipsychotic drugs than adolescents or children, antipsychotic treatment has increased rapidly among young people (1247). Hung-En Sung and his coresearchers state in “Nonmedical Use of Prescription Opioids Among Teenagers in the

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United States: Trends and Correlates” that the current “shape of the trends in prescription opioid misuse among youth looks remarkably like an epidemic,” as the number of adolescents who self-reported some kind of prescription drug abuse in their lifetime increased from two hundred and forty thousand in 1989 to nearly 2.8 million in 2002

(49). If the numbers of adolescents receiving prescriptions are any indication, mental health issues such as anxiety and depression are chronic conditions for millions of

Americans.

The label of “emo rap” is applied to music which puts sadness, self-deprecation, mental health issues, and frequent drug abuse at the forefront of its lyrical content and its appeal to its audience. Within this categorization, emo rap itself being an offshoot of the parent genre of rap, there is identifiable variation between popular artists of the genre, from the music of nothing,nowhere. that radiates “emotional immediacy” to the

“violently depressive” style of XXXTentacion to the “more radio-ready” Lil Xan, according to the succinct judgements of a few critics (Caramanica; Battan). Though these descriptors help distinguish the artists’ brands from one another, Trey Alston of Revolt writes in “The Claustrophobic Air of Emo Rap Will Kill the Genre” that many emo rappers borrow heavily from each other, both in terms of musical and aesthetic conventions, and that these similarities “could possibly stunt the genre’s growth in the long run and contribute to its denouement.” Unlike traditional hip-hop, which “has long rewarded creativity and flexibility,” Alston argues that, despite emo rap’s popularity, the insular nature and the melding of artists’ styles into one another increasingly results in “a claustrophobic space that doesn’t necessarily promote growth or reward it.” Currently,

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achieving success in the genre virtually necessitates that new artists adopt and only vaguely adapt the styles of popular rappers who have come before so that they may

“generate conversation that includes the hottest artists” and gain exposure by association with those in the genre who are more established (Alston). Setting oneself apart from the crowd works as long as the artists still retain the membership of the group and make it clear that they belong.

If there is one group from which fans of “traditional” rap have tried their hardest to exclude emo rappers, it is just that: the realm of classic hip-hop. Emo rap is a young person’s medium, and the generational divide between those who are fans of the music and those whom the music confuses or irritates encompasses not just children versus their parents, but also those who have an attachment to widely revered hip-hop artists of the

1980s and 1990s compared to those who do not. Lil Xan (real name Diego Leanos) experienced how vast these divides can be when, in an interview with Revolt in early

2018, he dismissed the late ’s music as “boring,” according to Trey Alston in his article “Lil Xan, Tupac, and Hip-Hop’s (Seemingly Unforgivable) Generational

Barriers.” For some, it was not only that this assessment was false, but the right to make it was also unearned: What authority did Leanos, as a young and relatively inexperienced rapper of hotly debated ability, have to criticize “hip-hop’s most prestigious legend”?

Though Alston bestows that distinction on Tupac within his article, he does not use that elevated label to belittle Leanos, as his writing demonstrates an understanding of the generational divide without giving it carte blanche approval: Alston writes that hip-hop is and always has been a “genre measured in decades,” meaning that its stars rotate and

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each artist’s music has different significance—possibly none at all—depending on the age and decade of the listener at the present. More specifically, Alston emphasizes that the two rappers exemplify not just different styles, but also different experiences: “The struggles that Tupac portrayed through his music are not the same problems that [Lil]

Xan faces on a daily basis.” For emo rap to be taken seriously as a genre, fans and critics, especially those who are older, will need to accept that emo rap is formed from its own set of circumstances.

Interestingly, in his article that primarily concerns the narrowness of emo rap,

Alston also makes a point to mention the particular difficulty female rappers face in achieving mainstream attention and radio airplay. There are many female artists in rap, but aside from a few who receive steady media attention, the majority are largely ignored.

Though she is more aligned with the genres of pop and than with rap, seventeen-year-old Billie Eilish is, like the stars of emo rap, young and sad; she has a characteristically broody sound unlike virtually any other teenage pop star who has preceded her, and her morbid aesthetic is both attractive to her adolescent fans and almost wholly repellent to adults. According to Hannah Ewens, in her article “Billie Eilish: The

Pop Icon Who Defines 21st-Century Teenage Angst,” Eilish’s music embodies all of the aspects of new popular music and its corresponding new culture that confound adults:

“genre-less but image-conscious; extremely online, but private. It deals in anxiety, sincerity, and emotional intelligence, mixed up with classic teenage .” Like her peers in the emo rap genre, Eilish grew up as a child of the Internet, witnessing celebrities’ mistakes and embarrassments, accruing “by osmosis” knowledge about what

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she should and should not do to appease her rapidly expanding fanbase in a way that retained the impression of being “relatable,” the pinnacle of compliments for an artist in the social-media era (Ewens).

Eilish’s personal style consists mostly of oversized hooded sweatshirts and athletic clothing, unlike the hyper-sexualization forced upon many female pop stars her age, writes Spencer Kornhaber in “Billie Eilish’s Spooky Shouldn’t Scare

Adults.”6 Her clothes, combined with the and grotesque images in her music videos, suggest similarities to artists such as Lil Uzi Vert (real name Symere Woods) and the late Lil Peep (real name Gustav Åhr), whose eclectic aesthetic choices convey a similar disregard for conventions and boundaries as their music. In “Lil Uzi Vert and a

Generation of Rap Stars Looking Beyond Hip-Hop,” Jon Caramanica writes that, while

Woods’s songwriting has become “less specific” the more his career has progressed,

Woods and other emo rappers like him do not fear “inconsistency” as a musical style.

Artists’ looks and personality as expressed through social media have a significant influence on how their career is built and how it will be received, and so an artist’s feeds become places to promote their music as well as glimpses of their private life almost out of necessity, according to Emma Garland in “How SoundCloud Rappers and Xanax

Influenced Fashion.” Eilish’s music, dark as it is, appeals to members of her audience because they can identify with it, which says as much about the culture and how adolescents perceive it as it does about the singer’s “spooky teen pop.”

6 Eilish was born in 2001.

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According to Kornhaber in his aforementioned article, the “heaping amounts of self-identification” throughout Eilish’s music is the aspect that is likely the most fundamentally connected to youth. Brian Bailey, in “Emo Music and Youth Culture,” corroborates that the importance of the subculture fostered by emo music “facilitates identity formation, social interactions, and emotional involvement.” In terms of emo rap, the relative closeness in age of the content producers to content consumers helps facilitate the connection between artist and fan, while the themes reflected in the music help fans connect to one another. Francesca Donovan credits Åhr, whose music and presence as an artist emphasized honesty about mental health and drug abuse, with “[forcing] listeners to confront the musical expressions of struggle head on because they weren’t fronted by the mask of theatricality of emo” in her article “Lil Peep’s Honesty About Mental Health

Inspired a Generation to Accept Themselves.” While Donovan’s assessment of emo rap as progressive in terms of mental health discussion may be accurate to an extent, emo rap exhibits theatricality in many of its own ways, including exaltation of drugs and suicidal ideation, both genuine and exaggerated on social media, though the differences may be hard to discern.

As the emo rap genre continues to develop, so will the manner in which artists, fans, and critics approach deceased emo rappers’ work and their posthumous legacies.

The deaths of Lil Peep and XXXTentacion have provided some insight into how artists’ reputations may be preserved or altered following their deaths. The deaths of both artists were followed by posthumous albums containing material the rappers had recorded but not formally released while they were alive. As discussed in previous chapters, among

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this material was “Falling Down,” a track featuring both Lil Peep and XXXTentacion created after the former’s death via the addition of XXXTentacion on a remake of the Lil

Peep and iLoveMakonnen track “Sunlight on Your Skin,” according to Jon Caramanica in “Lil Peep Died Before Becoming Pop Royalty. His New Music May Change That.” To some of those closest to Lil Peep throughout his life, the track felt like a betrayal of the negative opinions he expressed of XXXTentacion and the abuse of which the latter artist was accused; other individuals felt the powerful message of the song deserved to be heard

(Caramanica). In “XXXTentacion Left Splinters Amid the Wreckage on ‘Skins,’”

Caramanica writes that, though the album is relatively short and the recordings relatively raw, his “devoted audience demands to be fed,” suggesting that fans who are traumatized by the loss of an artist who was significant to them, for better or worse, will eagerly consume whatever material is available to them.

The releases of Skins and Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 2, Lil Peep’s first posthumously released project, have raised the question of how much new material the rappers had in waiting at the time of their unexpected deaths and what will happen when the well of unreleased songs inevitably runs dry. Though some of the songs on these albums were edited and remastered after the artists died, and thus without their input, those who have distributed these albums have worked hard to retain the impression that the work was released without much interference, as the artist would have planned or would have wanted it. The posthumous release not just of compilations but of previously unheard material allows the deceased artists to remain in conversations about emo rap, to expand their reputations, and even to revise their legacies, which is an opportunity with

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potentially precarious implications. In “XXXTentacion’s ‘Skins’ Is a Record of

Dangerous Revisionism,” Thomas Hobbs argues that “there seems to be a complete lack of awareness that presenting XXXTentacion as some kind of angelic mentor to young people only serves to further a damaging narrative where a man’s talent is more important than a woman’s pain.” The full impact of XXXTentacion’s violent and uncomfortable musical legacy is yet to be discovered; what also remains to be seen is if another artist like him will rise to the same immense but contested prominence in his absence (the idea that the genre will avoid potentially profitable artists because they are controversial does not yet seem likely).

Potential future research opportunities concerning emo rap, mental health, and adolescence will heavily depend on the developments in the emo rap genre in the future.

As currently popular artists age, their popularity will likely decline as their dominance in the genre is replaced by new artists, or they will distance themselves from emo rap and its associations with youth, mental health issues, and drug use. As the current emo rap audience ages, the branding strategies that emo rap artists use to connect with their fans will also evolve, or those fans will also “age out” of the genre and be replaced by younger admirers. Events such as the opioid crisis and financial crises will also continue to affect

American culture, therefore affecting the attitudes of citizens that are often reflected in cultural products such as music. Future research should also consider the most updated research concerning adolescent mental health and drug abuse, especially as the trends highlighted in this research pertain to the effects of cultural phenomena such as music on mental health.

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Though the exact form emo rap will take in the future is hard to predict, the impact it has already had is undeniable, and its rapid ascent has hinted at the future of music in American culture, driven by social media. An artist’s identity is so important that it takes on a near-sacred quality that endures even after death. In her article for The

Guardian about the release party for Lil Peep’s Come Over When You’re Sober Pt.2,

Marianne Eloise describes how four teenage fans were let into the otherwise exclusive event (as long as they gave up their phones) to get them out of the cold; to everyone at the event, this gesture was unremarkable, as it was what Lil Peep would have wanted. Lil

Peep was also not forgotten by other members of the genre: Lil Xan made a speech memorializing him at his New York debut concert in November 2017, not long after the rapper’s death, as reported by Carrie Battan in “Lil Xan and the Year in Sad Rap” for The

New Yorker. Battan writes that Lil Xan played “Beamerboy,” one of Lil Peep’s most popular songs, as a tribute, before returning to the microphone to perform his single

“Betrayed,” to which the crowd responded enthusiastically, “exulting in an opportunity to return to the present.” The genre, as always, moves forward.

89

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