We All Wanna Die, Too”: Emo Rap and Collective Despair in Adolescent America
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“WE ALL WANNA DIE, TOO”: EMO 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 ii 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 LIL PEEP……………………………………….….16 III. “BETTER OFF DYING”: DOES EMO RAP 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 FUTURE? ….80 WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………………………89 iv LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1. Lil Peep (Gustav Åhr) …………………………………………………17 Fig. 2. Still from “Awful Things” Music Video ………………………………21 Fig. 3. XXXTentacion (Jahseh Onfroy) ……………………………………….29 Fig. 4. Lil Xan (Diego Leanos) ……...………………………………………...36 Fig. 5. nothing,nowhere. (Joe Mulherin) ……………………………………...50 Fig. 6. Still from “Lean Wit Me” Music Video ……………………………….52 Fig. 7. Lil Uzi Vert (Symere Woods) ………………………………………….76 v 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. vi “Help me find a way to pass the time everybody’s telling me life’s short, but I wanna die.” -Lil Peep, “The Brightside” 1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION “Only once the drugs are done / do I feel like dying, I feel like dying….” -Lil Wayne, “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 2000s and early 2010s, 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, Nelly, and Lil Jon and their club-ready hits about partying, sex, and recreational drug use, while emo artists like Dashboard Confessional, My Chemical Romance, and Taking Back Sunday produced music dominated by heavy guitar sounds and emotionally 2 pained lyrics. The two genres did occasionally converge: artists like Linkin Park 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,” Kyle 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 Kanye West, Drake, and Kid Cudi, 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 3 Internet culture are a few key features that began to distinguish emo rap as a unique musical genre by the mid-2010s. Stockholm-based Yung Lean (real name Jonatan Leandoer Håstad) is often identified as one of the first artists to prominently display what would become hallmarks of emo rap in his music. Håstad released his breakout mixtape, 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 Twitter and Instagram. 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 depression 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 4 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 California-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, anxiety, 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 common in emo rap are parts of everyday life for many young people, especially youth whose lives may be affected by mental health 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 5 than adolescents themselves.