The rapper Lil Peep had the word “Crybaby” tattooed over his right eyebrow.Illustration by Keith Negley
Late in November, Lil Xan made his New York début, at the downtown club S.O.B.’s. The level of excitement was unusually high, even for the much anticipated rap shows that the club tends to book. “Xanarchy! Xanarchy! Xanarchy!” the crowd chanted as the diminutive twenty-one-year-old rapper, with shaggy brown hair and the face of a blissed-out toddler, took the stage. Some audience members sported fake face tattoos. (Lil Xan, whose real name is Diego Leanos, has “Zzz” tattooed under one eye, “Candy” under the other, and “Xanarchy” above one eyebrow.) Multiple cameramen and videographers joined him onstage. Halfway through his brief set, he brought out Cole Bennett—a twenty-one-year-old music-video director with wholesome, Zack Morris-esque looks—and the crowd shrieked with the delight of recognition typically reserved for those who live in front of the camera rather than behind it. “I wake up/I throw up/I feel like I’m dead,” Xan rapped coolly over one of his glum, low-range beats, flanked by his friends.
Lil Xan is just one member of a cohort of young musicians who, by embracing a morose sound, have transformed from underground curiosities into stars in the past year. (Last month, “emorap” was an answer to a crossword clue in the Times.) The dissonance between their lyrics and their reception is reminiscent of the grunge era, and, indeed, these artists are far more likely to worship Kurt Cobain or Marilyn Manson than Jay-Z or Kanye West. This loosely connected network, which has its roots in the streaming platform SoundCloud, is now large enough to have its own offshoots and subsets, ranging from the violently depressive nineteen-year-old Floridian XXXTentacion (born Jahseh Onfroy) to the more radio-ready Lil Xan, who hails from Redlands, California—or “Deadlands,” as he calls it. More concerned with aesthetics than with craft, Xan and his peers meld the visual signifiers and the spoken-word cadences of hip-hop with the gritty production values of D.I.Y. punk music.
Despite its abrasiveness, the music has experienced extraordinary commercial velocity. Over time, Billboard has broadened the qualifications for its charts, counting online streams as well as traditional album sales. Emo rap, which lives online, has benefitted: on its release, XXXTentacion’s début studio album, “17”—a confessional, genre-bending scrapbook of teen-age morbidity and mania—landed at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart. That week, it was topped by “Luv Is Rage 2,” by the more pop-oriented but still anguished Philadelphia rapper Lil Uzi Vert.
Uzi, who is twenty-three, can be considered a stepfather of the movement. His single “XO TOUR Llif3,” one of the most popular tracks of 2017, has become an anthem for an era of artists and fans who like to revel in misery, whether sincerely or for play. “I don’t really care if you cry,” Uzi sings in bratty melancholy, over a mournful low whistle of a beat, which was created, by the producer TM88, using a handheld portable speaker. “All my friends are dead/Push me to the edge.” When the song was released, at the beginning of the year, it felt like a revelation: an ode to depression that also got people moving at night clubs. Now it sounds standard. In Lil Xan’s breakout hit, “Betrayed,” released in August, he warns of the dangers of prescription pills one moment and brags about the women he scores the next. The song has amassed about a hundred and fifty million streams on various platforms, resulting in a major-label deal.
If hip-hop has historically focussed on invincibility, this generation is fixated on mortality. Nihilism, taken to an extreme that feels almost competitive, has become its own form of braggadocio. The sound is a sincere expression of anguished youth, but it’s also a backlash against a previous micro-generation of hip-hop artists obsessed with self-actualization and revelry. Post Malone, a singer and rapper tangentially connected to the SoundCloud community, rose to the top of the Hot 100 toward the end of 2017 with “rockstar,” a song that makes success sound as joyless as possible.
In some ways, this movement is in keeping with the dreary sensibility popularized on the radio by such artists as the Weeknd and Lana Del Rey. A symptom—or perhaps a cause—of this dim world view is the widespread use of prescription drugs like Xanax. (Lil Xan is not short for Lil Xander.) It is difficult to grasp how these musicians can be so prolific and make such high-voltage songs while under the influence of substances notorious for putting people to sleep.
As in all popular music, there is a strong element of fantasy here, and some of these artists seem to be creating fictional characters as much as they are expressing their natures. But the line between fantasy and reality has grown blurry: live shows have been marked by widespread violence; XXXTentacion is currently awaiting trial for a horror show of domestic-abuse and witness-tampering charges. Meanwhile, the rapper 6ix9ine, whose hit song “Gummo” blends the brazen lo-fi aesthetic of SoundCloud with New York street rap, is making headlines for appearing in sexual videos with an underage girl. (He pleaded guilty to the charge of “use of a child in a sexual performance” in 2015.) Is the tormented ethos of the songs spilling over into real life, or is the brokenness of these young stars being put to music? Listening to XXXTentacion’s “17” or Lil Peep’s “Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 1,” two of the more impressive examples of the genre, can be a means of understanding the artists’ pathologies rather than glorifying them.
Despite the excitement at S.O.B.’s, a dark cloud lingered. Two weeks before, Lil Peep, a twenty-one-year-old rapper from Long Island, had died after taking Xanax and fentanyl. Lil Peep, born Gustav Åhr, had been one of the more talented and brutally depressive members of the SoundCloud rap community. A master of aesthetic signifiers, with an ear for melody, he sampled both Lil Wayne and the early-aughts emo-punk band Brand New; he could also rap with the cool fortitude of an Atlanta trap rapper over a minor-chord guitar riff. And his haggard good looks made him an ideal entrant into the fashion world. (That he was white was perhaps not unrelated.) But his musical sensibility and his self-presentation were underlain with a genuine sense of despair that not even artistic success could placate. “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself,” Peep rapped on “OMFG,” a standout on his mixtape “HELLBOY,” from 2016. “My life is goin’ nowhere/I want everyone to know that I don’t care.” (Peep had the word “Crybaby” tattooed above his right eyebrow.) The day before he died, he posted a photograph on Instagram of his torso, with the caption “When I die you’ll love me.” Maybe it was a warning shot; maybe it was another exercise in image building; most likely it was both.
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. “f*ck 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.” In tribute, the d.j. played Lil Peep’s “Beamerboy,” perhaps the most morbid song about luxury cars ever recorded. “I’m never comin’ home now/All alone now/Can’t let my bros down/Can’t let my bros down,” Peep sings. Most of the people onstage and off bobbed along, unsure of whether to celebrate or to mourn. When the song finished, Lil Xan returned to the microphone to perform his hit “Betrayed,” three consecutive times. The crowd hollered the chorus—“Xans don’t make you/Xans gon’ take you”—exulting in an opportunity to return to the present.♦
