Two weeks after his 21st birthday, Lil Peep was found unresponsive on his tour bus from a drug overdose.
Two days before he was to stop touring, his emerging career was cut short. It was released in August 2017 and he began to tour shortly after.
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By his last mixtape Hellboy, his work was gaining millions of plays on Soundcloud securing him a major label deal for his first professional release, Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. His notable work ethic led to three more mixtapes and an EP by September 2016. His music, a genre-bending fusion of hip-hop and rock, began to gain notoriety after his 2015 release Lil Peep Part One. After dropping out and beginning to create music, he got his high school diploma online and moved to Los Angeles to pursue music as Lil Peep, derived from a childhood nickname given to him by his mother. Yet Lil Peep’s passing a year ago today came before his own opportunity to break into the mainstream.Ī self-proclaimed rockstar, Lil Peep was born in 1996 and raised in Long Island, NY. A burgeoning star on Soundcloud, he modified and popularized a genre many call “emo-rap,” and he inspired others, most notably Juice Wrld, to borrow from his sound.
This was clearly not something he was planning.Hailed as the “future of emo” by Pitchfork magazine, Gustav Åhr, better known as Lil Peep, was at the forefront of a musical revolution. He was given something he thought was one thing and turned out to be something else. He died from taking a laced pill he was given with a huge dose of fentanyl in it. It wasn’t a mindless defacing of his face, there was nothing mindless about it. That’s how he would connect with people, from the way they reacted. He said he could spot the difference between the people who saw the tattoos and the people who saw him. The second thing, his grandmother told me later, was that he’d always felt like an outsider and he wanted to understand how it was to feel like a minority. First, he knew that once he got them there was no turning back, he was committed to being an artist. There are a couple of reasons he got those tattoos on his face. So they created a whole playlist for Peep called Teardrop.
Spotify couldn’t find the place to put his music: it wasn’t rap, it wasn’t rock, it wasn’t alternative. We had no clue what would happen, but when he arrived in Moscow there were fans at the airport.
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Once I said, “It looks like you’ve got some fans in Russia, why don’t we go there and do a gig?” He agreed straight away and bought a book, How to Learn Russian, and put Russian subtitles on his videos so his fans there could follow his lyrics. He’d listen to advice, and wanted to meet other creative people, but he was his own man, there was nothing manufactured about him. Everywhere I went, I told people about Lil Peep. My colleagues and I would introduce him to people in the fashion and music business and give him financial and moral support to help him realise his vision. We became his advisers and business partners. Spotify couldn't find the place to put his music … They knew he was special and unique Eventually we tracked him down and he said, “Let’s make it happen, let’s work together.” He was a true original. We both knew we were going to work together, but for the next three or four weeks he led us on a sort of dance – he’d disappear, pop up to do some underground show, and disappear again. He was raised in an environment and surrounded by a family who had a great depth of knowledge. I quickly realised he was acutely intelligent – he didn’t have a college education but he was very well-read and intellectually curious. He told me he’d felt isolated at school, he felt different from other people. He was estranged from his father but very close to his mother, brother and grandparents. He had grown up in Long Island and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a music career – he was living in a squat on Skid Row when we met him. He was very self-effacing and a bit anxious. It took a while to track him down, but eventually Gus came in to see me and my colleagues Adam Mersel and Travis Mills at my office. Then Travis played me a Lil Peep track, Nineteen, produced by a friend he met online, Smokesac, and within seconds I knew he was something very special. That struck me really hard, it was instant. He showed me a photo of Gus in a rowing boat with “Cry Baby” tattooed on the side of his face. Travis Mills, who used to have a radio show on Beats 1, came to see me at my LA office and said, “I think this guy is really interesting”.
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