LiL PEEP
Lil Peep; Part One

THE REVIEW

Interior, daytime. A room with closed shutters, a desk and a MacBook, walls covered in colored LEDs, web-like.
Blond, slender, a teenager with black eyes in spite of his Nordic pale complexion, a young man (born ’96) in a room in a residential neighborhood on the East Coast, halfway through the new 2010s.
White, upper class, progressive (son of an elementary school teacher and a Harvard professor), genderfluid, glamour-nerd, shy and reserved.
A fan of manga, anime, internet, fashion and music.
Music for kids, sweetly languishing in one's controlled torment.
Pop punk, Alternative Nation, hip hop, rap, trap, emo, electronic twists, the queens of the Billboard charts.

Nurturing the stigma of being a collage of audiovisual fragments, in the silence of the psyche, in the digital echo, a layering of aesthetics, of states of mind crystallized by a century and a half of mass culture—codes, symbols and fetishes; embodied in the splendid physique of a Swedish Long Island model, living in what is apparently the most prosperous place on earth.

Alone in the crowd, bard of minimal feelings, with a young and privileged heart, of the privilege of nothingness.
Constant external infiltrations: notifications on devices, on socials and chats, likes and comments, almost all containing a quote, a floating brainstorm, legal and black market opioids, by the handful, for a pounding anxiety with no clear origin, a constant sense of inadequacy.

The young man's name is Gustav Ahr.

He creates his winning alter ego, the vibrant avatar of Los Angeles with which to present himself to a potentially boundless audience, that of the internet; a superhero of hype and seduction, with the nickname he was called as a child, the way his mother called him, "Peep".
Lil Peep, the Little Peep.

The body and face covered in tattoos, a carefully curated and constantly refreshed selection of clothes—IT/eboy, goth, emo, scene king.

The self-referential chatter of mumble rap, stripped of the narrative of the hungry and the triumphant, the revival of the second emo generation through the artifice of trap's DIY producers, the blossoming of SoundCloud's instant music-sharing platform, the iconography and differentiated stage upon which Gustav-Peep brings his show to life.
A perpetual, performative state, like Grace Jones's, emptied of transcendence, flattened in the floating sphere of pop's cross-pollination, 24/7/365, through the direct contact of social networks.

Reels, samples, digital filters, clippings, avatars, snips of comments on a photo containing a quote.

In 2015 he drops (never has a verb been more appropriate for a music release) his masterpiece, "Lil Peep; Part One".
Very brief, childish (with the deep childlikeness of the Philosophy of the World by The Shaggs), painful, complicated, paradoxical, contradictory, morbid, paranoid, skeletal, fetishistic, unsettling, melancholic, overproduced, citation-heavy, listened to again with the awareness of a premonition of tragedy.

The guitar turned into a beat.
No particular musical skill, except for a beautiful voice, which could have worked even in traditional rock, in service of a stream of consciousness without flow, a blandly rhythmic declamation, not a chant; poet more than musician.

Suspended in spheres of solipsistic gnosis, these sizzling testimonial memories, in the unreachable hyperuranion of the sky in "Praying to the Sky", through the mind's visions in "The Way I See Things" (two masterpieces within the masterpiece). Eternal adolescence—a universal spiritual place, not an age of man, "High School". In "Veins" his personal take on gangsta— a paper glass of lean (Purple Drank), a base of interstellar sadness, frail macho playboy thriving on the fake fame of being a bad boy. "Another Song" is yet another page of a virtual diary, a post that prolongs the prompt, likewise "It's Me" is a sidelong smile, barely hinted at, that refuses to justify itself in seduction, "Shame on You" is a rarefied meditative ode to perpetual suicide.
Other pieces in the macrotext are the delicate "Nothing to U", drowsy solipsistic narration with a distant view, "Wanna Be" on the other hand already a deadened act, a list of choices to operate, devoid of any energy, "I can do anything / I can be anything"; "Five Degrees" a relic from a digital scratch book, sunk in the iciness of isolation, dialogue with an absence, "I just wanna die in peace tonight".

The Ghost Boy, "Ghost Boy", goth angel sinner, makes music from beyond the grave, churning views by reappearing in the shadow of home screens, on smartphones, moving somewhere, floating between parallel realities, eternally beautiful and young.

Gustav, Peep, neo Thomas Chatterton, painted by the Henry Wallis of Google Images, supreme poet of the Internet era, lies bloodless on the tourbus, the rear window is a window to the basement, a metropolitan landscape, the dimly lit shadow of a mall, the safety deposit boxes on the wall of a pickup point.
He drifts out slowly, grows pale and bloodless, like a four-inch screen with the brightness turned down, grazed by the fingertip caress of a touchscreen.