Lil Peep - Live Forever

Music 4 years ago

Lil Peep - Live Forever

At a critical turning point in the new Lil Peep documentary, Everybody’s Everything, the rapper falls into a wall of digital flames. The grainy footage is taken from a Los Angeles show on May 10, 2017, when Peep was emerging as emo-rap’s answer to Kurt Cobain.

But that night he had taken too much of something, and the line between his depressive, drug-obsessed music and his own reality felt dangerously blurred.

After hobbling onto the stage, he began to mumble the words to his song “Hellboy”: “You don’t even know what I’ve been through.” A cluster of worried managers can be seen huddling in the wings, armed with emergency puke buckets, wondering if they need to call in a fake fire alarm to cancel the show.

Instead, they flood the room with fog, hiding the despondent rapper as he stares into nothingness with his back turned to the audience. But right then, Peep snaps out of his drug-induced daze, wanders over to the sea of screaming fans before him, and lets loose the anguished vocal fry that turned his meditations on anxiety, mortality, sex, and drugs into hypnotically raw anthems.