All the Young Sadboys: XXXTentacion, Lil Peep, and the Future of Emo

The new album from XXXTentacion opens with a disclaimer, croaked in the 19-year-old rapper’s own voice. “While you are listening to this album you are literally — and I cannot stress this enough — literally entering my mind,” he says on the first track of 17. “And if you are not willing to accept my emotion, and hear my words fully, do not listen.” It’s an alarmingly forthright statement of purpose — bracing, unabashedly teenaged. It concludes with an appeal to the listener, whom X assumes to be as troubled as he is: “I put my all into this in hopes that it will help cure, or at least numb your depression.” A signature quality of XXXTentacion’s music is its unvarnished surface. Fittingly, he doesn’t bother to correct the “p” that pops on the mic when he says “depression.”

This is not the kind of disclaimer that many listeners would have liked from XXXTentacion, who’s been called “the most controversial man in rap.” In some circles, choosing whether or not to pay attention to his music has been framed not as a matter of taste but a moral quandary. A typical headline about his new album, in Mass Appeal, wonders, “Should You Listen to XXXtentacion’s ‘17’?” “He apologizes for nothing,” the author noted in the column, “and all the negativity has only built his rep.”

Via XXXTentacion’s Facebook page

XXXtentacion — real name Jahseh Onfroy — grew up in and around Lauderhill, Florida. His upbringing was turbulent. “My mom just had it hard,” he said last year in an interview on the podcast No Jumper. “Raising a kid, honestly, was one of her last priorities. So what she did was she passed me from hand to hand to people who could take care of me.” That interview (which has been viewed more than 4 million times) shows X to be an exuberant, fast-talking teen who oscillates between moments of striking self-reflection and unsettling giddiness as he describes in detail people he has beat the shit out of. With candid, off-hand self-awareness, he admits at one point that he first started fighting kids at school to get his mom’s attention.

As he’s grown, the stakes have gotten much higher, and those old patterns have become harder to break. In July 2016, XXXtentacion was arrested and charged with robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Three months later, while he was out on bail, he was arrested on charges that he assaulted his pregnant ex-girlfriend (the police report describes her having been “punched to where both eyes became shut and the victim could not see”). “Look at Me!,” the rambunctious song he’d uploaded to his SoundCloud profile (which now has 1.23 million followers) before his arrest, started to gain traction while he was in jail, eventually amassing hundreds of millions of streams. He was released in March, and has only continued to court controversy. His concerts have been violent: He was knocked unconscious while on stage in San Diego; a few dates later, in Colorado, he punched a fan who touched him while he was performing. Just last week, two days before the release of 17, he uploaded a video to his Instagram account (user bio: “problematic genius”) that appeared to show him hanging himself. He later explained that the clip was staged and that fans would soon see it was part of a forthcoming music video. “If you thought I would ‘pretend’ to kill myself for a publicity stunt,” he wrote later on Instagram, by way of apology, “you’re fucking stupid.”

X is the living embodiment of a phenomenon that’s been bubbling up for some time now, what Mass Appeal called “the trendification of suicide.” Dark thoughts and heart-baring lyrics are of course nothing new in music, especially music made by and for very young people. But a specific aesthetic of masculine sadness is everywhere right now, a hybrid microgenre that draws equally from hip-hop, nü-metal, and emo. XXXTentacion’s music, in particular, is striking a chord right now: He has two songs in the top 10 of Spotify’s singles and three of the top 10 of Genius’s most popularly searched lyrics. For all the aggression in his life, X’s music is often jarringly tender. 17, his most rock-influenced release to date, is stunning because it is something both inevitable and new: an album that imagines what it would sound like if Elliott Smith were a member of Odd Future.

The lines between hip-hop and emo culture have been blurring for the past decade, most visibly since the release of Kanye West’s landmark Auto-Tuned song of self, 808s and Heartbreak. Modern kingpins like Drake, Future, and Young Thug (who, among other things, sampled an acoustic Bright Eyes song on his latest album) owe a tremendous thematic and stylistic debt to 808s, as do the more internet-fueled scenes that have sprung up in the last few years, like Odd Future, the Swedish rapper Yung Lean’s Sad Boys collective, and the burgeoning emo-rappers who comprise the GothBoiClique (most notable among them the polarizing Lil Peep). All of this music has been an unsettling combination of radical and retrograde. At times it does feel genuinely progressive for so many male artists to be expressing and embracing sadness — it is, of course, often difficult for men to express emotion without being labeled “soft.” But the steely armor of Auto-Tune, the company of their mostly male cliques, and the welcoming codes of a shared aesthetic have all recently made a certain kind of “sad boy” attitude not only acceptable, but au courant. And yet, while these artists are revising and often expanding stereotypes about masculinity, their attitudes about women are old-fashioned, objectifying, and often plain antagonistic. In the moralizing over X, there are echoes of conversations about the misogyny and homophobia that greeted Odd Future when they first gained notoriety in 2010. But the violence here is not just confined to the imagery in the songs. What makes XXXTentacion the locus of so much controversy is that there are real-life correlations to the destructive spirit of his music. He’s playing with fire. And people — including X himself, he’d like us to know on this record — are getting hurt.

Lil Peep — who recently released his debut album, Come Over When You’re Sober — is a tall, gaunt, grungy-looking 20-year-old, like if you put Kurt Cobain in a taffy-pulling machine and gave him a face tattoo that said “crybaby.” (He also has the word “LOVE” tattooed on his torso, with a sad face inside the “O.”) He raps lackadaisically about depression and Xanax and getting his dick sucked and taking long naps. When he sings there’s a retching, pre-vomit quality to his voice, as though the lead singer of Simple Plan were trying to make the Pusha T “EGHCK” sound over and over. He has more than 639,000 followers on Instagram.

Peep is a proud child of the internet. Perhaps the most modern thing about him is that his music is most compelling when listened to in the form of the playlists he creates, where his own songs mingle alongside his heroes like Sum 41 and Gucci Mane. “I would listen to underground bands and shit,” he has said, when asked about his relationship to emo and punk music, “but I wouldn’t call my music the new emo necessarily. It’s just another wave of it, a sub-genre.” Just a few years ago, an artist like indie-pop star Grimes (who is nine years older than Peep) was considered unusual for having an eclectic palate of influences, largely informed by the internet. Peep and XXXTentacion represent a microgeneration for whom there is no longer anything unusual about this — it’s how they listen to music, and they would be puzzled to consider that there is any other way. In an interview from prison, X told Genius that the artists he most wanted to collaborate with were the Fray, Kings of Leon, and Lorde.

Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Also like X, Peep makes a point to claim the authenticity of the dark emotions he expresses in his songs. When asked by Pitchfork a few months ago if he was suicidal, he replied, “Yeah, it’s serious. I suffer from depression and some days I wake up and I’m like, Fuck, I wish I didn’t wake up. … Some days I’ll be very down and out, but you won’t be able to tell, really, because I don’t express that side of myself on social media. That’s the side of myself that I express through music. That’s my channel for letting all that shit out.”

For all the dourness of his music, though, Peep has a goofy, court-jester quality. (A Ringer colleague has described him as “the light, Davy Jones–ish heartthrob” to XXX’s “Jim Morrison.”) He is also not nearly as imaginative a lyricist or nimble a rapper as X: One of the first videos for which he received attention is called “Girls,” and it goes, “Girl / Girl make me think / Girl make me drink / Girls like it on my dick / Now girl, girl, uh / Girl.” Like Yung Lean before him, Peep’s music too often feels like it’s infringing upon a hip-hop culture in which he’s neither skilled nor interesting enough to justify his presence. It would be a grave mistake, though, to blame his misogyny and strangely flat understanding of girls on hip-hop. He got that from emo, too.

This month, just as X and Peep released their debuts, the Long Island emo band Brand New hit the top of the Billboard album chart for the first time, after surprise-releasing their fifth album, Science Fiction. It’s earned. Science Fiction is an achievement, an intricate, ambitious album that sounds like a vivid waking nightmare. There are haunting interludes about primitive forms of therapy, vivid and disturbingly flippant references to nuclear warfare, and skin-melting riffs. It sounds more like late Scott Walker than early Taking Back Sunday, and the first few times I listened to it I could barely recognize it as Brand New. It’s different in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first, as if relieved of something that had previously held the band back from reaching such heights. Then I realized what was missing. The Girl.

Brand New emerged during what is sometimes called the “third wave of emo” (the first being ’80s D.C. emo-core bands like the Rites of Spring and Embrace, and the second being the somewhat gentler Midwestern-centric art-rock boom associated with Cap’n Jazz, the Promise Ring, and Sunny Day Real Estate.) Along with bands like Taking Back Sunday and Saves the Day, this scene candy-coated emo’s hardcore origins with a glaze of pop punk, and specialized in lyrics that focused rather myopically on what the music critic Jessica Hopper, in an incisive 2003 Punk Planet column, called “the singer’s romantic holocaust.” Consider, for example, that a popular song on the first Brand New album, “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad,” was about the personal apocalypse of a girl breaking up with the narrator before her semester in London. “And even if her plane crashes tonight she’ll find some way to disappoint me,” frontman Jesse Lacey sang, “by not burning in the wreckage, or drowning at the bottom of the sea.” It was assumed at the time — even by female fans like myself — that being “emo” meant you were in touch with your emotions. In more recent years I’ve realized that it just meant being in touch with one very specific emotion: cataclysmic angst caused by a girl.

Via Brand New’s Facebook page

Still, artistically, Brand New were at the head of the pack. The quartet established a fan base with the furious pop punk of 2001’s Your Favorite Weapon, but Deja Entendu was the album on which Brand New’s sonic ambitions became apparent. (And yet, something I always liked about them was that they poked self-conscious holes in their grandeur just as often as they puffed it up. The last thing you hear on Deja is Lacey singing to himself, “never to see any other way,” simultaneously asserting and mocking the idea that this was Brand New’s Sgt. Pepper’s.) If Deja proved that Brand New aspired to be something more than their peers, though, their lyrics hadn’t yet caught up. In one of its signature songs, “Me Vs. Maradona Vs. Elvis,” Lacey sings in a middle-of-the-night whisper about a rather predatory encounter: Getting a girl drunk enough so that she’s “barely conscious” and taking her home. He explained, in a 2003 interview, that the song wasn’t grounded in personal experience so much as it was nightmarish vision of what he most feared becoming. “I’m a big soccer fan and [Argentine striker Diego] Maradona is kind of like the Elvis of the soccer world,” he said. “He was a star and then he let the world get to him, and then he was this washed-up figure, but he had these shining moments when his old magic came out. … I can’t imagine anything more awful than that.”

The song, though, is chilling, and he uses a borderline-sadistic tone when singing about the girl: “’Cause it’s all you can be / You’re a drunk / And you’re scared / It’s ladies night, all the girls drink for free.” I’ve been returning to Deja Entendu in the days since Science Fiction came out, and I have been at turns comforted and appalled by the fact that I still know every word on the album.

If Science Fiction can still be considered emo, it’s of an advanced, mature variety: an album about the true existential horror of no longer being able to blame girls for all that’s wrong in your life. At 39, Lacey is now married with kids, and Science Fiction is outward-looking, focused on legacy and the general fucked-up-ness of the world into which you’ve brought children. (When he sings “Maradona” in concert now, he sometimes changes the more disturbing lyrics: “It’s family night, all the kids eat for free.”) But it’s also a fearless exploration of a persistent, lifelong depression that can be blamed on nothing else but the self’s particular brew of chemicals. It’s incredibly intimate in that way. The stunning, slow-tempo “Same Logic/Teeth” has its share of surreal imagery (including nothing less creepy than an extended metaphor about self-lobotomy) but shifts into alarmingly vivid observations of an isolated mind: “Every kid you see starts crying, so you stop going out for walks.” Most of these songs are long, ambitious, and intricate in structure. The two that sound most like early Brand New songs are coated thick with sludge and centered on sing-along hooks to which one should feel kind of uncomfortable about singing along. “I guess that’s just depression,” Lacey hollers on the anthemic “Can’t Get It Out.” “No use in fighting it now.”

Brand New’s long, surprising trajectory and gradual path to maturity can perhaps serve as artistic inspiration for aging sad boys looking to either atone for lyrically questionable pasts or outlast the whole sadness-as-aesthetic gimmick. And given how malleable the lines between hip-hop and emo are these days, it does not feel outlandish to suggest that your future favorite rapper might be listening to Brand New right now. That makes me feel hopeful, and a little bit excited about the future of music. But reconnecting with these old Brand New songs that I sang along to as a young, impressionable 15-year-old girl makes me feel a more complicated mix of emotions. Appalled at some of the bizarre attitudes toward love, sex, and women I didn’t realize I was internalizing. Angry at the culture and my social scene for not giving me more empowering alternatives. But also strangely reassured, that liking sad, bizarre, and fucked-up shit that adults don’t really understand is just a part of being young, and probably will be until the end of time.

It does seem, when surveying the scene right now, that the vast majority of new rappers are or have recently been catatonically sad. As of this writing, XXXTentacion’s mournfully pretty new song “Jocelyn Flores” sits at no. 4 on Spotify’s Top 50 chart (an easily quantifiable, more accurate yardstick of what young people listen to these days, as opposed to Billboard’s ever-complex formula). The song one spot above it is Lil Uzi Vert’s ubiquitous “XO TOUR Llif3,” which centers on the hook “Push me to the edge / All my friends are dead.” The song one spot below “Jocelyn Flores” is Logic’s suicide-prevention anthem “1–800–273–8255.” The latter two songs were performed at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night: Uzi shared the stage with lite-rock crooner Ed Sheeran, and Logic performed flanked by family members of suicide victims and survivors of suicide attempts, with the number of the hotline emblazoned on their shirts. It was all very 2017.

Logic’s song — which has an uplifting, happy ending and was described by Billboard as “empowering” — has clearly helped people. (It was reported that the suicide hotline saw a 50 percent increase in calls after his performance.) But I can also understand why, if you were grappling with the sort of things that all of these rappers are describing, you would prefer the uncomfortably gritty songs of XXXTentacion, someone who does not yet seem to have come out the other side of the trials he sings about. For that reason, he might seem like a more intimate ally inside the loneliness of your own headphones. It’s troubling and even irrational, but so are a lot of the ways we relate to the music that worms into our brains.

Depression and suicide imagery in rap music isn’t going away anytime soon, not only because rappers as successful as XXXTentacion are bound to have imitators, but because kids are clearly seeking it out. But if the hype surrounding him disturbs you — as I think it should — the moral imperative is not to plug your ears and pretend like he doesn’t exist, but to try to understand the larger, systemic reason a kid like him might feel depressed, or might repress his sadness until it curdles into aggression and violence. Simply by virtue of his race, when Onfroy was born he was five times more likely to end up in jail than a white kid. Add to that the stresses of growing up in a broken home, a possible tendency toward sadness and depression, and an American culture dangerously averse to having conversations about mental health. I don’t want to diminish the violence he is responsible for, and I am truly disturbed by the pain he caused his victim. But I also don’t want to act like it’s some great mystery why someone like X — not to mention many of the kids taking solace in his music — would be predisposed to suffering from depression.

These young emo rappers who are so aesthetically fixated on suicide and depression remind me a bit of the all-male emo bands of my youth, who were aesthetically fixated on The Girl. Perhaps all of this music is a product of a culture that still has rigid gender expectations: Boys are not able to express a full spectrum of feelings for fear of being labeled “soft,” which means that too much of the burdensome emotional labor of “feeling things” falls onto girls. I’ve come to see emo or the embrace of the sad-boy aesthetic as a start in the process of dismantling these stereotypes, but not necessarily an end in itself. “Emo” is still just the first three letters of “emotion.” Spelling out the word can be a lifelong process.