‘Lil Peep: Everybody’s Everything’ on Netflix Tracks Tragic Rise And Fall Of Emo-Rapper

Youth isn’t wasted on the young, but the young tend to waste youth because they don’t know any better. That’s part of what makes them brave and exciting. The rise and fall of rapper-singer-songwriter-icon Lil Peep happened in the blink of an eye, but that didn’t stop Vice from calling him “The Artist Of The Decade” on the second anniversary of his death. It was just two short years from the release of his first mixtape to his fatal overdose in November 2017, three months after the release of his first album. The new documentary Everybody’s Everything tries to make sense of his brief life and career and is currently streaming on Netflix.

Born Gustav Elijah Ahr in 1996, Lil Peep embodied the modern pop star. He made music on his laptop, became famous on music sharing platforms and social media and went up in flames before living up to his potential. Like other young artists of the 2010’s, his music pulled from multiple genres, emo and hip hop most explicitly, and spoke of a personal anxiety and despair unique to Generation Z.

“Gus,” as his friends called him, grew up on Long Island in a family of intellectuals. Peep was a childhood nickname given to him by his mother. Though interviews find him bragging about his BMX skills, he was no jock and felt like an outsider. He told his grandmother he would vomit in the morning at the thought of going to school. His parents divorced when he was a teen, leading to a painful estrangement from his father, and his grandfather, noted historian John “Jack” Womack Jr., filled the void. Womack’s voice is heard throughout Everybody’s Everything, reading a series of letters he wrote his young grandson that acknowledge his struggles and encourage his pursuit of his own personal truth.

Adopting the name Lil Peep, he began posting music online and corresponding with like-minded musicians emboldened by the new freedom of laptop recording and informed by music blogs that treated the entirety of modern music with equal reverence. Operating at the nexus of skate, hip hop and punk culture, they booked their own tours, playing raucous shows at DIY venues and promoted themselves on social media. When not making music or low budget videos, they spent their downtime smoking weed, drinking cough syrup and skateboarding.

In spring 2016, Peep was homeless and running around Los Angeles in the company of the GothBoiClique, also known as GBC, who shared his affection  for trap beats, emo hooks, face tattoos, and getting wasted. They moved into a loft on Skid Row, and later a flop house in Echo Park, both of which were funded by Peep, the most successful member of the entourage. The film portrays GBC as enablers and hangers on but that seems unfair. Peep was certainly a willing participant in the debauchery and everything occurred within the space of a year, hardly enough time for young men barely out of their teens to take stock of what’s happening and think about the future or each other’s feelings.

As Peep’s fortunes rose, management came calling. Chase Ortega oversaw things in L.A. while Sarah Stennett in the UK became an advisor. Neither was up to the challenge of reigning in their artist’s impulses and penchant for substance abuse. The easy access of the Internet allowed Peep’s infamy to travel around the globe before he had an album out and he was received rapturously in Russia by fans who waited for him at the airport. Weed and cough syrup was replaced with Xanax and cocaine. Industry insiders speak with admiration about his ability to perform on the edge of overdose, not realizing they were his enablers as much as his skate rat friends. Despite his face tattoos and dirtbag style, footage finds Peep looking like a lost little boy, like the child seen in home movies, as he takes in the surroundings on his brief trip to the top.

In the months before his death, friends, management and record labels all put increasing pressure on Peep. His debut album, Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 1, was released on August 15, 2017. Peep brought his GBC friends out on tour with him, perhaps as a last hurrah before he moved on to the expectant pop stardom. On November 15 he was found unresponsive on the back of his tour bus, dead from an overdose of fentanyl and Xanax. Some say he had been dead for hours, sitting in the bus’s communal area, before any of his hard partying tour mates noticed. Two weeks earlier, he had celebrated his 21st birthday.

Through interviews, archival footage and home movies, Everybody’s Everything creates a profile of Lil Peep that is moving and tragic. It doesn’t do as good a job explaining why so many people placed so much importance on his music. Perhaps I’m just too old to get it, and that’s fine, one generation of rebels always has a hard time understanding the next. But I do understand is what it’s like to be a lost boy in a big world with no sense of how fragile life truly is.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician.Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

Stream Lil Peep: Everbody's Everything on Netflix