In a performance uploaded a few weeks ago to Audiomack’s YouTube page, TopOppGen, a buzzing 20-year-old from Asheville, North Carolina, has his fingernails painted black, dermal piercings in, and locs almost covering his eyes. He’s doing “21 Club,” a song that nods to Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, and Juice WRLD, the pillars of emo rap who each died at 21 or younger in the late 2010s. The song is a paint-by-numbers pastiche of the cursed subgenre. You know, a sampled guitar beat that sounds straight out of Nedarb and Smokeasac’s Hellboy archives. Wounded, whiny melodies. Unhealthy relationships. Possessiveness. Hypermasculinity. Lyrics that directly reference depression, suicide, and drug overdose: “I do drugs and blackout/My bitch gotta make sure that I’m breathing.” The uneasy feeling that it is more about the fucked-up vibes than delivering a quality song.
Before emo rap was neatly packaged into a marketable aesthetic—lonely men high on drugs, alienated by society, and backstabbed by the women they loved too hard—it was a term that you could loosely apply to a wide variety of hip-hop. I’d throw it around to describe the nihilism of Mobb Deep or Chicago drill; the eeriness of mid-’90s crews like Three 6 Mafia and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and the foundational internet groups, namely Raider Klan and the Sadboys, that mimicked them; the bitter loneliness of Future’s imperial mixtape run; the wanderlust of Kid Cudi’s first two albums; and maybe, most importantly, the bluesy pain music of the Deep South. “Emotionally, I’m an introvert, but it comes off as aggression,” wails Kevin Gates on the hook of Luca Brasi 2’s “Perfect Imperfection.” “No one understand me and everybody can’t be slow/It’s refreshing to find someone who think like me so I can’t be wrong.” In that moment, Gates gets at the stubbornness, misunderstood rage, and isolation that always felt like a more nuanced depiction of emo rap than what it would become.
As you might be able to tell, I’ve long thought that most popular emo rap was bad, but the one tape for which I still have a soft spot is Lil Peep’s Crybaby. Released in 2016, Peep, like Gates, offered more than just misery: There was tension in how his desire to party and hang out with girls was undercut by the drug abuse and sadness. These were the stories of a real person. Once 2017 rolled in, though, the branding of emo rap was in full swing—XXXTentacion’s Rolling Loud performance; the suicidal ideation of Lil Uzi Vert’s diamond single “XO Tour Lif3”—and the music took a backseat to the edginess, rockstar fatalism, and depraved mythmaking. On “Legends,” Juice WRLD sang, “What’s the 27 Club? We ain’t making it past 21.”
Nowadays, I look back on it all as a cautionary tale of how fast things go south when too-real fatalistic themes are infused with commercial ambitions. But we now seem to be far enough removed from 2019—it feels twice as long because of the pandemic—that there are fans and artists who grew up buying into the myth and are ready to live it all over again.
One of them is TopOppGen, who was 12 years old when Lil Peep died and seems to have picked up a lot of the wrong lessons from emo rap. His fast-growing SoundCloud catalog, which is racking up millions of plays already—a big step up from the vast majority of emo rap that exists in the niche and underground corners of the internet—is unsettling and morally ambiguous, but hard to look away from. “I’m not Lil Peep, but I’m tryna go out like him,” he sing-raps on “Fake Pills & Real Scars,” sounding like XXXTentacion did. It’s as if he thinks the real goal is one day to get a documentary that talks about how influential he was on a generation of lonely teenagers.
But dig past the stuff that is trying to make you squirm and there’s life in the way he taps into the extreme emotions you can feel when you fall in love really young. His lyrics come off like fodder for Euphoria B-plot material, but he’s so committed to the mood that who cares if it’s embarrassing. On the unimaginatively titled “drivemeinsane,” he tiptoes the line between affection and obsession as he pines, “Girl, them piercings on your face drive me insane,” like he’s blowing up his ex’s phone while she’s out with her friends. “Cute Like Aspen,” his love letter to popular Chicago drill star Aspen Kartier, is like a screwed-up, pill-popping version of those late 2000s digitized loverboy bops, like “Kiss Me Thru the Phone” and “Tie Me Down.” He has a real thing for the idea of tragic relationships, and, on his recent tape kalon, there’s literally a track called “bones and all”—a reference to the Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell cannibal romance—where he lilts, “Yeah, she watch Bones and All, and I don’t get it, but I’ll die in her arms.”
Like XXXTentaction and YoungBoy Never Broke Again, though, this over-the-top infatuation turns sinister and territorial fast. On “Petty $hit,” a twisted love song released last week, Gen toggles between the pained infatuation of X and the controlling aggression of YB’s heartbroken lullabies. “Don’t care if you leave, I’m gonna kill the next nigga you fuckin’ with,” he raps, as the 808s blare over a rock sample. Then, on the blunt “suicide song,” he stirs up controversy by telling a story of apparent relationship violence: “All the shit that you do, it just hurt more/Yeah, all them hos had been fucked up my love, but I ran into you, tried to get more/I ain’t mean to hit you, know your face, I adore it.” It doesn’t matter if this is a confession or a total fabrication. He’s manufacturing an XXXTentacion-style broken man narrative, cheaply using the physical and emotional abuse of women as a tool in depicting himself as a victim of being too real.
Gen’s persona is try-hard stuff that darkly recognizes that part of what drove the underdog rise and outcast bonafides of X and YB was their worst qualities. He’s working so hard to frame himself in a similar light because that’s what he seems to believe makes generational icons. But whatever happened to just making good songs? Gen can do that when he weaves together the emo rap signifiers with emotional cues picked up from the melodic pain rap of the South and Midwest. My favorite song of his, “end up dead,” has the wallowing melancholy of NoCap’s new age classic “Drown in My Styrofoam,” and “dirty cup” deepens his angst by linking up with tormented Mobile crooner FattMack. But also next to Mack—an up-and-comer who, on minor Southern smashes like “’08 Grand Marquis,” blends together the druggy haze of Juice WRLD with the plainspoken self-reflection of early Polo G—Gen feels noticeably emptier in comparison.
A week ago, I threw on Mack’s recent tape Untreated Trauma, and my mind was buzzing like a pinball machine as all the potential touchpoints came to me: Lil Poppa’s Blessed, I Guess, Lil Durk’s Love Songs for the Streets, Kevin Gates’ The Luca Brasi Story. That doesn’t happen when I listen to kalon or the preceding Fake Pills & Real Scars. Instead, it’s so much of the lore outside of the music. That sat with me as I watched an interview he did a few months ago, where he was asked about the music he grew up on. For a while he scratched his chin, before he finally said, “I never, like, listened to music for real.” Yeah, that tends to be a thing rappers say in interviews when they’re trying to build a mystique, when they’re still trying to figure out their schtick, but the bad thing was, I sort of believed him.