#Hellboy lil peep reaction professional#

One of the more far-flung Hellboy samples appears on “Fucked Up,” where Horse Head flipped a song by Japanese math rock band Toe. “The Song They Played,” which features one of three stand out Lil Tracy verses that work well as a counterbalance to Peep’s melodies, was originally the mixtape’s title track. “Next thing I know, he hits record and sings it.” “The line, ‘Do one more line, don’t fall asleep,’ that was something he actually said to me midway through recording because he saw me dozing off,” he says. While many of Peep’s lyrics were about more abstract representations of events in his life, one of the signature bars of “The Song They Played” was an ad-lib inspired by an exhausted Smokeasac barely keeping his eyes open in one of many late-night sessions. “I think there are a lot of different ways that Gus went through some hell and wondered about himself and explored that theme.” “He said, ‘I’m not going to do what is expected of me in my life,’” says Womack.

On the opening verse, he fears that he cannot go “Back to fall, back to everyone I ever knew at all / Back to small town blues, and not a clue of what's goin' on / Back to old routines, and wedding rings and livin' at the mall.”

On “The Song They Played,” Peep eschews the notion of a traditional suburban life, expressing trepidation at the prospect of returning home a failure. It’s one of the first times I felt truly alienated from, you know, kids these days,” Elverum said in 2018. It’s a thing for people who are 20 years younger than me, or more. “I just really didn’t get it, and I think it’s just because I’m old, honestly. “OMFG” was the third time that Nedarb sampled Washington folk band The Microphones for a Peep track, the other two being “White Wine” and “Beamer Boy.” Like several of the established artists whose music was getting flipped in this unexpected way, frontman Phil Elverum was taken aback at first. “He’s basically saying, ‘No matter how big I get, that’s not gonna help anything with my mental health.’” “I would say a lot of us probably felt that way,” he says.

#Hellboy lil peep reaction professional#

When Peep’s music began attracting mainstream attention, it was a line from “OMFG” that people seemed to gravitate to: “I used to wanna kill myself / Came up still wanna kill myself.” The bars resonated with Nedarb because he felt like Peep was speaking for all of them in the Skid Row loft, who were learning that professional success can’t do much to cure anxiety and depression. “But at the same time, he didn’t have his family.” He was not going to stop, because he felt himself doing better and meeting people and being able to create things that people liked, that he was proud of,” says Womack. “On the one hand, being in California was something he very much wanted to succeed at. In the midst of working on Hellboy, Peep’s new management wanted him to leave the loft, and got him his own apartment in Echo Park, where he struggled with feelings of isolation. “Motorola phone, I ain't goin' home / I won't go to work, mama hate me and I know it though,” he sings on the hook. On “Drive By,” we can feel the stress of Peep being far from his family, grappling with a new environment without his usual support system. It remains Peep’s most cohesive project, and serves as a poignant time capsule of the stretch just before the then-19 year old became an ascendant mainstream hip-hop star, only to die from a drug overdose in 2017. Today, Hellboy is being released on streaming services, a somewhat herculean feat given the breadth of samples that needed to be cleared. He said that people would judge him off the way he looked, when he really just wanted to help people out,” says producer Smokeasac, who lived with Peep and a handful of other producers at the Skid Row loft where they made much of the seminal 2016 mixtape Hellboy. “He told me that he saw parts of himself in the character Hellboy. As a heavily tattooed, polarizing underground rapper, the sweet-tempered introvert felt a growing chasm between how he was portrayed and who he was, similar to the way the Mike Mignola superhero’s looks inspire fear even though he just wants to help. He’d loved Hellboy since he was a kid, and felt a kinship with him. In retrospect, it’s obvious why Lil Peep gravitated to a comic book character who has the appearance of a villain and the soul of a hero.