Book Cover via Adreeonah Toro
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The following is an excerpt from Donna-Claire‘s upcoming book, CRYBABY: The Artists Who Shaped Emo Rap, out on January 25th, 2025, courtesy of Permuted Press.
Purchase CRYBABY: The Artists Who Shaped Emo Rap here.
By the mid-2010s, the visual language of emo rap had been defined by face tattoos, colorful hair, and a broad mix of deep purples and bright pinks. Where BONES, Atmosphere, and Kid Cudi appeared as everymen in their own lanes, this era also mandated a new-age rock star cosplay. To complement the music, artists in the canon had to adopt a style popularized by the late Lil Peep. Innovating on the look of underground hip-hop, Peep was heralded as a “fearless” fashion icon by GQ shortly after sitting front row at a Paris Fashion Week show in 2017.1 And the imitators following his passing, the lesser and more sterile acts, borrow heavily from his handbook: copious pink, abundant strutting, and a faux-cheeky attitude.
Peep, with his boyish charm and approachable appearance as a handsome white artist, established a play-by-play of tailoring yourself in the digital underground. His vibrant sense of style set him apart from the modalities of his emo rap lineage. But it was late-2000s Lil Wayne who acts as the true molten core of the genre’s visual language. “Young rappers, including young emo rappers, style themselves after him,” music critic Paul Thompson explains of Wayne. “The guitar fetishization of his late-middle period plays in here. Wayne is a progenitor of a lot of this stuff.”
“Prom Queen” is the obvious callout. In the song’s video, Wayne is jamming on a bright red electric guitar in the vein of Lil Jon’s Crunk Rock. He serves as an additional aesthetic origin point for Lil Peep, Lil Tracy, Trippie Redd, or any other artist interested in fashioning them selves as a bona fide emo star. “You see Lil Wayne doing jam sessions with Fall Out Boy and Gym Class Heroes,” music journalist Christina Lee recalled in an episode of the Bottom of the Map podcast with hip-hop scholar Dr. Regina N. Brad ley.2 “That’s where you see him reach this whole other audience, and I understand. It’s not that great. It’s mostly the image of him that’s so memorable. That’s what people cling onto.” She recalled Playboi Carti, a rage rap icon, getting a tattoo of Rebirth-era Wayne. “The image is almost more important than the sound.”
The visuals accompanying Wayne’s Rebirth era spawned a generation’s worth of influence—red candles, red wine, scuffed Converse, colorful Vans, an ever-so displaced beanie. Wayne took the forlorn skater aesthetic Cudi developed on “Day ‘N’ Nite” and injected it with his New Orleans swagger. It was almost as if Wayne was handed Cobra Starship demos and couldn’t shake the feeling something was there. Where Cudi appeared dejected, Wayne was on top of the world, having a blast garbling and warbling atop frenetic guitar riffs. Wayne’s presence on Rebirth signaled a tonal shift for emo rap: this stuff could be fun. Atmosphere’s records were sharp, Cudi’s were bubbly but depressing, and BONES firmly spooled gothic sensibilities even at his funniest. With Wayne acting as a type of bedrock, though he wasn’t exactly making emo music, there was a sense of liberation. His image represented an exercise in breaking boundaries and rewriting the rules of hip-hop adjacency.
Wayne’s sudden transformation into a rock star spawned an understandable panic. It’s not uncalled for—and certainly not surprising—given Lil Wayne was the rapper in every imaginable way in the late 2000s. In 2005, Wayne declared himself the best rapper alive. With every Tha Carter entry, along with the Dedication series, Wayne pumped out landmark moments in rap history. Late 2000s Wayne was deserving of the “meteoric” adjective, perhaps more than any rap artist before or after him. “Lil Wayne’s self-proclaimed greatness turned from bluster to truth seemingly through willpower alone,” goes a 2007 FADER cover story by Nick Barat.3
In 2017, Barat remarked, “It’s highly unlikely Wayne will ever be the artist of the moment again,” underscoring the overwhelming, inconceivable, now-untouchable significance of 2000s Wayne.4 In 2023, Wayne, a workhorse without question, doesn’t even recall the Tha Carter series.5 He is too keyed into the future, fueled by his 2005 flag-planting. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Wayne explained, “Every single action, every single word, every single approach,” is driven by maintaining his crown as the best.
And so, on the heels of Wayne’s indescribable apex point in hip-hop all those years ago, “Prom Queen” was received poorly by purists. Entertainment Weekly took glee in bashing him.6 “This unholy combination of bargain-basement mall-metal riffage and semi-conscious Auto-Tuned moaning sounded bad enough in the studio,” the piece expounds. “‘Prom Queen’ would be lame if it was being played by a random rock band. It’s still just as lame when it’s being played by the world’s biggest rapper.” Wayne turning his persona into something more recognizable to mass audiences, the rejection of the Southern rap tradition in favor of something classically understood as white and suburban, is a significant touchpoint in the history of emo rap.
The critical writing surrounding the Rebirth era calls to mind remarks made in VICE, in 2016, when Lil Peep was breaking out of his SoundCloud shell: “Lil Peep is the 2016 version of mallcore: a white rapper who samples Brand New and sings about suicide.”7 Though VICE was kinder to Peep than EW was to Wayne, there is the throughline of initial confusion-turned-disgust. This was based on the material: Peep performing a goth affect was more touching, more proficient, and more part of his initial artist DNA than Wayne’s playing in the same space. Rebirth is undoubtedly the weakest entry in Lil Wayne’s discography.
“You get an alternative viewpoint that might not be a lens that is used for young Black men,” Dr. Bradley said. Therein lies the supreme importance of Rebirth, not just to emo rap, but to all of hip-hop in the 2010s. Wayne was expanding the language and texture of hip-hop for a new generation, was broadening the creative options afforded to young Black artists, by way of his experimentation. He was not the first Black artist to adopt rock sensibilities within a non-rock genre—Collision Course, the 2004 collaborative mash-up album between Jay-Z and Linkin Park, exists in its own curious pantheon, and the band Gym Class Heroes is the undisputed bedrock of this Wayne Era.
Still, it is the magnitude of Wayne, his being the biggest rapper alive, the most elastic and proficient, that gives Rebirth’s role in hip-hop history an additional oomph. As the 2010s drew on, as more rappers adopted Wayne’s Rebirth style and overall sonic palette, the ire they drew dampened. The response to Rebirth showcased just how precious Wayne’s rapper image was to fans and critics, and his shattering of expectations goes down as one of the great sleights of hand in contemporary rap. When Wayne gets bashed for “Prom Queen,” there is a lot to consider between the curiosity of genre-coded expectations, the looming feeling of betrayal from rap purists, and the wonder of, “Is this stuff even good?” Does the material on Rebirth earn the hate, or are the arguments against the album made in bad faith? In Wayne’s lineage, artists like Juice WRLD and non-emo rapper Lil Yachty adopt a desire to be seen as “artists” and not merely rappers.8
The panic of losing tradition, of devaluing the artform of hip-hop makes sense, but also stands to limit young artists’ ability to experiment. In as many ways, Rebirth represents a broadening of hip-hop as it does a flop for Wayne’s discography. There are better emo rap offerings from Lil Wayne, stronger and more thematically rich songs that help build out the canon for the next generation of artists. Paging through his records, it becomes clear Wayne is much more than a visual beacon for emo rap. “People will cite a given Kanye or Cudi song, but I think ‘Prostitute Flange’ [2007] is as stylistically influential on current emo rap as anything. Wayne got very, very comfortable being sad on records,” Thompson says. “Which is strange, because he was a child star at first. You go back to ‘I Miss My Dawgs,’ [released in 2004] and it’s the same kind of thing as emo rap. ‘I am going to make a song for mass consumption, that is three letters from me to three of my former friends.’ There is this sense of Wayne that gets at two chief characteristics of emo rap. The first is on a basic level, being that comfortable being that revealing on records. The second is the sense that these things are spilling out of him in real-time.”
“Prostitute” in particular underscores an understanding that emo rap is a sexually driven genre—to depressing ends. The angst of wanting someone and the use of sex as a vehicle through which to prop yourself up are all key parts of capturing the roiling nature of being a teen locked away with your own thoughts. Almost every Lil Peep song involving a partner plays into the narrative arc laid out by “Prostitute.” That is: “I love you so much. Please don’t betray me. We should have sex, because this is how I’ll express that I value you.” And to the end of the final moment of this arc, sex is used to help fill in gaps of feeling these artists don’t yet know how to articulate.
From Wayne’s forlorn calls to keep the love real, to Peep singing the same themes nine years later on the 2016 single “Your Eyes,” there’s an insistence on trust being foundational. These songs are about sex, sure, but they are better understood as discussions of insecurity. There is a sense trust is easily lost, and not so easily granted. The giving and taking of pleasure in emo rap is a mask for the extreme anxiety of sharing yourself with someone. There is vulnerability in expressing the potential for a partner to hurt you, as if to say, “I know they will hurt me, I just know it.” The expectation of betrayal is a trademark of the genre. Mindless sex, in the writing, is meant to be a shield from that betrayal, a way to suggest the artists didn’t even care in the first place.
Additionally, the “real-time” aspect of Wayne’s releases carries with it the same aura that followed Juice WRLD as he freestyled his way through his sophomore album, Death Race for Love. There is an emphasis in emo to deliver the cardinal emotion as intensely and as quickly as possible. The speed at which Peep and Juice produced music fed into their genre convention. Their work ethics reflected the promise that emo rap was a boots-on-the-ground report of despair. It also spoke to their proficiency as artists, this ability to excavate constantly and release a stream of songs ranging from listenable to addictive. Dr. Bradley and Lee discussed the prolific process of recording at length, with Dr. Bradley citing the way Wayne shattered notions of literacy for Southern Black artists by abandoning the notebook and attacking the beat off top.
“It all goes back to the standard that Wayne set,” Lee added, speaking specifically to the way artists like Migos and 2 Chainz record, “which is to let the music dictate what he’s gonna say, rather than coming in ‘prepared.’ More often than not, I’ve seen folks going in and doing what the beat instructs them, as set by Wayne’s example. Rather than go in with a manifesto: ‘this is what I’m gonna get off my chest.’”
Wayne’s unmanicured approach bled into all the emo rap to follow. He opened a door for artists in the subgenre to dig deep in a manner of flow. His Rebirth look shaped the culture and his recording style changed the arrangement of the genre. Where Slug recounts birthing records and releasing them, Wayne goes a step further by showcasing the value of acting impulsively. This makes sense for a genre that largely feels like a series of outbursts and reactions. Wayne demonstrated the importance of having a feeling and responding to it in real time. Still, he appears calculated and entirely natural across most of his discography. With Wayne as their model, the most celebrated artists in this space grew to unleash an unfiltered clip of music as a stream of meticulous chaos. They would take the order and verbose texture of technically proficient hip-hop, and deconstruct it with either melody, intensity, or both pillars at once to build something new.
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