"This style is also called “emo”, but where that word has previously been used to describe punks who analysed their own emotions with a forensic level of detail, here the emotion is underanalysed: these rappers feel bad, but they’re not sure why.

The fact that some of them are unable to verbalise what they’re feeling, leads them to fall back on rap cliches around bitches and clips, and simply compounds the overall feeling of desperation. This is an inevitable cultural byproduct of the US, where the marketplace has been allowed to triumph, and silence moral concerns about the availability of these drugs. Because they’re profitable, people are allowed to just get on with self-medicating, without trying to understand the reasons for their sadness.

But perhaps these rappers’ ennui goes wider than mere Xanax, and into a numbing effect of our wider culture. One of the most chilling aspects to Lil Peep’s death is that his cries for help were so public, and yet went so unanswered – perhaps as a result of the paradoxically distancing effect of social media. He wrote on Instagram hours before he died: “I need help but not when I have my pills but that’s temporary one day maybe I won’t die young and I’ll be happy?” But we’re inured to see Instagram as performative, not real, and its inherently aspirational vibe along with the sheer visual noise of its scrolling feed drowns out individual torment."