As a teenager in Long Beach, N.Y., Lil Peep noticed a rift between the wealthy and the poor in his community. At the Lil Peep memorial held in December 2017, his mother, Liza Womack, spoke of how this division began to shape her son: "Gus got fed up with that world. He rejected it, and he rejected being molded into a box ... When he locked himself in the garage and got his first tattoo, he began to make his rejection of the box public."
It's unclear how much of this was self-imposed isolation or Lil Peep being ostracized from others his age, but his mother saw a turn in the rapper during his senior year of high school. "People who'd been his friend stopped being his friend," Womack later told Pitchfork. "He was low, and he felt like s**t. He had black curtains in his room, he was in bed most of the time, and it was messy, ashes everywhere."
Lil Peep would later reflect on his feelings about Long Beach in the song, "Cry Alone," with lyrics like: "I hate everybody in my hometown / I wanna burn my old high school into the ground." Even after the rapper said so long and set off to sunny California to pursue music full time, it didn't fix what he was feeling. "I think there was sadness too when he went to California," Womack told Pitchfork. "He was alone and scared to death."
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