1/31/2024 0 Comments Lil tracy after lil peep death![]() ![]() What do you see in the future for yourself? We had one bathroom, and tempers.īUTLER: A lot of people enter the rap game and a lot of people leave the rap game. We all made art, and we just drove each other to be what we are now.īUTLER: What was that like in those days? A bunch of dudes living in the house, just making music? from Virginia for the first time, and I was hanging out with other people that were just like me. TRACY: I really realized that it was real when I came out here to L.A. When did you start to really know that, “Okay, I’m going to be a rapper, and that’s what my life is going to be,” and have that single determination to get there and kind of forget about everything else, including shit you love, like basketball and skating. I would literally look out the window and be like, “I could be doing something else.”īUTLER: And when did you see this? I remember you would be in middle school and you wouldn’t really be that interested in school, and I’d be trying to talk to you about, “Hey, you got to do this and that to make it in life,” but then when you started making it in the music business, I realized you had been thinking about it for a long time. TRACY: I was just tired of being at home. So it was always there, and adding the singing to it just came naturally.īUTLER: What’s it like just being in the music business, and living in different cities? Where’d you get that nomadic sensibility from? I used to listen to that heavy punk shit. ![]() TRACY: It all stemmed from the guitar, and bands like The Helio Sequence and The Shins. TRACY: Bro, I was obsessed with that game.īUTLER: So the whole sort of emotional rap movement, how did you get into that? What put you in that frame of mind? But if somebody turned their back on you for five minutes, you were on GTA, bro. And it was drums down there, and video games, and a piano, basically everything that I do now.īUTLER: What was that video game that you were obsessed with?īUTLER: That’s all you used to want to do, and I would tell you that you couldn’t play it till you got done with your homework. TRACY: I remember I had that whole basement to myself. ![]() I remember I had one of those Hot Wheels tracks, and we would put it through the thing and it would just go all around.īUTLER: What do you remember about New Jersey? I don’t even know where we were, but I remember how the house looked. ![]() TRACY: One of the earliest memories I have is being in New York with you. TRACY: That’s what we were recording all that music on.īUTLER: What are some of your earliest memories of me, music, basketball, sports, Brooklyn, all that stuff? I was just like, “Damn this shit is really, really popping off.” But even when you were younger, I knew you had a lot of skill and talent, and you would spend a lot of time on stuff that most kids would have just messed with for a little bit and let go, like playing guitar and messing around on GarageBand. When I saw how many views it had, I was like, “What the fuck?” I think it was something like 50 million at the time. When did you realize that I was becoming big in music?īUTLER: I think it was when I saw one of your videos. ISHMAEL BUTLER: I remember when you were little, I used to love watching you play basketball. As Tracy readies the release of his next project, Designer Talk 2, Tracy connected with his father in Los Angeles to talk about life in the rap game, losing friends, and generational divides. He got sober, and released the EP Designer Talk, a more upbeat collection of songs than the anguished music he had become known for, followed by his debut full-length Anarchy, which Tracy dedicated to Lil Peep. Those twin setbacks refocused Tracy’s priorities. After Peep’s death at the hands of opioids, Tracy lost his way in a haze of grief and drugs, culminating in a stint in a psychiatric ward and, in 2018, a heart attack. Together, they made underground classics like “White Tee” and “Witchblades,” honing a sound that incorporated elements of pop-punk, trap, and what became known as SoundCloud rap. It was there that Tracy met Lil Peep, the rising rap star who also became one his closest friends. After leaving home as a teenager in search of a group of likeminded outcasts, he found his community first in the experimental hip-hop collective Thraxxhouse, and then in the cult rap crew Gothboiclique. Although his parents split when he was young, leaving Tracy, who was born Jazz Butler, feeling unmoored and adrift, their influence as originals is what influences his own independent streak.įor followers of the so-called emo rap wave, Tracy’s story is well known. His mother, Cheryl “Coko” Clemons, was the lead singer of ‘90s R&B icons SWV. His father is the hip-hop trailblazer Ishmael Butler, formerly of Digable Planets and currently one half of the astral hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces. That might sound like a cliché, but for the 24-year-old rapper, it’s true. Lil Tracy has music laced through his DNA. ![]()
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