Lil Peep, Whiny Vocals, and the History of Punk
0:00 This video is brought to you by Audible. Right now, you can get a free book and a 30-day free trial by texting MrAmazing to 500-500, or by going to audible.com/mramazing at the link below.
[Music]
I don't think anyone would deny that Lil Peep was an emo rapper. He was no stranger to openly discussing suicide and his anxiety. Not even in his music, but in his interviews, too. Almost the entirety of his debut album was written in minor keys, and his producers sampled from a number of pop-punk and metal bands, like Three Days Grace and Avenged Sevenfold. He also rapped like this:
[Music]
1:02 Rappers like Lil Uzi Vert and even X are considered to be in the general emo rap subculture, too, but they don't really sing the way Peep did at all. What made Peep a unique vocalist in emo rap was the fact that he rapped the same way emo rock and pop-punk artists sang. You can hear it in those vocals from the songs he sampled. You can hear it in Blink-182, Fall Out Boy, MCR, Panic! at the Disco, Green Day, The All-American Rejects, and even Weezer. They all definitely don't sound identical, but they share that same kind of whiny, discontented voice that still actually sounds pretty good. It works, especially in Lil Peep's rap. But how did that voice get so angsty?
One of multiple different explanations is in the 1960s, before most people had the opportunity to be emo because they were being drafted. If they were Black, they were probably being deprived of their voting rights.
2:00 People didn't like what was going on, and a lot of them spoke up about it. Students across the nation protested in colleges. People marched on Washington, culminating in mass protests by the New Left in 1967 and 1968. But that's a story for an upcoming video. Most importantly for us, they had music for their protests, inspired by the general discontent of the time. The folk singer Joan Baez gained critical acclaim for her cover of the traditional gospel hymn "We Shall Overcome" as part of the civil rights movement. Others like Peter, Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs, and Country Joe and the Fish sang against Vietnam, the latter singing at Woodstock '69, a music festival that represented the movement for peace, love, and rock and roll.
[Music]
The angst was definitely there in a number of these singers, but the one whose voice and musical style most foreshadowed the punk movement of the 1970s and 1980s that would then give way to the pop-punk and emo of the 1990s and 2000s was Bob Dylan.
3:11 [Music]
Critics hated the way he sang, David Bowie famously saying that he had a voice like sand and glue. But for all its rasp and grit, there it was, protesting Vietnam and even the entirety of Western culture in songs like "Blowin' in the Wind", where he wrote in typical Dylanesque poetics: "How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind. The answer is blowin' in the wind."
He would also be one of the first to pioneer that sort of whiny, speak-singing style that's so common today in emotive music, particularly in what's considered by a few to be one of the first rap songs ever written, "Subterranean Homesick Blues".
4:11 [Music]
This raw and monotone style would have a particular impact on Lou Reed and his band, The Velvet Underground, considered by many to be one of the first proto-punk bands of the late 1960s, in the vein of earlier garage rock bands like The Monks and The Sonics. And although Reed would go on to say some pretty nasty things about Dylan towards the end of his life, the influence that Dylan had on Reed is obvious. One of the band's earliest songs, "Prominent Men", took direct inspiration from Dylan's song "The Times They Are A-Changin'", complete with Dylan's vocality, guitar strumming, and of course, his signature harmonica.
[Music]
5:01 John Cale, who played a number of different instruments in the band, would later admit that they were pretty much directly competing with Bob Dylan. But while Bob Dylan wrote catchy tunes about mild discontent about politics and farming, with pretty standard album art, Reed went off the deep end and had a banana.
[Music]
The Velvets were artist-experimentalists through and through. Reed himself gained an affinity for free jazz during his time as an English major at Syracuse University, and John Cale was classically trained at the University of London. In their first album, *The Velvet Underground & Nico*, they wrote songs about drug dealers, sadomasochism, and the depressing life of a heroin addict, all to the background of slightly blown-out, mangled instrumentation.
6:00 Their second album, *White Light/White Heat*, took the raw energy in the band's lyrics and instruments and pushed it so far that the sound engineer they were working with didn't even bother to listen to it, culminating in the band's most ambitious song, "Sister Ray". Reed would later say of the song, "I like to think of Sister Ray as a transvestite smack dealer. The situation is a bunch of drag queens taking some sailors home with them and shooting up on smack and having an orgy when the police appear. They asked us what we're gonna do. We said we're gonna start. They said, 'Who's playing bass?' We said, 'There is no bass.' They asked us when it ends. We didn't know. When it ends, that's when it ends."
[Music]
And after 17 minutes, it finally ended. But it's right here in this messy, avant-garde music where the gruff vocals of Dylan and the garage rockers were used to discuss bitter, emotional realities.
7:00 By the early 1970s, the punk movement was in full swing, and The Velvet Underground had broken up. John Cale eventually worked with the punk band The Stooges in producing their debut album, continuing the tendency of linking guttural emotion with hard, rough vocals in songs like "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "Penetration". Soon The New York Dolls and The Ramones formed, too, both singing in a similar style. But the sneering, whiny tonality of more recent punk music and of Lil Peep would come more so from the British punk movement, and most notably, The Sex Pistols.
[Music]
Iggy Pop and The Stooges would later be cited by the Pistols' lead singer, Johnny Rotten, as having had an influence on the band.
8:00 The vocal style of emotional hardcore and pop-punk was here in Johnny Rotten, lyrics like "I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist, don't know what I want, but I know how to get it, I want to destroy the passerby, 'cause I want to be anarchy," written by Rotten in an overflowing madness dealing with repression, racism, and the destruction of personality. The angst of modern emo-core was also here. Much of the other music produced by the Pistols was informed by what Rotten would later describe as "the thought that we're all being tortured mentally and physically, so let's rise up against it and have a song about that." Their song "Bodies" definitely conveyed that thought, written in light of a true story about a girl Rotten knew who had gotten an abortion and showed up at his house with the fetus in a see-through bag. He'd go on to call it a "bloody good subject for a song," literally, I guess. Dark themes like this were as much a part of punk as war protest was to the folk that preceded it, but politicisation was also still pretty important, The Dead Kennedys being "Too Drunk to Fuck" in one song, but talking about "Kill the Poor" in another. There were, however, some currents finally bringing these vocals to a place much more personal and mental than before, closer to the emotive rock of today.
9:05 The ever-angry Henry Rollins in Black Flag's *Damaged* focused the entirety of the album around themes of personal struggle, depression, confusion, and even self-harm. The cover of the album featured Rollins punching a mirror, so there was literal damage on the album, too. Hüsker Dü, though a self-proclaimed rock and roll band, did the exact same thing, the lead singer Bob Mould pretty much summing the entire idea up by saying, "I'm singing about myself, and if you don't understand that, just go to fucking hell."
By the time California pop-punk bands of the early 1990s had formed, raspy and sneering vocals had long been associated with the angsty, anti-establishment, and by that point, almost depressive lyrics of punk and post-punk. Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer of Green Day, in a 1994 interview with *Rolling Stone*, joked, "I'm an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent," pointing to some of the earlier tendencies the Pistols and bands like The Clash took on when punk emerged in Britain in the '70s.
10:05 Of course, all of this isn't to say that this was the only way that these vocals became associated with angst. You could look at a lot of other mainstream rock bands in the 1970s and '80s who sang in a similar sort of style; punks weren't the only ones doing it. If you want to look back even further, you could probably look to Woody Guthrie, Joe Hill, and maybe even the 1950s jazz singer Billie Holiday. Some punk bands, even some I cited here, didn't sing this way either. This is just one path of many, one that's evidenced in the anarchy symbol that Lil Peep had on his cheek, a symbol of how punk helped create Lil Peep's "White Wine".
This is Mr. Amazing. Thanks for watching.
10:47 If you're interested more about the history of music, then Audible has exactly what you're looking for. Audible offers the largest selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy, and lectures for just about everyone. Sign up using the link in the description right now and get one credit for a free audiobook each month,
11:05 regardless of price, exclusive sales, and 30% off all regularly priced audiobooks. If you don't use your free credit in that month, it rolls over to the next one. If you're an Amazon Prime member and you sign up for Audible in July, you can get three months for the price of one. If you ever happen to watch any of my streams playing the piano, you know that I happen to be very interested in jazz. So I downloaded a series of lectures from The Great Courses using Audible's Amazon Prime deal on the history of jazz, and it actually included a sample of every single song the lecturer discussed. So I now know why "Cakewalk Ragtime" is called "Cakewalk Ragtime". Audible also offers books on punk, hip hop, and much, much more—books that can be accessed on Audible's free apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows devices for listening on the go, at the pool,
12:00 or even in the mountains if you want. And even though the books are 100% yours after purchase, if you don't like them, you can swap them out for another. So go to audible.com/mramazing or text MrAmazing, that's spelled out M-I-S-T-E-R A-M-A-Z-I-N-G to 500-500, and enjoy 30 days of Audible completely for free.
[Music]
Found a mishearing? Say so.