Songs: “I Feel Like Dying” by Lil Wayne, “Awful Things” by Lil Peep, “Self Care” by Mac Miller, “Rockstar In His Prime” by Juice WRLD, and “Delete Forever” by Grimes
The music world has long flirted with opiates. Whether it was an overweight Elvis numbly popping Demerol pills in the 1960s or grunge idol Kurt Cobain injecting black tar heroin in the 1990s, performers have frequently sought the feel-good rush of narcotics as a response to trauma and pain. And the cost has been staggering: Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Layne Staley, and Prince all lost their lives due to accidental overdoses. The current prescription drug abuse crisis stems from overprescribing of pain medication in the 1990s following a sales push from Purdue Pharma, the business wing of the Sackler family, to market their product (OxyContin) as “non-addictive.” Opioid-related fatalities rose from under 10,000 in 1999 to just under 50,000 in 2019.
Long before Dr. Sackler and his cronies decided to peddle dope, there was “lean”- a potent mix of codeine cough syrup, promethazine, and Sprite popular in the African-American community since the 1980s. Served in a foam cup with a Jolly Rancher to sweeten the mix, lean is also known as “purple drank” or “syrup.” It’s referenced by artists like Three 6 Mafia and Lil Nas X, but its main champion was Houston’s DJ Screw. He pioneered a genre called “chopped and screwed” that scratched and slowed down rap music as if in an opiate-induced haze. The drug took his life in 2000. Lean’s most famous current user is Lil Wayne, who admitted that quitting the drink “will feel like death in your stomach.” On 2008’s Tha Carter III, the year’s best-selling record, he laid down some of the most intimate and poetic verses of his dependence on narcotics.
Only once the drugs are done
That I feel like dying, I feel like dying. . .Swimming laps around a bottle of Louis the Thirteenth
Jumpin’ off of a mountain into a sea of Codeine
I’m at the top of the top, but still I climb
And if I should ever fall
The ground would then turn to wine. . .
Over the next decade, the U.S. Government recognized opiate abuse as a significant problem and began to crack down on “pill mills” and crooked doctors. However, it did so without adequate treatment plans in mind. As a result most users turned to heroin or its stronger cousin fentanyl. Counterfeit Percocet 30s- a powerful blend of synthetic fentanyl and methamphetamine- flooded the streets, manufactured and trafficked by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. Overdose deaths soared due to the high potency of the drug. It took very little time to permeate the music industry.
The first casualty was emo rapper Lil Peep in 2017, who accidentally succumbed to a mixture of fentanyl and Xanax at the age of 21. He frequently referenced his prescription drug abuse in his music; at the beginning of the video for “Awful Things,” he’s shown riding in a car littered with empty orange pill bottles. He later writes “I will not nod off in class” over and over on the chalkboard. While never a household name like Bruno Mars or Kanye West, Lil Peep nevertheless had a committed legion of young fans, earning hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. The Atlantic wrote in his eulogy, “If you were going to bet on the young musicians most likely to soon be superstars, until yesterday, a lot of smart money would have been on Lil Peep.”
Fentanyl also claimed the life of Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller a year later. He was never as “emo” as the goth-eyeliner-rimmed Lil Peep, but he was open about his struggles with depression and addiction. At various times in his career he relied heavily on lean and claimed he “hated” sobriety. His music explored themes of mental illness and drug abuse but without a shred of self-pity, resulting in a sound that Pitchfork magazine described as “wistful soul and warm funk.” The video for “Self Care” features Miller waking up in a coffin, casually smoking a cigarette, and carving words into the wooden lid before escaping to the outside world- an eerie premonition of his death at age 26.
Because being an emo-rapper in the 2010s was only slightly safer than BASE jumping or lion taming, the world lost another musician in 2019: Juice WRLD, who fatally overdosed on oxycodone and codeine. He initially rose to prominence on SoundCloud as a teenager mixing elements of rock and trap into his music. His 2018 hit single “Lucid Dreams” became one of Spotify’s most-streamed songs and peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts. In “Legends,” released the same year, he mourns Lil Peep and rapper XXXTentacion (killed in a burglary attempt) with the lines “What’s the 27 Club?/ We ain’t makin’ it past 21”- a chilling reflection on the lives snatched away too soon by the opioid epidemic, and a list to which his name would be added.
If I take too many percs, then I won’t die
If I drink too much of this syrup, then I’m gon’ fly. . .
A slew of tunes have memorialized the opioid epidemic’s untimely casualties, but the most haunting is Canadian indie pop star Grimes’ “Delete Forever.” The singer was “triggered” by the passing of a close friend, as well as Lil Peep, and penned a darkly beautiful concoction of acoustic guitar, lone fiddle, and spare banjo. Tucked neatly into her futuristic album Miss Anthropocene, the song was hailed on YouTube as kickstarting the genre of “space country.” The lyrics are a masterpiece in themselves:
Always down when I’m not up, guess it’s just my rotten luck
To fill my time with permanent blue
But I can’t see above it, guess I fucking love it
But, oh, I didn’t mean to
I see everything, I see everything
Don’t you tell me now that I don’t want it
But I did everything, I did everything
More lines on the mirror than a sonnet. . .
Over half a million Americans have died from opioid-related causes since 1996, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement stipulated that the Sacklers could keep their wealth while enjoying immunity from prosecution. I wish I could point out the light at the end of the tunnel: a new federal statute, a treatment plan, hell, anything. But expect this to get worse before it gets better.
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