Music from late stars such as
Mac Miller and Lil Peep prove that younger audiences don’t share the same reservations over posthumous releases
“You have been asking for this, and I can’t wait to get it to you!” Lil Peep’s mother wrote to her son’s 4.7 million followers via his
Instagram account. She was referring to more new music: a second posthumous album in as many years; not far off the amount of
music the artist, who died in 2017, had released in his short life. He is far from the only one in a wave of posthumous releases this year that includes an album from the late Avicii and a single from Mac Miller. The estate of controversial rapper XXXTentacion, meanwhile, will release his second, and apparently final, posthumous album Bad Vibes Forever this week.
While the demand for more music is certainly not unanimous (“This sounds like black mirror’s episode of miley cyrus,” ran one comment under Peep’s mother’s post), a scattergun approach to posthumous legacy-building has been widely accepted by young fans as the new normal. The old consensus decreed that in order to build a respectable legacy, an estate should protect what the artist had already put out and be discerning with anything more. Fans were furious with Drake’s bungled attempts at putting together a posthumous Aaliyah album, and frustrations arise whenever a Prince release is announced. Administrators for the Purple One’s estate reportedly drilled into a locked vault to get at unreleased recordings, and ignored Prince’s views on streaming services, uploading his catalogue months after his death.