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He’s a popular rapper in the controversial ‘drill’ genre with over two million followers on TikTok, but Lil Mabu has a surprising backstory as a senior at one of New York’s oldest luxury private high schools.
Lil Mabu, better known in class as 17-year-old Matthew Peter DeLuca, burst onto the scene with the support and recognition of established names like Tory Lanez, Lil Mosey, Pnb Rock and Rich The Kid.
The lyrics to one of their songs, ‘NO SNITCHING’, read: ‘I could never snitch (Gang, gang, gang), that’s on my kids (Yeah). I put a chopper on the blade (grrah, grrah), I put a blade on a switch.
However, as a freshman at the $60,000 a year Collegiate School on the Upper West Side, he was a member of the student council that evangelized Kids Walk for MSK Kids.
Lil Mabu, better known in class as 17-year-old Matthew Peter DeLuca, burst onto the scene with the support and recognition of established names like Tory Lanez, Lil Mosey, Pnb Rock and Rich The Kid. However, as a freshman at the $60,000 a year Collegiate School on the Upper West Side, he was a member of the student council that evangelized Kids Walk for MSK Kids.
DeLuca currently lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in a five-bedroom, five-bathroom, 3,327-square-foot condominium, when she’s not kicking back at her parents’ weekend home in the Hamptons.
Together, the family’s estates are worth about $12 million, according to the New York Post.
Drill, as it is known, has become controversial around the world with local authorities from New York to London to Sydney disapproving of the sub-genre, which literally means “fight or retaliate”.
In DeLuca’s hometown of New York, Mayor Eric Adams has called on Twitter and Instagram to post rap videos that he says promote gun violence.
“We took Trump off Twitter because of what he was saying,” he told a news conference on Friday. “However, we are allowing the music, the display of weapons, the violence. We are allowing it to remain on these sites.’
Mabu clearly leans into some of the subgenre’s nastier tropes, with lyrics like ‘Glock came with lightning inside/Run him up on a demon vibe/Let it fire-fire-fire’ on ‘I’M NOT A COP’ . ‘
His videos, some of which have millions of views on YouTube, include fake restaurant shootings in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with DeLuca implying that he himself was shot.
The Collegiate School in New York, which costs $60,000 a year to attend
His videos, some of which have millions of views on YouTube, include fake restaurant shootings in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with DeLuca implying that he himself was shot.
DeLuca currently lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in a five-bedroom, five-bathroom, 3,327-square-foot condominium, when she’s not kicking back at her parents’ weekend home in the Hamptons.
Despite posing for this photo with a police officer, the lyrics to one of Mabu’s songs, ‘NO SNITCHING,’ read: ‘I could never snitch (Gang, gang, gang), that’s on my kids (Yeah) . I put a chopper on the blade (grrah, grrah), I put a blade on a switch.
His father, Peter DeLuca, is a funeral director, though he actually has some run-ins with the law in his past.
In 2006, DeLuca’s ex-wife, Jane, accused him of defrauding her out of millions of dollars in their divorce settlement and he has one of New York City’s few permits for concealed carry.
When interviewed in 2021, Lil Mabu said that what set him apart from other rappers was “my age and my fan base”. I’ve only been in the game for a year, give or take a couple of months.
The interviewer then mentioned that he had won a speech contest twice in a row and a writing award in the sixth grade.
The Post quoted a parent of a student who was not thrilled with DeLuca’s antics.
“If it was any other kid who didn’t have a rap career… who said anything like what this kid says, he’d be expelled and never be heard from again,” the anonymous father said. “Collegiate used to be the Olympics for Latin, Greek and Math, and now it’s TikTok.”
Drill rap tends to have heavily autotuned vocals and themes of violence, killing, and death.
It was the death of 18-year-old Jayquan McKenley, a trained rapper who goes by the name Chii Wvttz, who was murdered outside a Brooklyn recording studio last week, that struck a chord with the mayor.
Adams said he wants to meet with high-profile rappers and executives from social media companies in a bid to remove the videos.
The mayor blamed the music and videos for “causing the loss of life for young people like them.”
“You have a civic and corporate responsibility,” he said. “We are alarmed by the use of social media to really overproliferate this violence in our communities. This is contributing to the violence we are seeing across the country. It is one of the rivers that we have to dam.