NYC drill rapper Lil Mabu is upper-crust private school student (2024)

He's a popular rapper in the controversial 'drill' genre with over two million TikTok followers - but Lil Mabu has a surprising backstory as a senior at one of New York's oldest upscale private high schools.

Lil Mabu - better known in class as Matthew Peter DeLuca, 17 - has broken in to the scene with support and recognition from established names likeTory Lanez, Lil Mosey, Pnb Rock and Rich The Kid.

The lyrics to one of his songs - 'NO SNITCHING' - reads: 'I could never snitch (Gang, gang, gang), that's on my kids (Yeah). I put a chopper on the blade (Grrah, grrah), 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 student board member evangelizingKids Walk for MSK Kids.

DeLuca currently lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a five-bed, five-bath, 3,327-square foot condominium, when he's not chilling at his folks' weekend house in the Hamptons.

Together, the family's properties are worth around $12million, according to the New York Post.

Drill, as it's known, has become controversial across the globe with local authorities from New York to London to Sydney disapproving of the subgenre, which literally means 'to fight or retaliate.'

In DeLuca's home city of New York, Mayor Eric Adams has called on Twitter and Instagram to dump 'drill' rap videos which he says promote gun violence.

'We pulled Trump off Twitter, because of what he was spewing,' he said Friday at a press conference. 'Yet we're allowing music, displaying of guns, violence. We're allowing it to stay on these sites.'

Mabu clearly leans into some of the sub-genre's nastier tropes, with lyrics like 'Glock came wit' a beam inside/Run him up on a demon vibe/Let it fire-fire-fire' in 'I'M NOT A COP.'

His videos - some of which have millions of views on YouTube - have included faked shootouts at restaurants in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with DeLuca implying being hit by gunfire himself.

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 cheating her out of millions of dollars in their divorce settlement and has one New York City's few permits to concealed carry.

When interviewed in 2021, Lil Mabu said that the thing that set him apart from other rappers was 'my age and my fanbase. I've only been in the game for like a year, give or take a couple months.'

The interviewer then cited that he'd won a public speaking competition twice in a row and a writing award in sixth grade.

The Post quoted a parent of an alum who was not thrilled with DeLuca's antics.

'If this was any other child who did not have a rap career … who said anything close to what this kid is saying they would be expelled and would never be heard from again' the unnamed parent said. 'Collegiate used to be Latin and Greek and Math Olympiads, and now it's TikTok.'

Drill rapping tends to have heavily Autotuned vocals and themes of violence, killing and death.

It was the death of Jayquan McKenley, 18, a drill rapper who goes by the name Chii Wvttz, who was killed 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 of the social media companies in a push to have the videos removed.

The mayor blamed the music and the videos for 'causing the loss of lives of young people like them.'

'You have a civic and corporate responsibility,' he said.'We are alarmed by the use of social media to really over-proliferate this violence in our communities. This is contributing to the violence that we are seeing all over the country. It one of the rivers we have to dam.'