There was a point last week where I found myself curious to check out the new Juice WRLD album “Legends Never Die.” If you look at my track record, I honestly don’t know that you would think of me as a fan of the genre. While I have collected names over the years, I couldn’t tell you anything about rappers who gained popularity after uploading mixtapes to Soundcloud. I respect the hustle, able to make careers in this niche way. But if I’m being honest, they always felt strangely like a novelty that would never be taken seriously. It was in large part because I looked at them and saw these tattooed faces as off-putting. As it stands, I still look at people like Lil Peep and think I’m about to get some aggressive, incoherent mumble rap because I don’t get why they look like that.
But Juice WRLD was an interesting case. To look at him was to see a kid with a leather jacket who felt reminiscent more of punk rock. He looked clean cut, coming from an ultra-conservative home and had music tastes that ran an interesting spectrum. He was as much informed by rap as he was these various pop punk bands that informed a lot of my youth. There was even something to his cameo on Eminem’s “Music to Be Murdered By” (one of the few standouts on that album) album song "Godzilla" that made him resonate with me.
As a posthumous album, “Legends Never Die” is a fitting compilation and served as my first true wrestling with his music. What I found amazing wasn’t just his lyrical transparency, but that his melodies often were reminiscent of latter day Blink-182 or Fall Out Boy, managing to use the structure in such a way that I sometimes wouldn’t even call him a rapper. Even his use of autotune felt like an atmospheric flourish, reflective of a man who was dealing with insular pain, pushing through his inner demons. I saw the swirling nature as something endearing and at times haunting.
Frankly, “Legends Never Die” is overlong and redundant in such a way that I don’t know that I get a direct conversation with him as an artist. There’s definitely a lot that has resonated from it, but it does sound like an artist who was only getting started. His style still had this rawness and he was still in the establishment period, where every song had this declaration of personality: a depressed man who was often dealing with drug addiction.
I’d say to play a drinking game with a Juice WRLD album (nay, song) where you drink every time he mentions getting wasted. The issue is that this is his defining trait. After listening to roughly 35 songs by him now, it’s difficult to call him a genius because of how one track minded he was. Also, to get wasted while listening to him is a very depressing form of irony when you think about it.
And yet the more that I dived into his story, the more that I felt my heart break. He wasn’t exactly singing about drug abuse through a positive light. Every reference alludes to a deeper pain that at his best eats at your soul. He was so in tune with a depression that at times the clarity is painful to listen to. Almost everything he sings about has this fatal subtext going on, where death exists alongside his own study of anxiety. You can read it as cautionary or the most obvious self-fulfilling prophecy since Kurt Cobain sang “I Hate Myself and Want to Die,” but to place him in a bigger context is even more painful.
As a preteen, Juice WRLD fell in love with rap music. It is a time when everyone is trying to find their identity, and he found it in artists like Future (whom he would collaborate with on an album). It wasn’t just the sound that attracted him. It was the discussion of drugs like lean and Percocet, which he would immediately form an addiction for. He eventually realized that if he wanted to be taken seriously as a rapper, he would need to be honest and, apparently, addiction was a big part of it.
The final chapter is where things got most depressing. It wasn’t that his first album “Goodbye and Good Riddance” became a phenomenon, whose single “Lucid Dreams” featured over a billion listens on Spotify. It was that his music became indicative of a trend. When he sang about death, he was talking about rappers like Lil Peep and XXXtentacion who died by 21. He was questioning his own mortality and paying homage to figures that were supposed to define the next generation.
In one interview from September 2019, Juice WRLD discussed the death of Mac Miller, who also died from drug addiction. He claimed that he was trying to get clean and understood the cautions of having too much money. Among his comments was the familiar exchange of living impulsively because people don’t live forever. It’s a perspective you’re always going to have at 21, though in his case it feels uncomfortably transparent.
Everything that Juice WRLD says feels painful now. When reading his Wikipedia page, he’s often been considered part of the emo-rap genre, and again that feels accurate. By the end of “Goodbye and Good Riddance,” there have been songs about driving cars recklessly into ditches and a number that I’m pretty sure is about hanging from a noose. Considering that I grew up during the height of emo in terms of rock, I am very familiar with the self-destructive terminology. The whole “slit my wrists” and “I’m dead inside” jargon were around every corner, and it felt ridiculous. Still, it’s easy to see this as Juice WRLD’s interpretation of it, though I wonder how productive it is just to stall out on admitting you have a problem but never getting a chance to solve it.
That’s what’s sad. As I mentioned, he was clearly working on his demons when he died of a drug-induced overdose. What makes it more bizarre is that he consumed these pills because there was concern that the cops would raid his private jet and find drugs and guns. It’s not even clear that it’s his own pills. It all feels preventable, and it makes it more tragic. Sure he would’ve been in terrible trouble had this scenario played out in any other way, but it’s all the more tragic to know even as he tried to knowingly escape it, he was surrounded by these obstacles.
I can’t speak for how his music influenced the current generation, though it’s clear that he had some breakthrough. The numbers don’t lie. However, there is no story that holds as much weight as one that ends in an ellipses. When I hear him complaining about his problems, I want to get to the next stage of his career, the one where he begins to see the world in this more optimistic light. In interviews he comes across as intelligent, aware of what he needs to maintain a fruitful career. If “Legends Never Die” means anything, he wasn’t entirely ready to move onto newer themes. He was still dealing with personal issues.
I get it. I totally do. Even if there are a lot of ways that our story differs, I look back at being 19 and recognizing it as one of my most painful years. I was deep in a depression caused from my first year out of high school and feeling alone. When you’re young and don’t have something to compare to, a depression feels like the worst thing in the world, and it’s scary to feel like it may never end. I may never have had addiction issues, but I can see it in Juice WRLD as he talks about Mac Miller, recognizing that fame doesn’t equate happiness. I don’t know much else about him, but there is something about how he approaches music that feels familiar.
It’s what I genuinely adore about this modern generation. I look at artists like Billie Eilish or Earl Sweatshirt and admire how willing they are to be weird. More importantly, they aren’t afraid to express their inner souls with these songs about sadness in ways that elevate pop music as an art form. Juice WRLD felt like he was on the verge of joining that list. Even if he sounds like music that I wouldn’t enjoy – and I find most of his work redundant – the moments that click are surreal in personal ways.
I’m aware that I’m not talking about “Goodbye and Good Riddance,” at least directly. The reality is that his life was so intertwined with his music that I can’t help but look at the man when popping on the record (which, funny enough, opens with a sample of Billie Eilish’s “Lovely”). There is no moment where he’s jubilant and happy. He doesn’t have a feel good song, and yet every moment feels essential as a form of self-expression. He needed this as a form of therapy, in hopes that somebody would listen and help to make his life better. Considering that he would eventually collaborate with Future, a rapper that inspired him as a youth to do drugs, it was clear that he was no better than any of us. He was a teenager about to take over the world.
It would be wrong to not mention “Lucid Dreams,” which was his biggest hit. It’s a break-up song, and one of the most transparent looks at him emotionally. It’s said that this was the only song he wrote for the album. The rest exists in freestyle, though it’s difficult to tell. If you had to guess, the album is about a man who gets broken up with and goes through a downward spiral. Following the opener “All Girls Are the Same,” he turns to drugs and reckless endangerment after he finds it difficult to move on. It’s haunting in broad strokes, especially since there’s no real light at the end of the tunnel. Sure Juice WRLD makes it to the end, but not without the aforementioned suicide attempt.
But with “Lucid Dreams” we find him questioning a relationship in familiar negative terminology, calling his ex “plastic, fake.” More importantly, I think it embodies what was haunting about him as an artist. The lyrics have this self-awareness that is meshed into the darkness:
You left me falling and landing inside my graveI know that you want me deadI take prescriptions to make me feel a-okayI know it's all in my head
It’s not only in the lyrics, but the fact that he doesn’t sound like a rapper to me. He sounds alien. He sounds even more isolated from conventional music and sounds like a thought buried deep inside. The rhythmic structure reminds me of pop-punk. Adjust tempo and pitch with a traditional rock band combo and this wouldn’t be too out of place. Even then, the harmonies have this implicit crying that eats at you. Even as he curses out his ex, you are on his side because you buy into his sadness. We’ve all been there, and yet this feels like the darkest take on it.
Then again, having to admit it’s all in his head only makes the other 34 songs that I’ve listened to all the more tragic (also check out “Used To,” which is one of the best Drive Thru Records songs not released by the label). This isn’t an act. He’s really calling out for help, and I think it’s made worse because I genuinely recognize the talent in him. Lyrically he’s in tune with a perspective that could grow into something greater. Sonically, he’s presenting a hybrid that could make the next generation of rap-rock far more tolerable and interesting.
This is one of the unfortunate signs of me trying to be more open to modern music. I learn about tragic stories of a generation trying to survive. I suddenly get to interact with emo music as a concerned adult, wanting these poor kids to solve their problems. Maybe I will go further down the hole, though I worry that I’ll only be attracted to those who strike me as genuine. I can’t buy into people clearly doing it as a joke like whoever did “Gucci Gang.” There needs to be a soul there, and I can only hope that whoever I find captivates my soul as well as Juice WRLD.
I imagine that I will now be giving any of his remaining output a curious listen because to me he’s more than a shock rapper with a tattoo on his face. He clearly got into music to express himself in meaningful ways. The fact that his story ended so abruptly in ways that leave me feeling “missed opportunity” only makes me realize that my issue with modern music wasn’t necessarily the sound, but what people were saying inside of it.
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