If you haven’t yet listened to Juice WRLD’s music, it’s time to get familiar with the young Chicago rapper. Since the release of “Lucid Dreams,” Juice has been making a serious amount of noise and now, people are starting to take notice on a larger scale. With the underground and SoundCloud realms on lock for the last few months, the 19-year-old transitioned into a larger role, signing to Interscope to the tune of $3 million and releasing his new project Goodbye & Good Riddance to much acclaim this week. As the hype continues to build, Juice sat down with Mass Appeal to speak a little about his influences, the origins of his name and how exactly he took over the world.
With his introduction to the Billboard Hot 100, the young Chicagoan is quickly rising up the ranks and, as he does so, he’s allowing his fanbase to get to know him a little more. Speaking with Mass Appeal, Juice revealed that he used to have Tupac’s high-top “Juice” haircut with a clean line in the front, sticking with it for his name. As for “WRLD,” he thinks it came from a literal misspelling of the word, saying that in his attempt to take over the world, he ended up embracing it.
With his influences spanning from the Wu-Tang Clan to Fall Out Boy, Black Sabbath, and Megadeth, Juice has clearly listened to a wide range of music in his time, which comes through in his sound. As one of the members of an emo-rap community that continues to grow, Juice WRLD is on a serious come-up. Check out the full interview below.
Jarad Higgins’ career was a corrective. Growing up, the rapper and singer best known as Juice WRLD listened to hip-hop like everyone else in his hometown of Homewood, Illinois (albeit behind his religious mother’s back). Though the music thrilled him, as a depression-prone teenager, he couldn’t connect to the lyrics about luxury, fast cars and mansions. So when Higgins started recording demos on his iPhone while still in high school, his aim was to fill that void. His songs, he decided, would be impassioned blood-lettings full of frankness and vulnerability that listeners battling similar emotional storms might be able to find comfort in. “Everybody’s got pain,” he said when I interviewed him for the Guardian earlier this year. “Depression, addiction, heartbreak: these are human characteristics.”
Higgins released two albums, two mixtapes and multiple EPs that interrogated those characteristics before his death from a reported seizure in Chicago this weekend. In 2017, the breakout anthems All Girls Are the Same and the Sting-sampling Lucid Dreams propelled him to the pinnacle of emo-rap, a sub-genre he helped tailor into one of the decade’s defining new sounds. Born on SoundCloud, it infused hip-hop with 00s rock heartache: two genres that Higgins, who grew up idolising Kurt Cobain as much as Kanye West, knew intimately. He found the angst he couldn’t see in rap in bands such as Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco: Higgins was perfectly placed to join the likes of Philadelphia rapper Lil Uzi Vert in making emo-rap infamous.
Juice WRLD: All Girls Are the Same – videoAs the popularity of emo-rap rose, so did Higgins, to the brink of genuine superstardom. He found himself entertaining arenas with Nicki Minaj and recording collaborative projects with Future – A-listers whose ranks Higgins seemed primed to join. Death Race for Love, his second album, hit No 1 in the US following its release in March. The album struck a chord with its tormented Auto-Tuned melodies and immersive melancholy moods. The planetary part of his stage name always seemed appropriate: on fan-favourite tracks such as Robbery and Empty, he constructed fraught, fragile other-worlds of knife-edge anxiety and sensitivity.
Death Race’s success sparked something of a referendum on emo-rap’s influence on America’s youth. Some saw Higgins, Lil Uzi Vert and co as offering a positive outlet for young male listeners, often hesitant to share their mental health troubles. To others, tracks like Numb the Pain, full of allusions to self-harm and using narcotics as coping mechanisms, were guilty of deepening existing problems among his target demographic. In 2018, emo-rap was accused of “glorifying” drugs such as fentanyl and Xanax by the US Drug Enforcement Agency following the death of the Long Beach rapper Lil Peep and troubling increases in opioid use by teenagers, allegations that Higgins objected to when it came to his own music. “It’s therapy,” he told me – catharsis for both himself and those who listen. I came away from my interview with Higgins struck by his earnestness and family values. He was surrounded by his long-term girlfriend, a gang of friends and, endearingly, his mum, who helped him factcheck details about his childhood.
Juice WRLD: 'There is just so much trash in rap'
In the aftermath of his death, some outlets have been quick to run stories positing that Higgins “predicted” his own death: “What’s the 27 club? / We ain’t making it past 21,” he rapped on 2018 track Legends. But that overlooks not only Higgins’ repeated, poetic confrontation of mortality in his songs (“Lay me down to sleep with my casket closed,” he rapped on Death Race track Rider) but also his evident hunger to build a long-lasting and boundary-busting career. When we met, he lit up when talking about the hardcore album he hoped to make and how he had been studying screaming tutorials on YouTube in preparation. He also talked about finding new ways of reaching people who might benefit from his message: that there’s no shame in vulnerability and nothing to be gained from pushing your feelings down.
Higgins’ death cuts short a career that was just gathering momentum – a depressingly familiar story in recent years for young rap fans. The loss of Juice WRLD follows the losses of fellow rappers Nipsey Hussle, Mac Miller and the aforementioned Lil Peep, as well as the controversial XXXtentacion. For fans of Higgins’ unapologetically emotive sound – heartbroken anthems that trembled with trauma and reached millions – it will hurt to never know the heights he might have scaled.
Two years on from the harrowing day on which Chicago’s emo-rap hero Juice WRLD sadly died from an overdose, the music world still feels the tremors of his absence. Jarad Higgins, who was just 21 years old when he passed, turned his legions of fans onto his ’00s emo influences while also dubbing himself the “codeine Cobain”. Touring to sold-out crowds and topping the charts with his second album ‘Death Race For Love’, Juice WRLD was taken from the planet as he was on the cusp of greatness. But that hasn’t stopped him from being one of today’s biggest stars.
He allegedly left over 200 songs in the vault after his passing, according to a tweet from his manager, Chicago drill star-turned-label Grade A label founder Lil Bibby. Juice’s first posthumous album, ‘Legends Never Die’, topped the US and UK album charts with his inimitable brand of rock-infused bounciness. Now a new documentary, Into The Abyss, detailing the life and aftermath of Juice WRLD, accompanies another posthumous album, ‘Fighting Demons’, which NME called “evidence of a nuanced, complex artist whose legacy is stunning in its richness”. Here’s why that legacy endures…
Even his posthumous releases go hard
Juice WRLD’s posthumous music has been of the same calibre as the music he released while alive. And there aren’t many artists you can say that about. He was able to rattle off endless feel-good rap hits with such ease and talent that transcends his lifespan. Just look at all the crazy collaborations to come out after his death. Juice WRLD was hitting it big before he passed, featuring on songs with Ellie Goulding, Future and more, but his posthumous features are even wilder: he finally got to feature on a song with his idol Eminem; ‘Godzilla’ tops both of the rapper’s Spotify popular track lists, with almost 800 million plays.
Then there was the tune he made with his friend and tenured hitmaker Benny Blanco. Juice was alive when they made ‘Graduation’, but had passed by the time it was released this year. Speaking about Juice and 6 Dogs, another SoundCloud rapper who tragically passed too soon, and with whom the producer collaborated on posthumously released work, Benny told NME: “We’re making music, and then we went out to dinner. We talked about anxieties – I’ve been to their houses. It wasn’t transactional. So [their deaths] hit me hard. We had some great music, and I want it to be the way they would want to hear it and make it as good as I possibly can.”
His freestyling ability remains unmatched
Juice WRLD’s superior freestyling skills seemed effortless. On the spot, Juice showcased one of the hallmarks of true hip-hop by rapping stellar verses off the top of his dome. And this could go on forever; check out his Capital Xtra freestyle on Tim Westwood’s show. It’s over an hour of Juice rapping over Eminem beats – you could never get bored of it. Few could match this spontaneity, which has mesmerised rap fans and his peers. Long-time collaborator Taz Taylor of Internet Money summed it up when he told NME: “Literally, when he’s on a record, he doesn’t stop”.
Other great freestyles to remember Juice by: his appearance on Fire In The Booth, a British freestyle platform that is a staple in UK rap culture, and ‘Evil Twins’, a freestyle he created with his best friend, Ski Mask The Slump God, during an interview with YouTube channel Montreality, which fossilised their amazing friendship shortly before Juice died .
As does the emotional intelligence he displayed
With his amazingly captivating rap skills, Juice WRLD was able to inspire a generation of kids to tap into their emotions. Juice spoke openly about his pain and heartbreaks, which became signature themes in his music – at odds with rap’s typical braggadocio. It’s his ability to narrate the inner turmoil of many kids – who perhaps couldn’t speak up for themselves – that won the hearts of a generation. Punk newcomer Jxdn spoke to NME in February about his love for Juice WRLD, describing his attendance at one of Higgins’ shows as life-changing: “It’s his authenticity. Not only is he not scared to be authentic in his words and how he delivers it; he doesn’t want to do anything else… He laid out his life for people to connect to him.”
His style was super-diverse
As well as helping kids out with his emotional intelligence, Juice WRLD was on the frontier of this new punk-rap wave that we see today. In love with emo bands such as Panic At The Disco! Escape The Fate and My Chemical Romance, to name a few, Jarad Higgins seemed like the school outcast who was in love with punk and rap music. Naturally, as he’d grown up listening to this cocktail of genres, his music ended up being stunningly reflective. Want proof? Check out the posthumous DJ Scheme collaboration ‘Buck 50’, which came out this year, and most enduringly his Billboard-charting, SoundCloud-topping, Sting-sampling ‘Lucid Dreams’, with its lyrics “I don’t know how to feel / Swallowing all these pills”
He helped to coin genres such as ‘bedroom rap’ and ’emo-rap’, which are still thriving today
‘Lucid Dreams’ pioneered so much more than Juice WRLD could have probably imagined. Going multi-Platinum in 12 countries and reaching Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, he proved that the internet kids who have learned how to make studios in their bedrooms, out of sheer convenience, could become true chart contenders.
‘Lucid Dreams’ was produced by Nick Mira, also of Internet Money fame, who created beats in his room to sell on kids on YouTube and other platforms. He sent beats over to Juice after meeting him through a mutual friend and producer, Sidepce, and the two developed Higgins’ signature down-in-the-dump breakup songs. Being emotive D.I.Y musicians, they both paved the way for more expressive kids and moodier sounds to become the norm in mainstream music. And thus emo-rap and bedroom rap have become popular sub-genres in the pop world.
Rebellion never gets old
Juice WRLD had such a IDGAF attitude to the world and establishment – unless it was about his craft, of course! He was such a free spirit, a quality that made his fans fall in love with the charismatic Chicagoan. For example, he always had a quirky sense of style that went against most conventions of rap fashion: check out our stellar collection of pictures from Juice’s March 2019 NME cover story, when he mixed preppy styles with basketball shirts. And he wasn’t afraid top speak his mind. Cancel culture? In that interview, he told NME that we shouldn’t be so quick to condemn others: “Our heads are so imperfect; we drown ourselves in this imperfection. We don’t know what imperfection is.” No wonder he referred to himself as an “old soul”.
He’s immortalised online
People don’t often stop to think about how exposed you can be as a musician with a social media account, or out here doing interviews. As as we’ve seen, Juice wasn’t afraid of putting himself out there. And that’s also partly why the legacy of Juice WRLD lives on. Go back to our cover story, his interviews with influential podcast NoJumper and scroll through Instagram pages dedicated to his life and you’ll find a piece of Juice WRLD’s story to connect with. Blowing up on the career-changing, cultural taste-making platform Lyrical Lemonade, Juice WRLD always knew how to get his face in the coolest places. Thank goodness: he’s been immortalised forever.
He’s the Godfather of SoundCloud, which he revived
With songs such as ‘Lucid Dreams’, which was a SoundCloud sleeper hit in 2017, Juice reinforced SoundCloud’s notoriety for harbouring astonishing raw talent. The golden age of SoundCloud may have birthed Gen-Z icons such as Playboi Carti and Trippie Redd in the mid-10s, but many fans stopped checking on SoundCloud as interest in the platform dimmed. But with Juice WRLD’s fresh face topping the charts thanks to his debut album ‘Goodbyes & Good Riddance’ its aforementioned follow-up ‘Death Race For Love’, it seemed you couldn’t count Soundcloud out. Through Juice’s success we’ve seen other rising superstars such Lil Tecca, The Kid LAROI, iann dior and more show off their talents to a wider audience.
The coolest friends are keeping his name alive
Speaking of those SoundCloud kids: a lot of them still keep his name alive. Some, like Jxdn, watched and were influenced by him from afar, but there are also those rappers and fellow musicians who worked so closely with Juice WRLD that their stories about the once-in-a-generation talent will keep his memory alive. Australian star The Kid LAROI was once constantly compared to Juice, as he also makes emotional music and was signed to Grade A Productions. LAROI told NME last year: “I love Juice – shout out to my brother, RIP, one of the greatest of all time. He was obviously a close friend of mine and a mentor… He is one of the greatest of all time… He is one of the people who made me who I am today.”
He’s the Gen-Z Kid Cudi
Given that he mixed everything together, Juice WRLD’s musical delivery was almost crooner-like most the time, reminiscent of a young Kid Cudi. Let’s think about that for a moment. A revered rap star who flipped hip-hop production and rap delivery on its head to inspire a generation – we could be talking about Cudi or Juice here. And despite the fact that Cudi keeps us waiting between releases and Juice’s was tragically cut short, both have such have impactful discographies that aren’t diluted by rubbish throwaway efforts for clout or money. There’s a lesson in there for young, emerging artists.
In fact, rising Puerto Rico-born star iann dior told NME last November: “If I had to say what my role is, I would say I’m picking up where Juice WRLD left off.” Able to tap into the hearts of a generation by cathartically divulging his inner-most feelings, Juice tackled the usually unspeakable hidden demons that affect many out there. Defying the harmful myth that men shouldn’t be emotional, he knocked down barriers around mental health and, like any true great rapper, gave a voice to the voiceless. He truly proves that a legend can never die.