7/5/2023 0 Comments Juice wrodOn “Legends,” Juice sings, “They tell me I’ma be a legend, I don’t want that title now / ’Cause all the legends seem to die out.” XXXTentacion was shot by robbers at the age of 20, and Lil Peep died of an overdose two weeks after his 21st birthday. While his drug use was hardly a secret, Juice’s death still sent shockwaves through the music industry, especially in light of the then recent deaths of two contemporaries, XXXTentacion and Lil Peep, both of whom Juice had memorialized on Too Soon, a two-track EP he released in June 2018. “Man, you’re taking this a little too far right now,” his recording engineer and arguably his closest musical confidante, Max Lord, remembers thinking at the time. His music stood out for its rawness and emotional vulnerability: In the intro to “Lean Wit Me,” off 2018’s platinum-selling Goodbye & Good Riddance debut, he sang, “Drugs got me sweatin’ but the room gettin’ colder / Lookin’ at the devil and the angel on my shoulder / Will I die tonight? I don’t know, is it over? / Lookin’ for my next high, I’m lookin’ for closure.” As 2019 neared an end, those in Juice’s inner circle were becoming increasingly alarmed by his levels of drug consumption. In the three years since he started releasing music to SoundCloud, Juice had found huge success with a tender-voiced combination of melodic hip-hop, emo, and pop-punk-nine months before his death, his second album, Death Race for Love, debuted at number one on Billboard’s chart. In two weeks, he was set to enter a rehab program, but first he headed from Los Angeles home to Chicago, accompanied by a handful of friends and security guards, to celebrate his 21st birthday with a game of paintball. It was a habit, he said in a radio interview, that started as early as his freshman year of high school and continued as he discovered the drug-saturated music of rappers like Future. Jarad Anthony Higgins, as his birth certificate read, had long been an open wound on wax and in interviews about his battles with prescription drugs like Xanax and Percocet, and his struggles with mental health in general. When Juice WRLD boarded a private jet in early December 2019, for what would turn out to be the last flight of his young life, his friends and family had become increasingly alarmed about his drug intake.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |