“I wasn’t happy about that,” Wallace says. And having the awareness of how great the gift he had was, but not being clouded by it.” So excited and having so much fun with it. A lot of artists see it as clocking in or having to chase a hit. It’s not too often that artists are excited to record, even if they’re great. Kudo describes Juice’s insatiable desire to record as “like a faucet that’s stuck on. I started it for, and Juice went in and made it his own.” “We made an amazing song, and it’s not something we could have done on purpose. Seconds after meeting her, Juice went into the booth, “and he just started freestyling,” Kudo remembers. Producer Rex Kudo recalls the first time he met Juice at Metropolis Studios in London, where Kudo was working on a song with the artist M.I.A. Juice had the rare ability to freestyle lyrics and melody with intense emotion-a feat he famously demonstrated for more than an hour on Tim Westwood’s British radio show, in 2018. “And it wasn’t like he had dumb lyrics-his shit made you feel something.” “Yeah, we recorded eight songs that first day,” says Blanco, still palpably amazed. And then he just says, ‘Pick the best parts you like.’ ” Juice recorded several songs in that one session with Blanco, and he would do the same with numerous other collaborators. “And he did three more takes and did three more hit songs over the same beat. “He hears one second of the beat, he goes in and not only does he come up with the lyrics and the melody, but he does the entire song in one take,” Blanco recalls. “Some of the hardest shit I ever heard from a kid.” The songwriter-producer Benny Blanco, who discovered Juice on Instagram and immediately proceeded to set up a recording session with him in L.A., recalls being blown away by his ability to craft a song on the spot. “The first time I heard his music, it was just crazy,” says G Herbo, his longtime friend and a star of the Chicago drill music scene. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” says Cole Bennett, who directed several of Juice’s biggest music videos, including his breakout song, “All Girls Are the Same.” “I feel like he was just getting to new levels of his creativity.”Īlmost everyone who met Juice recognized his immense potential from the outset. “SoundCloud rap,” as their subgenre was known, was characterized by extremely raw and oftentimes tragic songs, but just when the sound was moving toward the center of music, its most promising artists were gone. On “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.
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