![]() His breakthrough single, “Lucid Dreams,” is typical of his work. These are, largely, the textures that would show up in the music Higgins would later make as Juice WRLD: an overt pop sensibility that would lapse at times into the style and sound of contemporary street rap. Then came true-school, battle-bred rappers of the era (Cassidy, Meek Mill), then Future, Odd Future, and Chief Keef, all of which mingled in Higgins’s brain with bands like Fall Out Boy, Blink-182, and Panic! at the Disco. Music was Trojan-horsed into his house through video games and older cousins - pop-punk and Cash Money, respectively. He grew up in a single-parent household with his mother, who initially forbade rap music. Higgins was born in Chicago proper two months after Mobstability came out and moved to its south suburbs when he was a toddler. His resonance seemed to highlight just how desperate many young people have become to dissociate from an increasingly fraught world. But Higgins tapped a vein that made him genuinely and uniquely relatable to his young audience, allowing him to sell groaningly cheesy lines about teenage heartbreak as something more sinister and ones about an inevitable death as somehow charming. It could feel, from afar, like he was constructed in a lab to succeed in the new major-label economy, which measures attention first and rewards artists who are able to see clearly where audiences will be in the immediate future. He could drone like Future, yelp like Lil Uzi Vert he was a a compulsive oversharer who cultivated just the right kind of very-online mystery. A year later, he had signed not only to an imprint run by fellow Chicagoan Lil Bibby, but to Interscope, for $3 million.Īt times, Juice WRLD seemed like an algorithmic end point, someone fluent in social-media syntaxes and the popular styles at rap radio. When he self-released his 9 9 9 EP (“ I took the hell I was going through (666) and flipped it over into something positive (999)”) in the summer of 2017, he was a complete unknown toward the end of the 2016–2017 school year, when he was 18, he played his first live show, a set at a friend’s birthday party for which he was paid $100. ![]() Over the last two years, Higgins had emerged from t he SoundCloud morass to become one of the most-streamed rappers in America, a genuine phenomenon especially among teenage listeners. TMZ reports that he was bleeding from the mouth as paramedics arrived. Higgins, better known as the rapper Juice WRLD, was rushed to the hospital after suffering a “medical emergency” at Chicago Midway, where he had recently stepped off a flight from California. On Sunday, Jarad Anthony Higgins was pronounced dead at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a suburb of his native Chicago. ![]() What will endure about Juice WRLD records is the feeling that this incredible darkness and the willingness to be open to love and heartbreak are two edges of the same knife. ![]()
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