JuiceWRLD is still alive

 But not like you'd expect. 

Almost two years have passed since the tragic death of rapper JuiceWRLD, originally born Jarad Higgins in Chicago in 1998.

Born in a conservative family, his mother wouldn’t let him listen to HipHop so he grew up listening to rock and punk bands like Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Blink 182, and Panic at the Disco. 

In a world that’s used to lyrics about luxury cars and gang violence, his songs, he decided, would be passionate,  full of frankness and vulnerability that listeners battling similar emotional storms might be able to find comfort in. He poured out his anxieties, fears, and insecurities in harrowing detail, painting pictures of depression—low-energy, isolating, destructive depression—  and filled a void that the conventional rap/HipHop music had failed to relate to. This solidified him  as one of the major players in the emerging “emo rap” genre, which had just lost XXXTentacion and Lil Peep in the years prior.

Earlier this year an AI model was trained on Juice's Voice

In 2017 JuiceWRLD joined the collective “Internet Money” and released his first full lenght EP “999”. This album featured his top song (currently has 1.7 billion streams on spotify) “Lucid Dreams”, which  was composed using a reworked guitar sample from Sting’s “The shape of my heart”. Later, Sting said in an interview that “Lucid Dreams” was his favourite rework of his original song, consolidating JuiceWRLD as an emergent talent across all genres. Rolling Stone mag even called his use of guitar loops his secret weapon for success. Analog recordings of guitars provide a human touch to songs that are otherwise impossible to achieve.

Still alive in 2023 

However, his rising career also provided more access to drugs and his inner circle began to worry about his health, constantly fearing that he might cross a line. His closest friends agreed that Juice hid how many pills he took, and begrudgingly conviced him to go into rehab. He was scheduled to start December 22, 2019.

When the plane touched down in Chicago in the early morning hours of December 8, federal authorities swarmed the aircraft, having received a tip that there were narcotics and illegal guns on the plane. The official cause of death, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, was an accidental overdose of codeine and oxycodone. He was just 21 years old. 

However he keeps topping the charts with new songs even away from this earth. Allegedly there are still over 3000 unreleased recordings. Fans were given gifts in July 2020 with Legends Never Die, Juice WRLD’s first posthumous album, and then again in 2022 with Fighting Demons. With two more albums in the works, we can confidently say that he is still alive in the charts, at least for a while. 

On top of his recordings, the new hot topic that has been impacting all industry made an appeareance in the first months of 2023: an artificial intelligence model trained with Juice's voice. 
This opens a whole new door of how can fans can keep their favorite artists alive and "collaborate" with them in a way, although we are still in a very gray area until all the legal terms are sorted out. 

If you are inspired by Juice's spirit, there are a bunch of free guitar samples that will bring his spirit to your beats.