JuiceWRLD is still alive

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. 

As a kid he learned to play the piano, the guitar, drums and trumpet. Music was the temple to express himself and his struggles with mental health issues and prescription drugs. Later, in 2015, he started rapping, creating his own music with his cellphone and laptop and then uploading the tracks to soundcloud.

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.

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.

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. As officers searched the plane, Juice suffered a seizure and was then transported to Advocate Christ Medical Center, but he was pronounced dead en route. According to JuiceWRLD photographer Chris Long, “J did not swallow a bunch of pills because the police were at the airport. We gave no fucks about them being there. He could have flushed them down the toilet if he cared,” he wrote on Twitter.

“J was just hooked bad. The amount he took daily was absurd and he hid how much he really took from mostly everyone. Everyone around him tried really hard to get him to slow down. When he agreed to rehab it was because he wanted to lower his tolerance. He didn’t want to stop.”
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. 

Fans were given a gift in July 2020 with Legends Never Die, Juice WRLD’s first posthumous album. The album included previously unreleased voicemails and phone calls from the late artist, as well as 18 songs that had never been released. In August, The Weeknd released a single with Juice Wrld, titled “Smile.”
Juice WLRD is still on our minds, and his voice still in our heads, especially with the recent release, “Godzilla.” The Eminem song featuring Juice is sure to be one of many more to come. Allegedly, there are around 2000 songs waiting to be released and many artists eager to collaborate.

Our small tribute to JuiceWRLD's talent that departed way too soon is our new product "999", sad guitar loops, or better said, JuiceWRLD type guitar loops. We were inspired by his essence and hope that you, too, can carry along his spirit in your tracks. We hope that this emotional guitar sample pack help keep his spirit alive in the inspiration of million other artists.