![]() It’s the sonic (Black) trauma industrial complex: make engrossing music about hopeless conditions, elevate said narratives to the mainstream, continue to sing trauma songs with the experience of wealth and celebrity, roll the dice on whether or not one survives. We keep seeing the ending in the opening credits. The subject matter within renders me incapable of thorough criticism because there’s only so much colorful shit to say when my generation’s collectively watched several rappers complete their career arcs in five years or less. Legends Never Die is the first posthumous Juice WRLD offering. It’s what the screens can do: lend us immortality, accessible (seemingly) in perpetuity, and accelerated once our lives are either under siege or severed short. None of them had plaques, yet all of them were at least a little famous beyond their neighborhoods. I hate rapper death: the inevitability, the fragile youth, my own proximity to such a particular peril by way of the friends I’ve lost. I couldn’t help but imagine the hundreds huddled around their luggage, the loose eyes wandering past the Dunkin kiosk, the coming and going that continued on the day Juice came home. I landed at Midway, returning from LAX, six days after Jarad Higgins landed there for the last time. I longed to see the King of Calumet Park while he was alive, yet never seized the moment. Then, for reasons left unconfirmed, the prophecy fulfilled itself at Midway Airport. He prophesied his end as he narrated the tragic endings of his contemporaries. Like so many sad young men on microphones, he pined for peace and found relief in what would end him. ![]() No matter how redundant his vocal affectations or clumsy his lyrical execution, Juice WRLD became unavoidable, if not undeniable. He was a child of Kanye and Keef as much as Billy Idol as I saw him, he was an unlikely symbol of mainstream Black rock reclamation in real-time, with no juvenile politics and bleeding hearts left behind. By extension, he became champion of the generation of digital scene kids… more precisely, all the young niggas who loved Paramore and Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, sonic color lines be damned. As a stalwart son of the new emo, Juice WRLD catapulted into international stardom on the backs of many tortured souls turned career crooners. ![]()
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