An
HBO documentary shares the
Rapper and singer’s ascent filled with anxiety, depression and drug use before he died at 21
Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss, the HBO documentary on one of Gen Z’s biggest
music stars, opens with the late poster child of “SoundCloud rap” freestyling straight to camera nudged only by a woozy, hymned beat. A 19-year-old Juice, real name Jarad Anthony Higgins, appears at ease toggling between disconsolation and winking bravado off the cuff: “I gotta admit myself, I’m on these drugs, feel like I can’t save myself,” he says, pausing for a cigarette pull. “Nobody’s ever felt the pain I’ve felt / so I share it / put it out to the whole world, I ain’t embarrassed.”
The five-minute freestyle is an arresting introduction to Juice’s prodigious talent for rhyming “from the dome” that now doubles as an elegy. In the early hours of 8 December 2019, less than a week after his 21st birthday, Juice WRLD died of an accidental overdose of oxycodone and codeine shortly after landing at Chicago’s Midway airport. Two years later, he remains one of the most popular music artists in the world – according to Spotify, the third most streamed in the US of 2021, behind
Drake and
Taylor Swift – and a beloved icon of a genre whose stars burned bright and too fast.