Lil Peep, the subject of the similar posthumous documentary Everybody’s Everything, died of an accidental overdose just after his 21st birthday in 2017 the rapper XXXTentacion, controversial for his domestic abuse charges, was murdered at 20 in 2018. His first music video, for All Girls Are The Same, was released in February 2018 to overnight success within a year, he had moved to Los Angeles, scored a record deal at Interscope for $3m, topped the Billboard charts, and occupied the Gen Z zeitgeist just as emo rap lost its forebears. Raised in the south suburbs of Chicago by a single mother, Juice posted an EP, JuiceWRLD 9 9 9, on SoundCloud in 2017, the year he graduated from high school, which caught the attention of Chicago music figures Gmoney and G Herbo, who both appear in the film. He was also a kid struggling with longstanding depression and anxiety exacerbated by the hyper-onset of fame. To quote Lucid Dreams, his breakout teenage breakup anthem from 2018: “You were my everything / Thoughts of a wedding ring / Now I’m just better off dead.” In both the hyperbolic stakes of his lyrics and his signature aching delivery, Juice’s music embodied ripping your heart open and throwing blood on the wall. He was an enthusiastic artist on the vanguard of blending drug-infused rap with the pop-punk influences of Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco and Blink-182. He was a virtual spigot of rhymes, in love with and committed to his girlfriend, the influencer Ally Lotti, a near constant presence at his side. The person Oliver and co-editor Joe Kehoe got to know through hundreds of hours of footage was sweet, goofy, anxious about losing himself to superstardom.
Oliver never got the chance to meet Juice he came aboard the project after the singer’s death, distilling behind the scenes footage shot by videographers Steve Cannon and Chris Long into a loose, unvarnished portrait of the superstar in the final year and a half of his life – his creative powers turbocharged, his demons dissembling into full-blown addiction. “For so many people who tend to bottle things up or don’t have the language to discuss something … to be able to see somebody who is willing to do that and can make incredible music with that, I think that was something really special.” “He was both willing and able to discuss the things that he was going through without a filter and without shame or regard for how it was received,” Tommy Oliver, the film’s director, told the Guardian.
#LIL PEEP FUNERAL PHOTO SERIES#
And as Into the Abyss, the final instalment of HBO’s Music Box series (which also includes Jagged and Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage) illustrates, through archival footage of his near-ceaseless freestyling and testaments from collaborators, Juice was a singular talent, both in the prolificness of his output and the rawness of his lyrics. The brief life and career of Juice WRLD was one of mind-boggling singularity: one of the most vertiginous rockets to superstardom, even by internet standards one of the most ubiquitous and influential artists of his generation, with streams in the billions for a career that lasted barely two years. 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. 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. The five-minute freestyle is an arresting introduction to Juice’s prodigious talent for rhyming “from the dome” that now doubles as an elegy.
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