Boy Meets WRLD
On the top floor of New York’s Dover Street Market, the realization that the universe rearranges itself around Juice WRLD hits me like a large gulp of promethazine. On the bottom floor of the retailer, guards are ordered to refuse entrance to customers with beverages; Juice oozes past them with a styrofoam cup fizzing with purple liquid. Inside, he shops like he’s a contestant on Supermarket Sweep. He grabs Maison Margiela sneakers, Marni sweatsuits, Prada sweaters, and OAMC overalls (retail price? Just about $5,500) and passes them off to the VIP shopper trailing him. (The clothes will materialize later in his room at the Dream Hotel.) Fans orbit him, waiting for a chance to however briefly penetrate his atmosphere. Even God dims the lights for the arrival of emo-rap’s dark prince, breaking a string of sunny days with rain that gushes like one of Juice’s heartbroken teenage fans. And when the universe does not anticipate Juice’s needs in time, he takes matters into his own hands. So, on the top floor of Dover Street Market, Juice woozily bends over and takes the blue and silver metallic Margiela clogs by the heels from their designated perch on a white for-display-only chair and slumps into it.
The cadre of handlers paid to make sure things go the 20-year-old’s way is not uncommon for someone of Juice’s rap-phenom stature. When I meet him in early April, he is one month removed from the release of his latest album Death Race for Love. At that moment, the album held the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart, which tracks the most popular albums by combining sales and streams. Goodbye & Good Riddance, the album Juice released last summer that contains his monster Sting-sampling hit “Lucid Dreams,” is simultaneously inside the chart’s Top 20 (Death Race currently sits at the No. 10). The day before we meet, the rapper visited the Brooklyn Museum where, in celebration of his status as a top-streamed artist, Spotify had erected a statue of him wearing Balenciaga Triple S sneakers in a gallery on the second floor.
But today is about shopping. Juice loves to shop. He misses the days when he could go to the mall unmolested. During the few hours we spend together, Juice is approached by a half-dozen fans who often try the same line: Hey, Juice, can I get a picture?! But that hasn’t necessarily stopped him from going shopping three or four times in the past month. He guesses he’s spent $200,000 combined on those trips. He’ll end up spending another $10,000 or so here today and then cruising over to Kith where he spends $38,971.86 as part of a Complex Sneaker Shopping video.
His first target at Dover Street Market: a pair of massively chunky silver metallic Margiela sneakers with a velcro closure that don’t come in his size because they’re women’s shoes. His VIP shopping buddy tells him there’s a similar men’s model. Juice doesn’t bother trying them on, let alone take a hard look at them. He’ll take them. Most of the day transpires similarly, the moments between Juice eyeing something he wants and it being his collapsed into a single moment. CDG Play polos, Craig Green coats, and Marni blue-and-red vertically striped knit shorts-and-shirt set swiftly come off the rack.
Much like his music, his shopping is guided by a know-it-when-he-feels-it style. “Everything on this rack looks like it belongs,” he says while gliding his hand over the hangers before he lands on the Marni set. “And then—bow!—Crip-Blood shirt.”
Even when things don’t go exactly his way, he finds way to remind himself and everyone around him that things are peachy: Like when Juice receives the crushing news that the pair of OAMC overalls he wanted to buy for himself and his girlfriend Ally Lotti—a tall woman with platinum-blonde hair and a pierced belly button wearing Burberry tights and carrying a Louis Vuitton purse—isn’t available in his size. For some reason, maybe in search of a pick-me-up, this inspires him to casually drop news that will shake the rap blogosphere: he and Young Thug are working on a joint project. “This is a song I made with Thug,” he says before queueing one up from a long list of tracks he has loaded onto his phone.
Thug is up first (I got a condo for my hoes / I put some diamonds on her toes) before he kicks it to Juice, who references a 2016 viral Internet moment: “Off of the perc and the Xan again, yeah / Walk in the store like a mannequin, yeah / Double G on me like mannequin, yeah / Make me feel like the mannequin challenge again.”)
Juice says he and Thug have about 10 songs completed. “It's going to happen,” he says, “Just whenever we put it out, I don’t know.”
He’s already put out a joint album with Future, and with one on the way with Thug, I ask him who he dreams of working with next.
He doesn’t wait a moment before he answers: “Lead singer of [hardcore band] Senses Fail.” Juice, presumably, has a whole Rolodex of rap A-listers at his disposal—at one point he tells me he’s been messaging with Pharrell—but he naturally gravitates towards music made to cry your eyes out to. And sure, to some, Future, Young Thug, and Senses Fail might play more like a game of One of These Things Is Not Like the Other. But the fact that Juice can make sense out of all three is, unquestionably, the secret to his success.
Earlier in the day, Juice and I are dueting, and I swear we’re nailing it. “I got your picture, I'm coming with you / Dear Maria, count me in,” we sing. “There's a story at the bottom of this bottle…” Maybe you recognize these as lyrics from pop-punk band All Time Low’s 2008 single “Dear Maria, Count Me In.”
Much of Juice WRLD’s popularity stems from his position as emo-rap’s figurehead. He operates within a nebulous space between moody rock/pop-punk and bars-fueled hip-hop—equal parts All-American Rejects, Fall Out Boy, and Future is a recipe that shouldn’t work, but has for Juice and a whole wave of artists including Lil Peep, Lil Uzi Vert, and Trippie Redd. Juice wasn’t first but he has leaned the hardest into his hurt feelings or at least ridden them the furthest up the charts. He makes music meant to be played in the bedrooms of heartbroken teens with crushes, VIP sections filled with bottle-service-indulging clubgoers, or the AirPods of nostalgic millennials. Juice has found success in that sweet spot because he fully embraces all of these emotions at once: we’ve all hit rock bottom before; we’ve all claimed something as OUR JAM while shimmying over to the dance floor. If you happen to be sad in the club, well, wooo!
The first time I heard Juice WRLD was last summer, but his music gave me an eerily familiar feeling. His music brings me back to childhood memories of putting on the explicit version of Blink-182’s Enema of the State when my parents weren’t home (it’s also Juice’s favorite Blink album). He’s the sound of getting rejected by your freshman-year crush and drowning yourself in All Time Low, Jimmy Eat World, and Green Day. I’m not saying this because Juice openly talks about some of these groups as influences (he does), nor because his music seems to satisfyingly click into place in my brain among all the other pop-punk junk I’ve already filled it with. Science is also on my side.
Kevin Holt, a PhD graduate of Columbia’s music theory program, says there are more than a couple overlaps between Juice’s music and The OC-era pop-punk. He points first to shared melodies—what he calls a “vocal leap”—that really puts Juice in the same pool as former Warped Tour bands. Juice’s go-to melody, Holt says, mirrors angsty radio hits of yore like All-American Rejects “Dirty Little Secret” and Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (Think: “My SHAAAAdow’s the only one that WALKS beside me”). He also points to Juice’s frequently choked-up vocals borrowed from heartbroken ballads. “Juice WRLD seems to lean in on breaks in his voice that effectively convey strain,” he says.
When Holt hears Juice’s Death Race track “Won’t Let Go,” for instance, he says he hears Weezer, All-American Rejects, Imogen Heap (remember this name), Jimmy Eat World, and a pulsing guitar reminiscent of the openings on “The Middle” and “Dear Maria, Count Me In.” Reading Juice that list is what initially prompts us to form our aforementioned a Cappella group.
Juice perks up as I rattle off those names, hearing artists he wasn’t even fully conscious he was referencing. His music is, at its core, the result of a 20-year-old’s flypaper approach. In middle school, he loaded Tony Hawk Downhill Jam into his Nintendo DS not to play but to listen to the game’s soundtrack of Nine Inch Nails, Weezer, Green Day, and Alien Ant Farm. He started listening to bands like Black Veil Brides because a fifth-grade crush was into that type of chord-heavy, soaked-in-sadness rock. He discovered Imogen Heap during summer school while surfing YouTube comments on a Clams Casino song that sampled the singer. Present-day Juice seems to spit out a roughly three-minute concoction of all these influences scrambled together. The music has proven uncategorizable in complicated ways.
The gloomy day I meet Juice happens to be the day after Lil Nas X drops his Billy Ray Cyrus-featuring remix of “Old Town Road.” That song, a twangy country and hip-hop mash-up, originally climbed the Billboard charts for each of those genres before being suddenly dropped from the former. Billboard claimed the song did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music;” most everyone else thought it had a lot to do with the fact Lil Nas X was black. The remix with Cyrus dared Billboard to deny Nas X a spot on the country charts. Billboard blinked, and the fans would not be denied: it's been at the top of Billboard's Hot 100, fending off fierce competition from Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, and Taylor Swift, for seven straight weeks. For Juice WRLD, who feels his music deserves a spot on the rock charts, it’s an issue close to his heart.
“Some people don't get the credit that they deserve strictly based off the color of their skin,” he says. “And technically speaking, my people made up those same genres. They created that sound in the first place.” While Lil Nas X tiptoes around the idea that race played a factor in his removal from the charts, Juice wades right in. It has everything to do, he says, with Billboard ghettoizing him.
“A lot of people subconsciously are stuck in that mindset where they think caucasian people are better than minorities,” he says. “I know it burns some people inside to even see a black face next to their favorite artists. Or next to them, if they are the artists.”
Billboard’s insistence on antiquated genre line-drawing is, suffice it to say, falling out of style fast. Juice is only the beginning of a new generation of artists that have never known life without the Internet, without the ability to transition from Clams Casino into Imogen Heap. Juice’s great talent is not knowing that he’s doing it at all. “It's kind of subconscious,” he says. “It happens on its own.” That kind of born-with-it facility, followed to its logical conclusion, suggests that the future of music will be full of acts channelling Spotify’s boundless library and distilling their findings into music that offers a hand to everyone. Or, in other words, that the future of music will look a whole lot like Juice.
During my time with Juice, he is virtually inseparable from girlfriend Lotti. I constantly spot them sneaking off to smooch. Juice, in the middle of answering questions, reaches out his hand, tattooed with the phrase "I'm Sorry," for hers like he’s Jack bobbing in the sea, about to float away without her. The behavior fit nicely with the vision of Juice I’ve imagined in my head: someone who pulls from the extremes of his emotions, whether that’s cratering heartbreak or bloodthirsty infatuation (“If she leaves, I'ma kill her,” he raps at a particularly low point on “Fine China”). These are the sort of emotional poles Juice bounces between and often mines while making hit songs and albums.
Early on in our interview, still on the top floor of Dover Street, Juice WRLD pulls out his phone; he wants to show me something. Have I heard the leaked Imogen Heap song “A New Kind of Love”? He presses play and starts singing along. “This song is so fire,” he says. Then he starts to reminisce.
He and Lotti had started messaging on Instagram a year ago, after she’d slid into his DMs: “Good music,” Juice recalls. “Keep it up, kid.” Juice, a famous musician with a mega-hit under his belt, was reduced to a hard-crushing 19-year-old kid. A few months later, while on tour, he drives to Providence, Rhode Island to meet Lotti for the first time. It’s raining, because of course it’s raining, and on the drive to her hotel Juice puts on Imogen Heap’s “A New Kind of Love” and lets the butterflies flutter around in his stomach. They meet. It goes well, he thinks. “I was going to leave the hotel room, write her a note: ‘Did you like me?’ Yes or no, circle, and just slide that under the door,” he says. “If you like me, still be here when I get back upstairs. And if you don't, I'm sorry. You're pretty. Bye!”
She didn’t leave. They spent the next four days together. Lotti was living in Memphis at the time. Owned a house there, actually, where she lived with her two dogs. She hasn’t been back since. Shortly after those four days, she moved out to L.A. with Juice. She had all her stuff, including her two pups, shipped out.
“You guys think it's funny but it's how it happened,” she says while Juice playfully pokes at her stomach.
That story—all his stories, his shopping, his rocket-like rise—means that I believe him when Juice says that this last year has taken on a dreamy surreal state. Like he could wake up at any minute back in his bedroom in Chicago without any of the hits, without the number-one album, the fame, and the fortune. And most crucially, in the kind of twist that would fit in a Juice WRLD song, without Lotti. “I would instantly start looking for her,” he says. He drafts a hypothetical message as back-to-the-future Juice: “Like, ‘Yo, you may not realize it now, but later on…’" It makes sense: you don’t make music this straightforwardly aching by focusing on becoming a star. You focus on the girl, the heartbreak, the does-she-like-me-like-me of it all. The hits are nice, but the heartbreak is the thing.
Originally Appeared on GQ
