Juice WRLD and the Tragic End of the SoundCloud Rap Era

Last year, Juice WRLD emerged as SoundCloud rap’s best hope, and also its eulogist.

In June, his breakout hit, “Lucid Dreams” — built on a sample of Sting’s “Shape of My Heart” — reached the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, where it remained for months. It was beatific catharsis, a perfect balance of insolence and agony. And it was the purest pop distillation of the pugnacious sound that had been developing on the streaming site for almost three years.

Later that month, Juice WRLD released “Legends,” a mournful rumination that touched on the deaths of two of the SoundCloud generation’s creative pioneers, XXXTentacion and Lil Peep. “They tell me I’ma be a legend,” he sang. “I don’t want that title now/’Cause all the legends seem to die out.”

On Sunday morning, Juice WRLD died suddenly in Oak Lawn, Ill. He was 21.

Juice WRLD, XXXTentacion, Lil Peep: Together, these three artists, who began releasing music as teenagers, told the story of a sound that began as a renegade movement and was beginning to find ways to re-engineer pop’s center. Beginning in 2015, the hip-hop emerging from SoundCloud — which imported punchiness from pop-punk and emo, and incorporated both rapping and singing — was emotionally serrated, but also sneakily melodic. It felt like a rupture that would realign hip-hop with rawness and also, thanks to the seamlessness of the internet, push these dizzyingly tragic songs toward pop’s center. These three artists, more than any of their contemporaries, embodied the sound’s ambitions and its potential.

And yet the scene was disintegrating seemingly as quickly as it was being built. Lil Peep died of an accidental drug overdose in 2017, at 21; XXXTentacion was 20 when he was shot and killed in the parking lot of a Florida motor sports store. With Juice WRLD’s death, the distorted blend of singing and rapping, boasting and pain, that shaped SoundCloud rap feels like it’s reached its terrible conclusion. Rather than continuing to shape the sound of pop’s next generation, it will likely be remembered with a combination of awe and regret. How did something so radical and powerful implode so swiftly?

It is awful to watch a promising scene crumble into nothingness. It’s more awful to know that there are systems in place to quickly extract maximum value from the art produced by its creators, but essentially none designed to protect them from the challenges that quick success can bring. That left these three musicians vulnerable in circumstances that their fame might have created, but from which fame could not protect them.

Juice WRLD captured that tug-of-war better than any of his peers. He was part of SoundCloud rap’s second wave, and experienced its biggest pop success. He was versatile, schooled in pop and emo, and he had the most solid hip-hop fundamentals; in one of his most memorable videos, he freestyled for more than an hour on a British radio show.

His voice had an easy sweetness to it, tempered with just a touch of reluctance. In his songs, comfort was never as close as drugs were. He almost always sounded as if he was looking for a way out.

In that anxiety, he was an inheritor of XXXTentacion, perhaps the patient-zero figure of the SoundCloud rap movement, though also its most problematic exponent. At the time of his death, XXXTentacion was facing criminal charges: aggravated battery of a pregnant victim, false imprisonment, domestic battery by strangulation and witness tampering. In his brief career, he inspired fervent fan devotion as well as significant public backlash.

In the music industry, however, his controversies were mostly shrugged off. Apart from a brief moment in which Spotify removed him from its playlists, his ascent went largely unchallenged. XXXTentacion was a phenomenon — wildly popular (his first two albums reached No. 2 and No. 1 on the Billboard album chart) and also wildly influential, proving irresistible to many, including the pop star Billie Eilish (a SoundCloud rap-era star in all but genre).

“Bad Vibes Forever,” which is billed as the final XXXTentacion album, was released on Friday. It is full of promising sketches of songs and stuffed with collaborations with more established artists, including Rick Ross and Blink-182. Just two years ago, songs like these would have sounded unlikely, but in part because of the crossover success Juice WRLD experienced — he had hits with Ellie Goulding and Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie as well as YoungBoy Never Broke Again — they sound like the direction pop was moving in.

At around the same time XXXTentacion was first finding popularity, Lil Peep was working similar musical territory, albeit with a more robust emphasis on singing. Unlike XXXTentacion, who thrilled in abrasion, Lil Peep sounded like a fully formed pop star almost from the start, slowed only by emerging from a scene most hadn’t heard about.

He is the subject of a distressing and elegiac documentary, “Everybody’s Everything,” that was released last month and lays bare the tug of war between his accelerating fame and crippling fragility. In the film, Lil Peep is presented as someone who was brittle long before the music business found him, and who was particularly poorly equipped for the leeching and temptations that every rising star must contend with.

Two interwoven narratives dominate this film — Lil Peep’s inexorable rise, owing to the emotional directness and melodic accessibility of his music; and his thin defenses against the demands and consequences of fame. Friends describe him as forever in service to others, yet his loyalty wasn’t always repaid. The film includes footage, first seen online soon after Lil Peep’s death, of the musician sitting motionless in his tour bus for hours, head tilted back — a reminder that even in his final moments, no one appeared to be looking after him.

An empire was being built upon his shoulders, but Lil Peep was collapsing. His mother and the executor of his estate, Liza Womack, filed a lawsuit in October that alleges negligence, breach of contract and wrongful death by First Access Entertainment, the talent agency that partnered with Lil Peep in a quasi-managerial arrangement. (First Access has called the claims “categorically untrue.”)

What the lawsuit seeks seems straightforward enough: accountability. The music business tallies hits, streams, sales and profits, but generally fails to provide extramusical tools for the tolls of success. There is no scene, no sound, no movement without musicians, but they have no union, no centralized self-care resources. Just the requirement that they work harder and do more.

Until, that is, the circumstances of creation become so untenable that they begin to threaten the well-being of the creators. Just because a musical style reaches widespread popularity doesn’t mean it isn’t built upon a house of cards. The SoundCloud rap era, once pulsing with promise, is over. When the worst happens, there is no data that can make the rise worth the fall.