I want to be that person that leads people out of the place they’re at. And in the process, maybe I’ll find the key to get out of the place that I’m at. | | | | Juice WRLD at Rolling Loud, Oakland, Calif., Sept. 29, 2019.
(Steve Jennings/FilmMagic/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “I want to be that person that leads people out of the place they’re at. And in the process, maybe I’ll find the key to get out of the place that I’m at.”
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| | rantnrave:// "What's the 27 club?," JUICE WRLD sang a year and a half ago, when he was 19. "We ain't making it past 21." That line is going to haunt all of pop music for some time to come. Juice WRLD's song "LEGENDS" was his response to the deaths of his peers XXXTENTACION—murdered at age 20—and LIL PEEP—lost to an accidental overdose at 21. Despite the matter-of-fact descriptions of drug use and visions of death that filled his own songs of teenage angst and heartbreak, he wasn't supposed to join them. He was a hard worker and prolific artist who in the past year and a half recorded two solo albums, a joint mixtape with one of his idols, FUTURE, and plenty of features. He had a vision of a future of his own beyond the singsongy (and mesmerizingly catchy) emo rap on which he made his early reputation. He was working on making himself a better rapper. He had an acute self-awareness (<--possibly the best JW feature ever written) of his nearly lifelong drug use: where it came from, how it fit into his life, how it might affect his young listeners. He wrestled with it in both his life and his music. He rapped and sang about it because he thought he owed his fans, and himself, his honesty, his deepest feelings, his heart. He gave them that repeatedly, in hip-hop songs that dripped with the influence of the screamo bands he first heard through a grade-school crush and the punk bands he was exposed to through the soundtrack of the video game TONY HAWK'S PRO SKATER. (He also was floored by ODD FUTURE, whose music he discovered after trying to engage a friend in a discussion about Future; his friend heard him wrong). His 2019 album, DEATH RACE FOR LOVE, was the journal of an artist who was a little bit less of an emotional wreck than he used to be. It was an album that, in the words of PITCHFORK's ALFONSE PIERRE, "felt like the beginning." He turned 21 a week ago today. Early Sunday morning, age 21 and six days, his heart gave out after landing at MIDWAY AIRPORT in Chicago, his hometown. He suffered cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at 3:14 a.m. That's the entirety of what was known about JARAD ANTHONY HIGGINS' death as of late Sunday night, besides the fact that news of it wrecked a lot of other hearts across the hip-hop and pop landscape. Another pop star lost way, way too soon. Another artist with so much—almost everything—left to give. An artist who might have sounded like he was contemplating his death but was really contemplating his life. MusicSET: "Juice WRLD's Lucid Reality"... Juice WRLD really, really liked sugary breakfast cereal. But not so much Tupac, whom he "greatly" admired but, "I’m not the biggest fan"... Is PHARRELL WILLIAMS telling interviewers a different story about the making of "BLURRED LINES" than he told a lawyers in a deposition five years ago? Yes, says the family of MARVIN GAYE, and they want to go back to court... Did SPOTIFY erase the band BRAND NEW, whose career was derailed by sexual harassment charges against frontman JESSE LACEY, from the end-of-decade WRAPPED playlists of the band's fans?... VARIETY's 2019 Hitmakers and Hitbreakers... LINDA RONSTADT tells Secretary of State MIKE POMPEO exactly when will he be loved. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | REDEF |
| He broke SoundCloud with the sound of his own heartache and then broke pop with hooks sampled from his own emotions. Remembering one of hip-hop's and pop's brightest and most original young stars, gone way too soon. | | |
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 | Complex |
| In a world where genre distinctions matter less and less to artists and fans, an exciting transformation of the industry is underway. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Did K-Pop cause the death of Sulli and Goo Hara? | | |
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 | SongData |
| Women are not receiving anywhere near the same amount of spins in any daypart as their male colleagues and the difference has grown significantly. | | |
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 | Music Tech Solutions |
| If you're someone who shops for vinyl or compact discs at your local independent record store, you may have noticed something odd has been happening. "We don't have that" particular title, even hit product is becoming a frequent response. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| From “Old Town Road” to “Harmony Hall” and beyond, these are the tracks that defined the year. | | |
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 | Paper |
| The rhetoric around TikTok -- a complex social platform often mischaracterized as merely a lip-syncing app -- tends toward amusement, confusion, and concern. Users' AI-enabled "For You" homepages are Pandora's boxes of pop culture, from "Old Town Road" challenges and Spiderman cosplays to outsider art-like skits and Insane Clown Posse sing-alongs. | | |
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 | BuzzFeed News |
| Unlike a lot of other men in pop, Styles’ willingness to indulge in fan service -- and laugh at it -- is what makes him such an effective star. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Spotify is bringing people together in an unusual way. | | |
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 | Water and Music |
| It’s not about the award; it’s about the show. | | |
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| | | ran into the devil today and she grinnin' |
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 | Nautilus |
| I wanted to build the ideal collaborator. Was I ever surprised. | | |
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 | Variety |
| Like a zombie that just won't stay dead, the "Blurred Lines" case keeps coming back. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| All-time classics, unfortunate clunkers, and more. | | |
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 | Clash Magazine |
| "Never mind the dog," reads the sign on the outside gate of an imposing Central LA mansion, "beware of the owner." Anywhere else, and this message would be dismissed as an attempt by the inhabitants to suggest an innate streak of anarchy when in reality they are just lifeless canine lovers with a desperate predilection for decrying they are anything but. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| For the fourth time in five years, Republic Records closes out the year as the top label on Billboard’s year-end charts. The win was powered by the chart performance of such Republic artists as Ariana Grande, Post Malone, Jonas Brothers, Drake and Taylor Swift. | | |
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 | Forbes |
| Ever since Taylor Swift and Kanye West's infamous run-in at the MTV Video Music Awards a decade ago, they've had a relationship that could be best described as star-crossed. Now they're duking it out for the title of music's highest-paid act. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| The perpetually boyish music director of the San Francisco Symphony and co-founder of the New World Symphony wears his elder-statesman mantle lightly. | | |
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 | Big Think |
| A new study finds that societies use the same acoustic features for the same types of songs, suggesting universal cognitive mechanisms underpinning world music. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| A memoir and a deluxe edition of “1999” offer a new perspective on the meticulous artist. | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| The Macon, Georgia, facility where the Allman Brothers recorded was dormant for decades until reopening this month. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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| © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group |
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