Juice WRLD - Into the Abyss: Some thoughts.

It's a story you've heard a thousand times in the entertainment industry, but it never gets old.

I've seen a lot of rock stars I grew up with in the 90s drop like flies:  Andrew Wood, Kurt Cobain, Shannon Hoon, Layne Staley, Mike Starr, Chris Cornell, and I'm sure many more I can't remember off the top of my head.

So now there's a new generation of whipper snappers lazily dubbed "zoomers," who not only see their favorite rappers die, but see them die so early in their lives that they don't even make it to the infamous "27 Club."  I refer to XXX Tentacion, Lil Peep, Mac Miller, and Juice WRLD.  Juice WRLD had a documentary released this year subtitled Into the Abyss.  It is a death march of a man who feels his time is growing short even as he is at the peak of his popularity.

The doc opens with Juice summoning lyrics from thin air.  He alternates between those he loves and those unnamed foes that he verbally shits on.  He follows, or more appropriately, dominates a rhythm track with a low, dazed voice you fear could go off the beat any second.  Juice rides the tracks expertly.  He never wavers and only stops when the rhythm track comes to an abrupt end.  He smiles and laughs with his friends and his ever present and ever supportive girlfriend Ally Lotti.

There are a few talking head interviews at the beginning and towards the end of the doc, but the body of the story depict Juice forever in action.  Playing live shows, laying down tracks, joking with his peers, and nuzzling with Ally.  Yet there is the ever present shadow of mortality which manifests in his lyrics.

He calls out to Ally, his mother, Jesus, or any other god or guru who may hear his lyrical cry.  There are times when you think he's going to sag over mid stride and bring the whole recording to a stop, but he soldiers on and never misses the beat.  Rather, he teases and plays games with it.

Every time one of his tracks is introduced in the doc, a caption appears of how many streams and YouTube views the song has received.  At the least, they are in the hundreds of millions.  At most, they crack the billions.  This is most effective when he struts onto the stage, often with a hail of pyrotechnics and a giant LED monitor which is the digital descendant of the psychedelic vegetable oil effects used at LA clubs in the 1960s like The Matrix.  But all that is embellishment to the man and his lyrics, which his masses of fans know word by word.  You know you've made it when your audience chants the very words you wrote or improvised back at you with an overwhelming affirmative.

Sadly, he has the obligatory age old personal battle with drugs.  His generation along with the previous millennials (fuck, even my generation) were and are at the mercy of excessive prescriptions of doctors that bend the knee to pharmaceutical companies.  These boys and girls are abused by chemicals.  Not abusing, abused by chemicals as far back as grade school.  Their crime was being rambunctious.  Their punishment was overmedication.  Now they have to wrestle with demons that they consumed without they themselves being consulted.

Juice was one of these kids.  He takes cocktails of prescription cough medicine mixed with Sprite.  He even snorts up crushed Percocet tablets with a Canadian twenty dollar note while Ally slumbers on his lap.  So, what's new about that news, man?  It isn't new, my inquisitive straw man.  That's the problem.

During a tour in Australia, he wears a T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and the caption, "So Goth, I'm Dead."  It's hilarious and saddening at the same time.  Throughout every performance, Juice nuzzles with Ally off stage and on.  Clearly she is his lifeline into the light.  But even her patience frays as she tries to lay down the law and stop him from taking any more drugs.  However, any addict can get his next fix from coded language and a few enablers.

Towards the end of the doc, eyewitnesses recount Juice's terrible seizure induced death aboard a Lear Jet. Local authorities drove up to the landing strip to arrest him and his entourage for possession of cannabis and other contraband.  You marvel (or maybe you don't) at the callousness of the law enforcement officers as they focus more on arresting Juice's friends than tending to the suffering man on the floor of the Lear.  The officers gave drugs the chance to drive the knife and twist it into Juice's back one last time.  Dead at 21.

As Juice's friends reflect on the man and his music in the rote fashion, it is Ally who is the most devastated.  She reclines on a mattress and can't even face the camera.  She is at a loss of words and ultimately turns away.  She was exhausted with pulling Juice away from the brink during life and her young face hides a soul that has aged by decades in the aftermath of her love's death.

I know next to nothing about Juice.  The last I had heard of him was two years ago on the YouTube channel BlackySpeakz.  I only found out about his death today and I'm only writing this an hour or two after I finished Into the Abyss.  So what attracted me to this man's story?  As I said, I've heard it a thousand times before from decades before I was born to the decades in which I live.  These stories sadden me but they never cease to fascinate me.  What is the ever increasing void that gnaws at the core of these gifted entertainers?  What alienates these artists even as those who care about them cling tightly so they don't drift away into the darkness, never to come back?

A friend of mine once spoke to me of an affliction he is burdened with:  Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder.  The Mayo Clinic defines the disorder as, "persistently or repeatedly [having] the feeling that you are observing yourself from outside of your body or [having] a sense that things around you aren't real, or both."  The disorder is mentioned in Into the Abyss as Juice confides with a fellow rapper and says he is suffering from the condition.  It sounds like some chilling episode from The Twilight Zone, but for many people it is not the stuff of fiction.

Juice won't be the last of this or any future generation to meet this end, but he leaves a document of his own in his songs.  Juice gave millions of fans a tether with which they could hold on to the world, even when he couldn't.  May this and future generations find a link with this world through his music so they can enjoy, and love, their lives.

Juice WRLD - Into the Abyss closes out the first season of the anthology series HBO Max Music Box.

- JJB