‘I’m tired of getting high its exhausting, I heard it gets better with time.’ - Juice WRLD, Ring Ring

Juice WRLD died this week. He was a 21 year old rapper who expressed the emotional difficulties of modern life better than most. His philosophy represents an attempt to ‘lean in’ to the dual commands of contemporary capitalism - to produce maximally and to experience fully - and his untimely death represents a challenge to the to-be-pursuedness of this view. In honour of Jarad Anthony Higgins, then, let us analyse his philosophy, expose its contradictions, and reveal in the process the exact sort of thing that Juice WRLD was.

Byung Chul-Han’s Psychopolitics notes that Western society has turned away from the repression of the individual in the age of Big Data. Under ‘biopolitics’, a term which Foucault used to describe the repression of the individual for the purposes of maximising bodily productivity over the last two centuries, human beings were forced to internalise the value judgments of society and act on them. In this way, the criminal, the delinquent and the pervert were forced to see themselves as criminals, as delinquents, as perverts, and encouraged to reform and repress these aspects of themselves, in order to make society conform to the more predictable image of the uniform, ‘utilitarian’ man. But Han notes that now, in the era of Big Data, biopolitics is no longer appropriate because, as mechanisation detaches our body from productivity, it increasingly involves our minds, such that psychopolitics is now the more appropriate model for social control. Under psychopolitics, individuals are no longer encouraged to repress their ‘delinquent’ aspects, but are rather encouraged to express them, to share them through the ‘confessional’ of social media, in which we all express all our darkest secrets and make them part of ourselves, make ourselves into a ‘work of art’, and attempt to experience life as fully as possible, believing it to be in pursuit of self-expression, freedom and discovery.

However, Han says that the opposite effect obtains: by getting us to express ourselves in this way, we still internalise the value judgments of society: by turning the walls of the panopticon into ‘glass’, we have each become our own master and slave. The turn towards self-expression, for Han, is not a turn towards liberation: so long as the end is still treated as maximal productivity, or progress, this self-expression ties us up in webs of our own making. Society has turned away from the repression of the individual and towards the incitement of his ‘voluntary’ self-expression, so as to better record, predict and thus shape his future behaviour. Big Data now encourages us to express our feelings, to talk about mental health for example, but only with the end of increasing our productivity, that is, stopping it getting in the way of getting on with it. We are encouraged to share how we think and feel, but without any suggestion that it might be the social order to blame, that is, the social order that needs to change. So we are now caught in an odd position: asked to simultaneously treat our feelings and productivity as ends to-be-pursued, whereas before we were content just to pursue productivity. But this is awkward: the more we express ourselves, the more we think about it, and the more we think about it, the less we like it. We begin to recognise that this system treats emotions as a kind of ‘release valve’ for the pursuit of productivity, where we all help each other get on with it, but don’t question how it should be got on with. Capital, armed with Big Data, asks us to uphold both these values as absolutes, as to-be-pursued, in order to realise its ends of predicting and thus shaping our behaviour.

Juice WRLD’s death, then, represents a potent challenge to the viability of this model. Juice WRLD’s music encapsulates the philosophy of attempting to express and pursue one’s emotions fully (the demand of data) whilst also pursuing productivity and success by turning that pursuit into a work of art, the better to get on with the living of life under consumer capitalism. Juice WRLD attempts to make himself into a financially productive element of society (that is, by making himself into a work of art), whilst obeying the dual command to feel and experience as much as possible. He attempted to recognise the dual absolutes of productivity and feeling, to feel as much as possible and commodify that feeling, and it worked: he got really famous and really rich, really quickly. Feelings, in the modern age, are commodifiable, because people have them, and want to consume them. Unlike experiences, Han notes, feelings can be consumed indefinitely. So capital turned Juice’s feelings into an object of consumption, and we all happily consumed them until it killed him. This suggests that, if feelings really are to-be-pursued, they must be more than a release valve for productivity. One of the two has to give.

Death Race for Love, Juice’s second album released this year, nicely expresses the flawed thought at the heart of his logic. In ‘Maze’, Juice describes the ‘death race’ concept as issuing from the complexities of his newly famous life:

‘stuck in a maze/ everything’s ok but its not really ok my life’s a death race’.

He lived in the hope that capital would allow him to have it all: that he could pursue the life of fame and be saved by love. His difficult relationship with drugs showed how much he struggled with this. Having been failed by love (which catapulted him to fame in the first place, as he turned it into his first album Goodbye and Good Riddance), he began to use drugs in order to allow him to get on with the productive side of things, that is, having a career, without giving up his faith in the saving power of love.

‘Lucid Dreams’ provides a compelling mission statement of the ‘Juice WRLD Philosophy’. This is the main hook:

’I still see your shadows in my room/ can’t take back the love that I gave you/ its to the point where I love and I hate you/ and I cannot change you so I must replace you, oh/ easier said than done, I thought you were the one, listening to my heart instead of my head/ you found another one but I am the better one I won’t let you forget me’.

Lucid Dreams is about lost love, and moving on from it. This path was well-trodden by Future before him, with lines such as

‘I want you to fuck him in paradise/ cos I want to be your hell tonight’ (Throw Away)

or

‘I had to see her and this lame happy/ and then try and figure out why i ain’t happy’ (Sorry),

but the key difference is that Future is happy to move on from it, to abandon love, whereas Juice is not. If we follow Han’s analysis, we must see this as a function of culture: it was productive to repress our feelings, but now that its not, culture is going to make people who make us express ourselves. Juice WRLD refuses to move on; he wants to live in the sadness of this loss, because he still wants to feel.

‘I have these lucid dreams where I can’t move a thing thinking of you in my bed/ I take prescriptions to make me feel A-OK i know its all in my head’.

In this line, Juice WRLD echoes Emile Cioran’s idea that feelings are ultimately arbitrary, formed by adjectival (descriptive) associations between ideas that constitute the ‘pyrotechnics against an empty sky’ of culture. Juice recognises that he can move beyond his painful feelings, and sees drugs as the way to do this: rather than making the mental move to not feel the feelings, he makes the physical move to block them out. Unlike Future and Young Thug before him, however, he has refused to make the mental move to rejecting the benefits of feeling and love: he still craves it when he says

‘im not a drug addict I’m a love addict with the love songs’ (Hemotions),

continuing to avow its to-be-pursuedness whilst not pursuing it. It is this contradiction, I contend, that led to his unhappiness, and this unhappiness that killed him. When he says in the line quoted at the top of this post,

‘I’m tired of taking drugs its exhausting, I heard it gets better with time’,

he refuses to abandon faith in the to-be-pursuedness of emotions. Whereas Future allows the lean to numb him, Juice does not, and if we apply the analysis offered above to this, then it seems plausible that this is a function of capital’s demands to express ourselves, a demand that is revealed to be fatal if we are unable to bring the simultaneous demands of productivity back into line with the requirements of the self.

This is why Future is more sustainable, as a character, than Juice WRLD, and also more toxic: Future is happy to kill a part of himself for material gain, even though he recognises that

‘all this fake love got me damaged’,

whereas Juice tries to do the same, and love regardless, and finds that the only logical terminus of that path is an untimely death. Perhaps tellingly, Future got Juice WRLD into lean in the first place. It seems we have reached an endpoint: society is no longer content for us to bury our feelings in drugs for productivity, since feelings are now required for productivity. But now, we are at risk of sacrificing everything to ‘progress’.

For a long time, the capitalist model has tied suffering and productivity on one side, and love and salvation on the other: work is grim and we get on with it, but that’s OK because we have a fairytale escape in the form of other people. What Juice WRLD’s pain and tragic end show, then, is that this escape is fictionalised: having been given these expectations of perfect eternal love, we cannot cope when real life gets in the way and things don’t work out like that. We’ve got to a point where we rely on human relationships for all our salvation, all our humanity, all the good experience, and Juice WRLD’s death shows that these two poles have now become too far removed. When he sings,

‘I ran away I don’t think I’m coming back home’,

he expresses the necessary alienation of moving into the world of fame and success with the attendant fake love that follows it. He views loyalty as important but sees himself as surrounded by ‘fakes’ and ‘negative energy’. He talks a lot of being lonely. This is significant: in rising to the position of star, Juice has attracted all the trappings of that power - the money, the drugs, the women - and a whole load of fake love that comes with that. He is necessarily isolated by his pursuit of productivity, since it creates a gap between him and other people: he must now ask himself whether people want to be near him for his appearance, that is his possessions, rather than his essence, that is his character. So capitalism has motivated us towards productivity by providing us with stand-ins that are supposed to guarantee human interaction, but because they modulate the nature of this interaction, divorcing symbol from representation, they create a void which is hard to fill without drugs.

Essentially what happened, then, was that we forced Juice WRLD into a world of supreme alienation, and were then surprised when it killed him. We should have recognised him as one of us, rather than as a saviour, and, rather than taken comfort in his pain, recognised it as an urgent call for change. This cheery revelation bears upon the question of the relation of the ‘legendary’ individual to society. With Nietzsche, Han rejects the idea that ‘special’ individuals are ‘bubbles in the flood’, mere expressions of a group-think given more definite form. Juice’s legendary status can be interpreted as if he were a bubble in the flood: expressing a pain extremely that we all feel to some extent allows us to feel heard and seen. But this simply serves the function of allowing us to bear our suffering more easily, to carry on with the ‘game’ of capital, just because we know someone else we respect is also getting on with it. But if this were all that Juice was, his death would undermine this entirely: we’d realise that this pain is caused by capital, and that we need to restructure the system in order to stop the people we respect, the ‘Legends’, dying so young. He portends his own death, eerily, when he sings

‘This time it was so unexpected, last time it was the drugs he was lacing/ all legends fall in the making/ sorry truth, dying young, demon youth’.

This final line is important: by creating a fictional ideal life, capitalism has done a disservice to ‘truth’, and living the experience of this impossible inconsistency has forced Juice, hardly a philosopher by trade, to recognise its tricky mutability.

The problem would lie, then, in treating Juice as if his living allowed us to see him as part of a great system that is mutually sustaining and intersupportive. His death reveals the opposite: Juice was not really thriving individually in his little niche, expressing our pain, because the pain ultimately killed him and he couldn’t access the real love that he was expressing the loss of. So the problem is this: while people live, we treat them as if they justified our existence, and it is only when they die that we recognise that their life story is an incitement to change, rather than to grin and bear it. Juice is not meant to be a legend, he is meant to just be one of us, and rather than seeing him as a spiritual leader, we should see him as a brother that was failed by the demands of the system. He is right to reject his mantle, when he sings:

‘they told me I’m a legend but i don’t want the title now/ all the legends seem to die out, what the fuck is this bout’.

So this is the problem: we uphold those who express suffering as legends, but precisely because it is untenable, they have no choice but to want to reject this title: they are just the things that suffer so that we can feel heard whilst we get on with suffering ourselves. It is because of the essential inconsistency of capitalism, the simultaneous advocacy of individual human thriving and maximal group productivity, that rockstars and rappers keep dying younger and younger: they are ‘leaning in’ to that ideology, and its killing them.

So if we interpret Juice as a fellow sufferer, and his message as to just get on with it, then he is just a ‘bubble in the flood’ which serves as a salve to our pain but fails to create change. However, if we recognise the fundamental logical inconsistency that killed Juice WRLD, the incitement to pursue feeling and productivity as equally absolute ends to-be-pursued, then he becomes more than a bubble in the flood: he becomes the thing that allows the flood, having been differently constituted to the bubble, absorb some of the rarefied air expelled by the bubble’s passing and, in so doing, change the dynamics of the flood, the dynamics of society, by changing our relationship to its demands and stepping back from its incitements to do, to feel, to achieve. It is only by deciding for ourselves the relationship which we stand in to culture’s demands that we can be free, that is, can move less like a flood, less like a herd, and think for ourselves. By stepping back from the apparently obvious to-be-pursuedness of our perceptions and their attendant feelings, we can ‘play the fool’, and use the prescriptions of society as they suit us, pursuing this end or that one as it suits us. Cioran suggests that all our motivational value judgments are fundamentally empty, arbitrary attachments of adjectives and their attendant feelings to valueless objects. This carries with it the recommendation that we must be sensitive to the arbitrariness of our feelings before we pursue them. Perhaps that is the message Juice WRLD best personified: we cannot obey all the demands of society, we must choose how to balance them, but it can be our choice, so long as we remain ambivalent. I can leave no more fitting tribute to the pain of Juice WRLD than the video below. I will miss you.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-BLWt_GdE8