Trying something a bit different here…
Scene 1
A: I love that Juice WRLD song, “Lucid Dreams.”
B: Yeah, they play it on KUBE all the time.
A: What’s weird to me is that I’m not really sure how it’s hip hop. Well—rap.
B: KUBE is Seattle’s number one for hip hop, but only about half the stuff they play sounds like rap. There’s a lot of… rap-adjacent? music that they play, like Silk Sonic, Khalid, Doja Cat. I mean, I know that rap is only one part of hip hop culture.
A: Juice WRLD is referred to as a rapper a lot—XXL even called him “a rapper’s rapper”—but all of the music I’ve heard by him, he sings. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him, like, rap.
B: True. But, there have been lots of rappers who sing: Biz Markie, Bone Thugs, Eminem sang a bit. And a lot of those SoundCloud-type rappers seem more like singers than rappers.
A: I don’t have anything against singing…
B: No—of course not.
A: A lot of those folks actually rap, though—less like singing and more like rhythmic spoken delivery over the beat. Sure, there’s some that are a bit more melodic or tuneful than others, some that are more sung than spoken or percussive. But in a lot of those cases, they’re rapping the verses and singing the hook or something like that. They mostly rap.
B: Of course.
A: So if Juice WRLD mostly just sings, why do people insist on calling him a rapper? What’s actually happening when we do that?
B: Good question.
* * *
“Lucid Dreams” appeared on Juice WRLD’s debut EP, 9 9 9, which he released in 2017. Success on SoundCloud led to a contract with Interscope Records in early 2018, and not long after that, the song debuted at #74 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It was officially released as a single from his debut album, Goodbye and Good Riddance, in May of that year and peaked at #2 on the chart. It’s been streamed over one billion times on Spotify, and performances of the song on YouTube have been streamed hundreds of millions of times. After his untimely passing at age 21 in December 2019, the song reentered the public sphere.
The song is built on a sample taken from Sting’s 1993 hit single “Shape Of My Heart.” According to NME:
Juice wrote the song in 20 minutes, and now hates it. “With a passion,” he says. “P-A-S-S-ion. It’s getting tired to me. I still play it, but I’m glad I dropped the album.” Sting told Billboard he considers the remake “beautiful” while the original song’s co-writer Dominic Miller called it “the most intelligent version of that riff that I’ve ever heard” and concluded, “it’s done in a very beautiful way.” Still, Sting joked that the royalties from the sample will “put [his] grandkids through college” and ultimately acquired a reported 85 per cent share of its earnings.
“It’s more,” Juice says. “I don’t give a fuck about that, though. Money is gonna come regardless. If you doin’ this for money, people gonna be able to tell. For me [it’s more important that] Sting said my music is beautiful, the fact that he performed my version of the song.”