Juice WRLD’s honest opinion of Kanye West and the lessons he learned
The legacy of Kanye West has become increasingly complicated. While clearly a musical innovator and arguably a genius, his erratic behaviour and violently racist rhetoric have made it difficult to uncomplicatedly enjoy his music without reflecting on his flaws.
While this is a situation that has obviously deteriorated in recent years, after Ye began expressing a wild antisemitism, he had already been a controversial figure for a long time before that. His fans have had to grapple with this issue for a while, and, as it turns out, one such fan to mull it over was Juice WRLD.
After Juice released his debut album Goodbye & Good Riddance in 2018, some parallels were drawn between it and the work of Juice’s fellow Chicago native Ye. During an interview with Vulture, the comparison was put to him directly.
Asked specifically if Ye’s 808s & Heartbreak had been playing on his mind as he created Goodbye & Good Riddance, Juice WRLD admitted that it had. “Yeah,” he said, “I think I kind of live with that record on my shoulder.”
The subject veered into a broader conversation about Kanye, who, by 2018, had become increasingly divisive for his support of Donald Trump and for making such statements as characterising 400 years of slavery in America as “a choice” on the part of Black people.
Explaining that he had been speaking to a friend about how to think of Kanye, Juice WRLD admitted, “It is hard to separate the art from the artist. But at the end of the day, that’s kind of what you have to do to enjoy some stuff — not think about it.”
Juice argued that “everybody has their flaws,” so “you gotta look at somebody and take into consideration how they might be bad for you and whether you want them in your life.” But when it comes to artists you don’t personally know, the considerations are a little bit different.
Juice WRLD hadn’t met Ye by the time he was giving this interview, so he found it possible to enjoy Ye’s art on its own terms. “You’ll probably never meet that person or ever get on a personal level with them,” he said of problematic artists, “so just take them for what they’re good for.”
This debate remains a hot subject to this day, of course. Ye’s behaviour only deteriorated in the years following Juice WRLD’s interview, and his recent attempts to rebuild his career have been met by fierce resistance from many people. The separation of art from the artist is a tricky thing, but, for Juice WRLD, speaking in 2018, it was possible.