Opinion: Juice WRLD Didn’t Just Die The Same Day As John Lennon, He Lived A Parallel Life

39 years to the day John Lennon was shot dead outside of his New York apartment in 1980, 21-year-old rapper Juice WRLD suffered what is believed to be a fatal drug overdose at a Chicago airport.

This could be chalked up to coincidence.

But Juice Wrld (born Jarad Anthony Higgins) had more in common with Lennon than one might suspect.

“All this jealousy and agony that I sit in,” Higgins sang on 2017 song ‘All Girls Are The Same‘, “I’m a jealous boy, really feel like John Lennon.”

“I just want real love,” he continues, “guess it’s been a minute. Pissed off from the way that I don’t fit in, I don’t fit in.”

No doubt these lyrics intentionally reference Lennon’s 1971 single ‘Jealous Guy’.

But just as equally this could be Jarad drawing a broader parallel between Lennon’s life and his own.

Both Higgins and Lennon had little contact with their fathers during childhood.

Jarad’s divorced his mother at age three, leaving her to raise him and his siblings alone.

By the rapper’s account, his mother was a conservative parent.

Lennon’s own father Alfred, a merchant seaman, stopped having regular contact with mother Julia three years after John’s birth.

Following this Lennon’s mother Julia, a free spirit, would send John to live with his Aunt Mimi, a loving but strict influence.

Jarad began drinking in sixth grade a habit he would soon supplement with Xanax and other drugs.

Lennon was a smoker and heavy drinker in school, something which intensified after his mother was struck by a drunk driver in 1958 and died not long after.

As Higgins notes in ‘All Girls Are The Same’ Lennon struggled to overcome the feelings of jealousy and resentment.

These feelings bled into many facets of his life, particularly when it came to his relationships with fellow Beatles Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

Higgins’s lyrics, like Lennon’s, also describe a life defined by immense pain.

They often deal with drugs as an escape, Lennon did not shy away from similar sentiment, writing many of the Beatles’ iconic songs during heavy periods of LSD and later heroin use in the mid to late 1960s.

(Lennon would eventually get clean though and sang about the experience on ‘Cold Turkey‘.)

Jarad sang about love as salvation, John too believed that love was a pathway from suffering.

While John would succeed in this quest, exorcising many of his childhood demons on the 1970 album Plastic Ono Band and later finding a measure of peace and tranquility in a family life son Sean as well as wife Yoko Ono, Higgins would never be given the opportunity.

Both, however, were eerily prophetic in predicting their own demise.

Juice Wrld notoriously rapped “What’s the 27 Club?” on 2018 song ‘Legends‘. “We ain’t making it past 21.”

Lennon may have survived Higgins by 19 years, but also foretold his death when he famously sung “shoot me” on Abbey Road‘s ‘Come Together‘ and later sang “everybody loves you when your six foot in the ground” on Walls And Bridges’ ‘Nobody Loves You When your Down And Out’.

The style, packaging, production, and medium of the music may change with time, but the personalities at the heart of popular culture do not.

Both John Lennon and Jarad Anthony Higgins lived lives of pain and ecstatic highs.

This was something that drove them to their creative peaks.

The success which followed should have delivered them from the childhoods which caused them so much pain.

Instead, it gave them untimely and tragic deaths.

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