"What's the 27 club?," JUICE WRLD sang a year and a half ago, when he was 19. "We ain't making it past 21." That line is going to haunt all of pop music for some time to come. Juice WRLD's song "LEGENDS" was his response to the deaths of his peers XXXTENTACION—murdered at age 20—and LIL PEEP—lost to an accidental overdose at 21. Despite the matter-of-fact descriptions of drug use and visions of death that filled his own songs of teenage angst and heartbreak, he wasn't supposed to join them. He was a hard worker and prolific artist who in the past year and a half recorded two solo albums, a joint mixtape with one of his idols, FUTURE, and plenty of features. He had a vision of a future of his own beyond the singsongy (and mesmerizingly catchy) emo rap on which he made his early reputation. He was working on making himself a better rapper. He had an acute self-awareness (<--possibly the best JW profile ever written) of his nearly lifelong drug use: where it came from, how it fit into his life, how it might affect his young listeners. He wrestled with it in both his life and his music. He rapped and sang about it because he thought he owed his fans, and himself, his honesty, his deepest feelings, his heart. He gave them that repeatedly, in hip-hop songs that dripped with the influence of the screamo bands he first heard through a grade-school crush and the punk bands he was exposed to through the soundtrack of the video game TONY HAWK'S PRO SKATER. (He also was floored by ODD FUTURE, whose music he discovered after trying to engage a friend in a discussion about Future; his friend heard him wrong). His 2019 album, DEATH RACE FOR LOVE, was the journal of an artist who was a little bit less of an emotional wreck than he used to be. It was an album that, in the words of PITCHFORK's ALFONSE PIERRE, "felt like the beginning." He turned 21 a week ago today. Early Sunday morning, age 21 and six days, his heart gave out after landing at MIDWAY AIRPORT in Chicago, his hometown. He suffered cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at 3:14 a.m. That's the entirety of what was known about JARAD ANTHONY HIGGINS' death as of late Sunday night, besides the fact that news of it wrecked a lot of other hearts across the hip-hop and pop landscape. Another pop star lost way, way too soon. Another artist with so much—almost everything—left to give. An artist who might have sounded like he was contemplating his death but was really contemplating his life. MusicSET: "Juice WRLD's Lucid Reality"... Juice WRLD really, really liked sugary breakfast cereal. But not so much Tupac, whom he "greatly" admired but, "I’m not the biggest fan"... Is PHARRELL WILLIAMS telling interviewers a different story about the making of "BLURRED LINES" than he told lawyers in a deposition five years ago? Yes, says the family of MARVIN GAYE, and they want to go back to court... Did SPOTIFY erase the band BRAND NEW, whose career was derailed by sexual harassment charges against frontman JESSE LACEY, from the end-of-decade WRAPPED playlists of the band's fans?... VARIETY's 2019 Hitmakers and Hitbreakers... LINDA RONSTADT tells Secretary of State MIKE POMPEO exactly when will he be loved.