Although Juice WRLD‘s stage name was inspired by Tupac’s 1992 film Juice, the late emcee was also hugely influenced by Eminem, mostly in terms of song topics and music videos. This became even more evident this past weekend when fellow emcee Cordae and visual company Lyrical Lemonade released Juice WRLD’s new posthumous song “Doomsday.”
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With Cordae and Juice rapping over the Dr. Dre-produced beat from Eminem’s famous 1999 song “Role Model,” “Doomsday” merges nostalgia with bittersweetness. Bouncing back-and-forth with whimsical bars about basketball players LeBron James and Dikembe Mutombo, Cordae and Juice’s first-ever collaboration is surely one of the latter’s best posthumous releases to date.
For “Doomsday”‘s epic visuals, Lyrical Lemonade’s founder Cole Bennett put together a masterpiece, to say the least. Opening with an artificial intelligence-crafted cameo of Eminem at the beginning, reciting the same I’m going to attempt to drown myself intro that he does on “Role Model,” the video continues to use AI respectfully and appropriately all throughout.
As Cordae walks through the hall performing his raps, his face swaps to Juice WRLD’s during moments in the song where Juice’s performance comes in. This technique was first introduced to mainstream rap by Kendrick Lamar last year, as he used AI to face-swap between himself, Kobe Bryant, Kanye West, and more in his “The Heart Pt. 5” music video.
When “Doomsday” finishes playing, Bennett cuts to a clip of Cordae and Juice making the song before Juice’s tragic 2019 death. In the never-before-seen video, Juice discusses what he’d like the music video to look like, where it mimics the freestyle cyphers done by XXL for their XXL Freshman campaigns. Honoring this wish, Bennett displays an animation he made that brings Juice’s idea to life.
Although Juice WRLD’s final posthumous album The Party Never Ends is currently in the works, with its lead single “The Light” having dropped in March, “Doomsday” is expected to instead land on the upcoming debut Lyrical Lemonade album. Likely to include a variety of rapper friends of Bennett, the album’s opener could not have been executed any better with “Doomsday.”
Check out the Eminem-inspired hit by Cordae and Juice WRLD below.
Photo by Arik Mazur/WireImage
