The 2020s File Feature
Lace It
Lace It: Juice WRLD, Eminem, and benny blanco at the End of 2023There is a particular weight to posthumous collaborations, a heaviness that sits alongside wh…
01 The Story
Lace It: Juice WRLD, Eminem, and benny blanco at the End of 2023
There is a particular weight to posthumous collaborations, a heaviness that sits alongside whatever pleasures the music offers. Lace It carries that weight and something more: the combination of Juice WRLD's posthumous presence with Eminem, one of the most technically accomplished rappers in the history of the form, and producer-songwriter benny blanco, who had spent years at the center of pop and hip-hop crossover, made for a track that arrived at the very end of 2023 with unusual gravitational pull.
Juice WRLD's Continuing Legacy
Jarad Higgins, who performed as Juice WRLD, died in December 2019 at the age of 21, leaving behind a vast archive of recorded material that his estate has continued to release in the years since. The posthumous releases have been handled thoughtfully, drawing on a catalog large enough to sustain a real sense of artistic continuity. Lace It represents the kind of posthumous collaboration that made the most of that archive, pairing previously recorded Juice WRLD vocals with new contributions from major artists.
Eminem's Presence
By 2023, Eminem's participation in any project was still a significant event. His technical skill and the intensity of his delivery are as distinctive as any voice in the genre, and his appearance alongside the emotionally raw aesthetic of Juice WRLD creates an interesting generational and stylistic contrast. The Detroit rapper's verse brings a different kind of weight to the track, technically denser and more consciously constructed than the melancholic freeform quality associated with Juice WRLD.
Chart Performance
The song debuted at number 85 on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 30, 2023, the final Hot 100 of that year. It spent four weeks on the chart, hovering in the 85-92 range, a modest but sustained presence. The end-of-year positioning meant it entered the chart at a moment when streaming was slower and competition was slightly reduced, but the four-week stay suggests it found genuine listeners rather than simply catching a statistical anomaly in the slow week.
benny blanco's Role
benny blanco brought his characteristic understanding of hooks and sonic architecture to the production. He had spent years making records that felt immediately accessible without sacrificing emotional complexity, and his involvement in Lace It gave the track a commercial coherence that more purely underground posthumous releases sometimes lack. His credit on the song is a marker of the industry's recognition that Juice WRLD's legacy deserved full-weight production treatment.
Grief, Commerce, and Music
Posthumous releases are always complicated. They raise questions about artistic intent, about commercial motivation, about whether the living can speak for the dead. Lace It sits inside those complications honestly enough. What it offers is a genuine piece of music with real emotional content: the particular sound of Juice WRLD's voice, the feel of his melodic approach to rap and singing, preserved and presented in a context that honors the scale of his brief but enormous impact. Press play and let the record be what it is.
“Lace It” — Juice WRLD, Eminem & benny blanco's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning Behind "Lace It" by Juice WRLD, Eminem & benny blanco
The act of lacing something together implies connection: threads woven through to hold something intact, to reinforce, to bind what might otherwise come apart. In the context of Juice WRLD's music, that image carries an additional dimension, given the themes of addiction, emotional fragility, and the desire for something that provides temporary relief that run through so much of his catalog.
Addiction as Central Metaphor
Juice WRLD's work consistently engaged with substance use as both subject and metaphor. The lean and pill-heavy references that populated his lyrics were not simply stylistic posturing; they were honest documentation of struggles that his audience, many of them young people navigating similar terrain, found deeply resonant. Lace It continues in this tradition, using the specific language of the addictive experience to describe a broader emotional condition: wanting something that provides relief but costs you something essential in return.
The Vulnerability Underneath
What distinguished Juice WRLD from many of his contemporaries was the willingness to be openly distressed in his music, to present emotional pain without the buffer of ironic distance or performed toughness. That raw quality persists even in posthumous recordings, because it was baked into his vocal style and lyrical approach at a fundamental level. On Lace It, the contrast between his open, melodic delivery and Eminem's tightly controlled verse makes the emotional difference between the two artists' approaches vivid.
Eminem's Thematic Contribution
Eminem's presence adds a generational dimension to the song's meaning. He is an artist who has also written extensively about addiction and self-destruction, most notably across his own catalog of deeply personal records from the early 2000s. His appearance alongside Juice WRLD creates an implicit dialogue across generations: two artists who made their inner lives the subject of their music, connected by a thematic concern that transcends era and style.
The Posthumous Frame
Knowing that Juice WRLD is gone when you listen to Lace It changes the song's emotional valence in ways that are difficult to fully articulate. Songs about self-destruction and the desire for relief take on a different quality when the person singing them is no longer here to have found a different way through. The music becomes simultaneously a document of what he felt and an elegy for what was lost. That is not manipulation; it is simply what time does to art when the artist has died young.
Why It Resonates
The enduring audience for Juice WRLD's music, years after his death, suggests that the emotional territory he mapped was genuinely and widely shared among young listeners. Lace It contributes to that ongoing conversation, adding new voices to a record that continues to be part of how a generation processes feelings of fragility, longing, and the complicated desire for something that makes the pain go away, even temporarily. The chart entry on December 30, 2023 is a timestamp; the emotional content is timeless.
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