The 2020s File Feature
Hate The Other Side
Hate The Other Side — Juice WRLD and Marshmello Featuring Polo G and The Kid LAROI (2020) "Hate The Other Side" is a posthumous collaboration that arrived as…
01 The Story
Hate The Other Side — Juice WRLD and Marshmello Featuring Polo G and The Kid LAROI (2020)
"Hate The Other Side" is a posthumous collaboration that arrived as part of Juice WRLD's first posthumous album, "Legends Never Die," released on July 10, 2020, approximately seven months after Juice WRLD's death in December 2019. The track features production from Marshmello alongside contributions from Polo G and The Kid LAROI, assembling an ensemble of artists who collectively represented the emotional and melodic direction that rap and pop crossover had taken in the late 2010s.
The album's release was handled by Grade A Productions and Interscope Records, and it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with massive first-week streaming numbers, demonstrating the scale of Juice WRLD's fanbase and the public appetite for new material from the late artist. The project as a whole drew both commercial success and critical attention to the question of how posthumous releases should be approached ethically and artistically.
"Hate The Other Side" stood out within the album's tracklist for the cohesion of its featured contributions. Marshmello's production built on the melodic, emotionally expansive sound that the DJ and producer had developed across multiple collaborative releases, including his earlier work with Juice WRLD on tracks that had already demonstrated strong commercial performance. The two artists had established a working rapport that gave Marshmello's contributions to the posthumous project an air of authenticity.
The Billboard Hot 100 logged the track's chart performance as part of a week when "Legends Never Die" generated multiple simultaneous charting entries, a phenomenon enabled by streaming's bulk-charting mechanics. The album's debut week broke streaming records for posthumous releases at the time, and individual tracks including "Hate The Other Side" benefited from the concentrated attention surrounding the project's arrival.
Polo G's verse brought his characteristic blend of street reportage and emotional vulnerability to the track, a combination he had refined across his own releases including "Die a Legend" and "The GOAT." His appearance alongside The Kid LAROI was particularly notable given that LAROI had been personally close to Juice WRLD and had emerged as one of the artists most directly shaped by his influence. LAROI's participation carried a quality of genuine tribute that went beyond commercial calculation.
The Kid LAROI, born Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard, had been signed to Juice WRLD's label imprint and had benefited directly from the mentorship of the older artist. His appearance on the posthumous album was therefore both professionally and personally significant, making his contributions feel grounded in genuine relationship rather than opportunistic association. This authenticity was noted in critical assessments of the track and the album.
Marshmello's role in the production brought a significant audience from the electronic dance music world, broadening the track's reach beyond the core hip-hop audience. Marshmello had amassed billions of streams across his catalog by the time of the release, and his involvement in a posthumous Juice WRLD project was a natural extension of the cross-genre collaborations that both artists had pursued during Juice WRLD's lifetime.
The track's reception was shaped by the emotional context of the album as a whole. Critics and fans alike found themselves evaluating not just the music but the circumstances of its creation and release, and "Hate The Other Side" was generally received as one of the more fully realized tracks on the project, benefiting from the quality of its contributors and the relative cohesion of its production and vocal performances. The song remains a meaningful artifact of Juice WRLD's posthumous legacy and of the collaborative network he had built during his brief career.
"Legends Never Die" was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America within weeks of its release, reflecting the depth of audience engagement with the posthumous project. The album's commercial success raised broader questions about the music industry's relationship to the estates of deceased artists and the ethical frameworks that should govern posthumous releases, questions that became increasingly prominent as the streaming era made it easier to generate revenue from archived and unreleased material. "Hate The Other Side" stood as evidence that when posthumous releases are handled with care and populated with collaborators who genuinely knew the artist, the results can honor the original creative vision rather than simply exploiting it. Juice WRLD had recorded prolifically during his lifetime, leaving behind a significant archive of unreleased material, and the care taken in selecting and presenting "Legends Never Die" reflected an understanding of the responsibility that the estate and label bore toward his memory and his audience.
02 Song Meaning
Themes and Meaning — Hate The Other Side
"Hate The Other Side" engages with a thematic territory that was central to Juice WRLD's creative vision: the divided self, the internal conflict between destructive impulses and the desire for something more stable and whole. The title itself frames the emotional subject matter in terms of opposition and self-rejection, a structure that mirrors the internal contradictions that animated so much of Juice WRLD's most resonant work. The phrase "the other side" can refer to death, to a darker emotional state, or to the aspects of oneself that one struggles to integrate or accept.
For Juice WRLD, the exploration of psychological duality was not merely a stylistic choice but a reflection of his personal experiences with mental health, substance use, and the particular pressures of achieving enormous fame at a very young age. His body of work is distinguished by its unflinching engagement with emotional pain and by the way it refused to present that pain as resolved or manageable. "Hate The Other Side" continues in this tradition, using the posthumous context to give the material an additional layer of poignancy that listeners could not help but bring to their engagement with it.
Polo G's contribution to the track draws on his own established thematic concerns: survival in environments defined by violence and loss, and the emotional cost of navigating those environments while aspiring to something better. His verse adds a dimension of street-level realism that grounds the more abstract emotional content of the chorus and provides contrast with the track's melodic superstructure. The juxtaposition of Polo G's reportorial style with the expansive sonic production creates a productive tension that enriches the track's overall emotional range.
The Kid LAROI's presence carries its own distinct meaning within the context of the collaboration. As an artist who had been directly mentored by Juice WRLD and who had openly discussed the depth of that relationship, LAROI's participation functions as both a creative contribution and a form of public mourning. His melodic sensibility and emotional directness were themselves shaped in part by his proximity to Juice WRLD, making his verse a kind of continuation of the older artist's influence rather than simply an addition to it.
Marshmello's production frames the emotional content in a way that maximizes its accessibility across multiple listener demographics. The expansive, anthemic quality of the production creates space for the various thematic concerns of the featured artists to coexist without competing. The result is a track that functions simultaneously as pop product and as genuine emotional statement, which is a difficult balance to achieve and which the best posthumous releases manage only when the raw material is strong enough to support both modes.
The broader cultural meaning of the track rests partly on what it represented for its moment: an early 2020s reckoning with the costs of the emotional rawness and vulnerability that had defined the emo-rap generation. Juice WRLD's death had prompted public conversations about mental health, substance use, and the pressures placed on young artists, and "Hate The Other Side" arrived within that ongoing conversation. Whether intentionally or not, the track functions as a contribution to that reckoning, a moment of collective processing of grief and ambivalence.
For listeners familiar with the full arc of Juice WRLD's career, the song's meaning deepens with repeated listening. The internal conflict it describes reads differently when one understands the biographical circumstances that informed it, and the collaborative framework transforms what might have been a single artist's private expression into a shared statement across a generation of artists who occupied similar emotional territory. The track is ultimately about the difficulty of living with contradiction, which is a subject as universal as it is specific to the conditions that produced it.
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