The 2020s File Feature
Smile
Juice WRLD and The Weeknd: "Smile" and the Weight of Posthumous Collaboration Juice WRLD, born Jarad Higgins on December 2, 1998, in Chicago, Illinois, died …
01 The Story
Juice WRLD and The Weeknd: "Smile" and the Weight of Posthumous Collaboration
Juice WRLD, born Jarad Higgins on December 2, 1998, in Chicago, Illinois, died on December 8, 2019, at Chicago's Midway Airport following a seizure. He was 21 years old. His death came at a moment when his commercial profile was at its highest point, with millions of streaming plays daily and a devoted global fan base that had assembled with extraordinary speed during the preceding two years. The recordings he left behind, estimated at thousands of unreleased tracks, provided the material for an extensive posthumous release program managed by his estate and Grade A Productions in partnership with Interscope Records. "Smile," featuring The Weeknd, appeared on the posthumous album Legends Never Die, released on July 10, 2020.
Legends Never Die debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week, selling the equivalent of 497,000 album units, a figure that included a very large streaming component reflecting the depth of Juice WRLD's digital audience. The album's commercial success was remarkable not only for its magnitude but for the speed with which it was assembled and released, approximately seven months after Juice WRLD's death, a timeline that reflected both the existence of substantial recorded material and the estate's decision to move quickly while audience grief and engagement were at their most acute.
The Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye on February 16, 1990, in Toronto, brought a very particular vocal and artistic sensibility to the collaboration. His career had evolved from the atmospheric, often psychologically dark mixtapes of the early 2010s through a period of mainstream pop dominance with albums like Beauty Behind the Madness (2015) and Starboy (2016). By 2019 and 2020, he was one of the most commercially prominent artists in popular music, making his participation in "Smile" a significant curatorial statement about the artistic seriousness with which Juice WRLD's legacy was being managed. The aesthetic overlap between the two artists, both working in melodic territory that blurred the boundary between rap and singing, with shared interests in emotional vulnerability and nocturnal atmospherics, made the collaboration feel organic rather than calculated.
"Smile" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 22, 2020, entering at number 8, which was both its debut position and its peak. This immediate top-10 entry reflected the enormous streaming volume generated by the album's release, which drove multiple tracks from Legends Never Die to simultaneous Hot 100 positions. The song spent 10 weeks on the chart, descending gradually from its debut peak through positions 35, 52, 59, 74, and beyond before exiting, a chart trajectory that reflected sustained but declining streaming volume as the initial album-release surge subsided.
The production of "Smile" is characteristic of the sonic environment that producers closest to Juice WRLD had developed over the preceding years, with melodic synthesizer lines, programmed drums with trap conventions, and a mix balanced to emphasize the vocal melodies that were central to Juice WRLD's artistic identity. The Weeknd's contribution sits comfortably within this production environment, his vocals processed with the kind of atmospheric treatment that characterized his own production aesthetic, creating a sense of sonic kinship between the two performers that transcends the posthumous nature of the collaboration.
The music video for "Smile," released alongside the track, handled the visual representation of Juice WRLD with sensitivity and care, using archival footage and imagery rather than attempting to construct a new narrative performance from the deceased artist. This approach was consistent with how other posthumous productions from the era handled the representation of artists who could no longer participate in the promotional apparatus around their releases.
The song accumulated 113 million YouTube views as part of the broader engagement with the Legends Never Die project, whose total streaming numbers across all tracks were among the highest for any album released in 2020. The sustained viewing reflects both the depth of Juice WRLD's fan community and the appeal of the collaboration with The Weeknd, whose own audience was directed toward the track through the collaborative credit.
Posthumous Release Ethics and the Legacy Question
The release of Legends Never Die and its singles reignited ongoing industry discussions about the ethics and artistic integrity of posthumous releases. Critics of such projects argue that the artist cannot consent to the final form of recordings made available under their name, and that commercial imperatives inevitably shape decisions that should be purely artistic. Defenders note that Juice WRLD was known to record prodigiously with the explicit intention of releasing material, that his creative collaborators who managed the estate had genuine knowledge of his artistic intentions, and that the music itself is of genuinely high quality. "Smile" as a specific case falls on the more defensible side of this debate, as it appears to represent a recording that Juice WRLD made with care and intention, however abbreviated the remaining time was in which he might have refined or revised it.
02 Song Meaning
Grief, Dissociation, and Performed Optimism in "Smile"
The title "Smile" carries a particular weight in the context of Juice WRLD's biography and the broader emotional landscape of his work. Juice WRLD was among the most candid artists of his generation in discussing depression, anxiety, and substance use in his music. The instruction or aspiration to smile, in this context, is not a simple directive toward happiness but a complicated negotiation between the speaker's inner emotional state and the performance of positivity that social life often requires. The gap between what the smile performs and what it conceals is the emotional center of the song.
The themes of the track engage with a version of emotional exhaustion in which the capacity for authentic joy has been compromised by ongoing psychological difficulty, and in which the performance of wellness becomes its own form of burden. This territory is deeply familiar to Juice WRLD's audience, who had followed his public statements about mental health struggles and recognized in his music an artist who was documenting internal experience with unusual directness. Within this context, the song functions as both a description of a specific psychological state and a more general statement about the emotional labor that public performance requires.
The Weeknd's contribution adds a dimension of shared experience to the recording. His own catalog contains extensive meditations on emotional numbness, dissociation, and the psychological costs of fame and excess. When his voice appears in "Smile," it brings with it the accumulated thematic weight of those prior explorations, creating a sense of dialogue between two artists who have visited similar interior territories through different biographical routes. The convergence of their voices on this particular subject, the effort to appear functional and even happy in the face of genuine internal difficulty, gives the collaboration a depth that would not have been achievable with a collaborator whose artistic identity was less specifically concerned with these themes.
The posthumous context of the recording adds layers of meaning that the original recording, made while Juice WRLD was alive, could not have contained. Listeners who engage with the song after his death at 21 bring awareness that gives certain lines additional resonance, transforming what was presumably intended as a relatively conventional lyrical meditation on emotional performance into something that reads as almost prophetic self-documentation. This transformation is not the result of anything specific in the song's lyrical content but rather of the interpretive reframing that posthumous status always applies to an artist's work.
The cultural impact of "Smile" extends into the community of young listeners who had formed around Juice WRLD's work, particularly the subset of that audience who identified with his openness about mental health. For these listeners, the posthumous release of the song was not a commercial event but an act of connection with an artist whose death represented a genuine loss and whose music continued to function as a vehicle for processing their own experiences. The song's themes of struggling to maintain functional appearance despite internal difficulty are broadly relatable for adolescent and young adult audiences navigating depression, anxiety, and the social pressure to present as well when they are not.
The production environment of the song, with its melodic synthesis and emotionally resonant vocal processing, creates a sonic space that mirrors the lyrical content. The music does not sound happy, despite what the title might suggest; it sounds wistful, slightly unreal, the sonic equivalent of the smile that the lyrics describe as something manufactured rather than felt. This formal coherence between production choices and thematic content is one of the qualities that distinguishes the song from more purely commercial posthumous releases and suggests that the creative team working on the album took seriously the responsibility of representing Juice WRLD's artistic intentions faithfully.
The broader cultural conversation about mental health among young people in 2020, a year defined by the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant disruptions to social life, isolation, and routine, created a context in which the song's themes were unusually resonant. Released in August 2020, as the pandemic's effects on social isolation and psychological wellbeing were becoming extensively documented, "Smile" arrived at a moment when enormous numbers of people were navigating exactly the kind of performed functionality the song describes. This temporal coincidence amplified the song's cultural impact in ways that could not have been anticipated at the time of its creation.
The song ultimately participates in a tradition of artistic self-examination that values honest description of psychological difficulty over the performance of mental wellness. In this, it aligns with a broader generational shift in popular music toward greater openness about depression and anxiety, a shift in which Juice WRLD was one of the most prominent and genuinely committed voices before his death, and one that "Smile" continues to represent as a document of that commitment.
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