The 2020s File Feature
Tragic
The Kid LAROI, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, and Internet Money: "Tragic" and Its Billboard Moment "Tragic" arrived in November 2020 at a remarkable moment in …
01 The Story
The Kid LAROI, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, and Internet Money: "Tragic" and Its Billboard Moment
"Tragic" arrived in November 2020 at a remarkable moment in the career of The Kid LAROI, a young Australian rapper who had risen with extraordinary speed from relative obscurity to one of the most-watched emerging artists in hip-hop. Born Charlton Howard in Waterloo, New South Wales, in July 2003, The Kid LAROI had been just 16 years old when he first gained significant international attention through his association with Juice WRLD, the Chicago-born rapper and singer who had become one of his primary influences and mentors before his sudden death in December 2019.
The Kid LAROI had participated in the Juice WRLD tribute album Legends Never Die, released in July 2020, which had debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and brought him to enormous additional attention. By the fall of 2020, he had released his own project F*ck Love through Columbia Records, a mixtape-length release that demonstrated his ability to sustain listener attention on his own material rather than solely as a tribute or coloring artist.
"Tragic" was part of F*ck Love (Savage), a deluxe edition of that project that arrived in November 2020 with additional tracks including collaborations with prominent artists. The collaboration on "Tragic" brought together The Kid LAROI with YoungBoy Never Broke Again (born Kentrell DeSean Gaulden in Baton Rouge, Louisiana), who was at the time one of the most-streamed artists in America despite being only 21 years old and despite ongoing legal difficulties. Internet Money, the production collective founded by Taz Taylor, provided the musical backdrop for the track.
YoungBoy Never Broke Again had established a streaming presence that was statistically remarkable, consistently appearing among the most-streamed artists on Spotify despite limited mainstream radio airplay and without the conventional promotional machine that typically supports that level of streaming performance. His fanbase, built through prolific releases and intense social media engagement with a young, predominantly Southern audience, gave any track featuring him an immediate stream boost simply through his existing listener base discovering the collaboration.
Internet Money as a production entity had developed rapidly through 2019 and 2020, building their own brand alongside their work as behind-the-scenes producers. Their self-titled album B4 The Storm, released in August 2020, had reached number 3 on the Billboard 200 and demonstrated that their collective name had become a genuine draw rather than simply a production credit. Their involvement in "Tragic" connected the track to a network of emerging young artists that had built considerable streaming momentum during the pandemic period.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "Tragic" debuted at number 76 on November 21, 2020, its single week on the chart representing its peak position. This brief chart appearance was a common pattern for tracks that entered the Hot 100 through the opening-week streaming burst associated with album releases or deluxe editions rather than through sustained radio or streaming promotion. The track's quality and the artists involved gave it immediate recognizability among the established fanbases of all participants, but it did not have the conventional promotional infrastructure to drive extended chart residency.
The broader context of November 2020 for music consumption involved pandemic-era listening patterns that had significantly elevated streaming numbers across the board. With live events still largely suspended and large portions of the population spending more time at home, music streaming consumption had increased substantially from pre-pandemic levels, and this elevated baseline affected chart performance across all genres. "Tragic"'s chart entry, however brief, reflected this broader environment as much as its individual artistic merits.
The Kid LAROI's trajectory after "Tragic" and the F*ck Love material was one of the more spectacular in recent pop music history. His collaboration with Justin Bieber, "Stay," released in July 2021, reached number one on the Hot 100 and became one of the longest-running number one hits in the chart's modern history, spending months at the top. The velocity of his ascent from the "Tragic" period to the "Stay" era illustrated both his genuine talent and the particular dynamics of streaming-era stardom, where the right collaboration at the right moment can move an artist from promising newcomer to global phenomenon in a matter of months.
The Juice WRLD Legacy and LAROI's Development
The emotional and artistic connection between The Kid LAROI and Juice WRLD is central to understanding "Tragic" in context. The song's themes and sonic approach drew directly on the emo-rap tradition that Juice WRLD had helped establish, and LAROI's emotional delivery throughout the track demonstrated how thoroughly he had absorbed his mentor's approach while already beginning to develop a slightly different inflection that would become more pronounced in his subsequent work. "Tragic" was part of the period in which LAROI was processing his grief and channeling it into music, a connection between biographical experience and artistic content that gave the material an emotional authenticity beyond pure stylistic imitation.
02 Song Meaning
Loss, Pain, and Emotional Aftermath in "Tragic"
"Tragic" engages the emotional territory that The Kid LAROI had been navigating throughout the F*ck Love project, the overlapping experiences of romantic loss and personal grief that the word "tragic" in ordinary usage is invoked to describe. For a 17-year-old artist who had lost his primary musical mentor and one of the most important figures in his life to a sudden death, the concept of tragedy carried particular biographical weight, and that weight informed the track's emotional texture even where the lyrics addressed more immediate romantic concerns.
The song's central subject is a relationship that has ended badly, with the narrator reflecting on the circumstances of the breakdown and the emotional state it has left him in. The word "tragic" as applied to a failed romantic relationship occupies an interesting emotional space, invoking a level of seriousness and permanence that everyday romantic disappointment might not conventionally be granted. In applying tragic language to romantic experience, the song makes an implicit argument about the genuine severity of emotional pain, refusing to minimize romantic loss as trivial by comparison to what might count as "real" tragedy.
The Kid LAROI's vocal approach draws heavily on the influence of Juice WRLD, with melodic singing and rap in roughly equal measure, Auto-Tune used as an expressive tool rather than purely a corrective one, and a delivery style that foregrounds emotional intensity over technical precision. This approach was central to the emo-rap tradition that Juice WRLD had done so much to popularize, and LAROI's adoption of it was not mere imitation but a genuinely felt connection to a set of musical tools that allowed him to express states he was actually experiencing.
YoungBoy Never Broke Again's contribution brings a different emotional register to the track. His Louisiana-inflected delivery and his particular brand of intense, unguarded emotional expression creates a contrast with LAROI's more melodically elaborate approach. Where LAROI tends to process pain through melodic elaboration, bending his voice around the emotional contours of his feeling, YoungBoy's tendency is toward direct declaration with its own kind of intensity that does not rely on melodic complexity. The two approaches together give "Tragic" a richer emotional landscape than either artist alone would have created.
Internet Money's Production Philosophy
The production created by the Internet Money collective for "Tragic" reflects the sonic philosophy that Taz Taylor and his collaborators had developed through their work with numerous emerging artists. The beats are melodically rich while remaining rhythmically tight, creating environments that support the kind of emotional vocal performances that artists like LAROI and YoungBoy favor without overwhelming them with excessive instrumentation. The production aesthetic shares DNA with the emo-rap tradition while incorporating elements of the more melodic, pop-inflected production that had been gaining ground in hip-hop since the mid-2010s.
The emotional logic of "Tragic" is one in which the capacity for pain is inseparable from the capacity for connection. The tragedy the song describes is not simply that a relationship ended but that the narrator was vulnerable enough for the ending to matter this much. Being susceptible to genuine emotional pain is presented not as weakness but as evidence of having been genuinely present in the relationship, of having taken the risk of emotional openness rather than maintaining protective distance.
The broader context of the F*ck Love project, from which "Tragic" emerged, was a sustained exploration of how romantic and personal loss intersect and compound each other. For an artist experiencing the grief of losing Juice WRLD while simultaneously navigating the ordinary romantic difficulties of young adulthood, the lines between different sources of emotional pain were blurred in ways that the music reflected. "Tragic" sits within this overlapping emotional landscape, speaking simultaneously to romantic loss and to a more diffuse condition of grief and disorientation that characterized LAROI's position in late 2020.
The song's significance in the arc of The Kid LAROI's career rests on its documentation of an artist in formation, a young person of extraordinary talent who had experienced losses and pressures far beyond what most teenagers encounter, processing those experiences through the medium that had become his primary language for making sense of the world. The brief chart appearance of "Tragic" on the Hot 100 represents a small data point in a much larger story that was still being written.
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