The Singles Jukebox

Pop, to two decimal places.

Juice WRLD ft. Future – Fine China

Don’t look to us to clean up this mess…


[Video]
[2.90]

Katie Gill: Bad points: this song is bizarrely short and the chorus makes up a solid 75 per cent of it. This means we get to hear Juice WRLD happily sing about how he’ll kill his girl and hit us with some blatant transphobia over and over again. Good points: Future’s verse is so friggen stupid that it somehow manages to be completely amazing while also being completely dumb.
[2]

Ryo Miyauchi: The chorus just gets worse and worse. Thousand-dollar price tag is a backhanded compliment coming from a rapper who got Future on his side, and the only time I’ve ever really noticed fine china plates is when they break. You’d think Juice WRLD threatening to murder his love if she decides to break up is terrifying, but then he brushes it off as some kind of cute joke, sliding in “oh, did I just say that out loud” like a violently vengeful Urkel. His affections feel repulsively sour after that, no matter how sweet he coaxes it with melody.
[4]

Will Rivitz: Chief among the endless churn of hip-hop thinkpieces are #takes about the glorification of putatively negative concepts in popular rap songs. It remains endlessly popular because of the endless variation within how artists portray contentious things as well as how listeners react to those portrayals. One can present everything from drug usage to interpersonal relationships constructively and incisively or harmfully and lazily, even within the same song, which makes the spin cycle of reactions continually compelling though the overarching genre remains the same. Here, Juice WRLD and Future, caterwauling transphobia and possessive psychological abuse, justify the most negative of these critiques. Extra minus points for Juice WRLD unintentionally arguing in support of using euphemisms for “vagina” instead of the word itself; his mealy-mouthing of those three syllables makes my skin crawl.
[2]

Crystal Leww: The pervasive narrative in mainstream rap media is that Lil Uzi Vert is music for the youths that olds can rock with because (1) the melodies popped, (2) the song structures are good, and (3) his lyrical musings about depression were relatable, even surprisingly elegant. This narrative has been largely written by olds, unsurprisingly, and the olds do not seem to have a similar amount of generosity for Juice WRLD, despite their similar styles. This is largely driven by a disdain for unfortunate lines like “so if she leaves, I’mma kill her, oh, she’ll die,” which like, yes — in this hip hop hellscape that is now straight up turning someone as hateful and repugnant as XXXTentacion into a martyr — it’s very bad! On the other hand, I cannot bring myself to be patronizing about this — this is music clearly not made for me, the melodies pop, and you cannot tell me there’s a funnier line in a Hot 100 song this year than “Shorty like a ten thousand plate, FINE CHINA.” 
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: Juice WRLD is pretty good at writing chorus melodies. He’s even better at writing parodies of Juice WRLD lyrics. He gets by on his willingness to take advantage of the fact that nobody knows what level of irony anyone is on anymore. So he says he’s going to kill this girl if she leaves him, which is bad, but it’s so over-the-top that he can’t possibly be serious, so it’s fine, but he’s still putting the idea out there, which is bad, but he admits he shouldn’t be saying it out loud, so it’s self-aware. After going through this cycle of contortions, you’re left with the realization that, however benign or toxic, it’s just not that interesting. I briefly held out hope that one of the lyrics was “pussy-hatted vagina,” which would’ve at least shown a sort of reactionary political awareness, but no, it’s just gender-based reaction. Future sounds so comparatively mature that one has to wonder why he signed on to this project in the first place; is it trend-hopping to hop on a trend that you had a large part in creating?
[4]

Anthony Easton: Oh, it’s transphobic as hell, and the line about killing her is a third rail of toxic masculinity, and the lake line is cribbed from Cardi B’s much better “Bodak Yellow,” but I’m oddly charmed by the idea of a pussy like Spode, and Future sells the whole mess. 
[3]

Andy Hutchins: I do not think Juice WRLD should be allowed to have any communication with women. But it is good to see that Future still knows his planets despite his favorite one not technically being one!
[2]

Thomas Inskeep: “If she leaves I’mma kill her,” Juice WRLD says, and unfortunately, I believe the asshole. Future, what are you thinking?
[0]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The only vaguely commendable thing about “Fine China” is Wheezy’s production, which does its jaunty best to prevent you from paying attention to what the rappers it carries are actually saying. On that front, Juice WRLD continues his pursuit of the perfect balance between reprehensible and boring while Future seems resigned to the latter.
[0]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: It’s easy to get a sense of rap’s quick cycling of all-stars when you work in a high school. Three years ago, some of my students were excited about Young Thug. The freshmen this year? They don’t know who he is, but they all love Lil Baby. Last year, one student called Kevin Gates a “respectable old head.” This year, the new kids only really know him as the dude who collaborated with NBA YoungBoy. If there’s a single rapper right now who all my students are into — from freshmen to seniors — it’s Juice WRLD. He makes miserablist rap that’s quasi-similar to Future’s previous music, but he doesn’t really rap; dude just makes 2000s emo with a rap veneer, the latter informing his music as the drug-fueled histrionics it is. Kids are here for the Juice, so the end result is a sing-songy tune that finds Future’s Auto-Tune warbles supporting the simplistic hook-as-everything modus operandi that defines virtually all of Juice’s music. It’s fine; his best music is always his most harrowing, his most depressing. But that sort of begs the question: why are critics less eager to champion Juice WRLD than Lil Peep or Lil Uzi Vert? Does something have to be objectively more sad in order to justify any questionable lyrics? Why is sadness always measured in the most obvious ways? Whatever the case, Juice WRLD will likely be forgotten in a few years time, a random blip in a line of artists who provided youth with a sense of angst-ridden release. “Fine China” won’t be remembered as one of his best songs because it’s decidedly not sad. Juice WRLD won’t end up on any critics’ lists because he’s not sad enough. That’s a good thing, right?
[5]

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