Posthumous Rap Albums: Serve the Hungry Fans or Honor the Legacy?
By: Harry Sutton
In the last decade we lost some incredible artists at staggeringly young ages, with the 27-club turning into more of a 21-club as of late. While posthumous albums have existed for a long time in rap, their presence has been more common than ever before with some of the most popular young rappers of our time leaving massive archives of incomplete songs following their deaths.
While it’s sad to admit, the deaths of these artists simply attracts more likes on social media and plays on streaming services, so whenever a rapper dies their popularity skyrockets. At that point, artists’ estates have an important question to ponder: how many decisions can they make in the artists’ name while respecting their legacy? Some estates have released only what music was close to completion posthumously, while others have regurgitated whatever semblance of a track the artists have left, adding unplanned features, remixes, and production.
As spectators, we’ve gotten a mixed bag of posthumous albums in recent years in terms of quality. Mac Miller’s Circles, which was nearly finished at the time of his death and worked on by many of the same people who made Swimming, is considered one of the Pittsburgh native’s best projects. On the other hand, Xxxtentacion’s estate has released a whopping five projects since his untimely passing in 2018. In order to assess the right way to make a posthumous album, let’s take a look at the good and the bad from recently deceased rappers.
The Good
Pop Smoke had about three months in the spotlight before his death in 2020, after an internet stimulus in the underground New York drill scene led to a massively popular feature on Travis Scott’s JACKBOYS. At the peak of his career, the 20-year-old was killed in his Los Angeles home in a burglary. He then became the most talked about artist of the year.
Five months after his death, Pop earned his first US Billboard number-one hit, thanks to the commercial success of Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon, executively produced by 50 Cent. Pop Smoke’s next album was already set for success, with New York drill exploding into popularity at the time, but with Pop not being there to finish his album, his estate called in the big guns.
50 Cent took charge of making sure that SFTSAFTM would be a hit, recruiting feature verses from some of rap’s biggest stars like Roddy Ricch, Lil Baby, and Future. Mastered and sequenced by Jess Jackson, who worked on all of Kanye’s 2018 projects (Ye, Kids See Ghosts, Daytona, etc.), the album was guaranteed to be a banger.
There’s hardly any praise I can heap on Mac Miller’s Circles that could convey how beautiful it is. Released over a year after his passing, the album almost feels like a conversation with Mac where he knows he is about to die: it feels like he’s apologizing to the listener for his overdose.
With the thin and minimal production on the record, it conveys the mental struggle and emotional desolation Mac endured at the end of his life. He ponders his relationships, drug problems, mental health, and so many other intimate topics that the album feels more important than music should be. His soft and whispery tone on many of the tracks mixed with the calmly rising melodies somehow incite peace and hope in the listener. There’s a fine line between smiling and sobbing when you’re listening to Circles.
It’s hard to imagine how they created such powerful emotion on this record with Mac being absent in its creation. The man who put it together was Jon Brion, and they couldn’t have chosen anyone better to finish an album so delicately. Brion has produced some incredibly harrowing and introspective music in recent decades, working with the likes of Frank Ocean, Elliot Smith, Kanye West, and Fiona Apple. Safe to say, everyone who worked on the album after Mac’s passing did a great job making sure that his song-making integrity and style were respected.
The Bad
Soundcloud rappers turned superstars Xxxtentacion and Juice WRLD died at 20 and 21 respectively. While X left behind an archive of just a few dozen half-baked songs, Juice’s song making process involved an efficient operation of buying a beat and freestyling to it, so there is practically an infinite collection of unreleased Juice tracks. He left behind hundreds of nearly-finished songs in his vault, which gave his estate the confidence to drag out his death into a series of albums and a documentary. To be fair to Legends Never Die, it is a well produced album that is listenable but comes away feeling like an attempt to appease needy fans and capitalize on Juice’s relevance. His second posthumous album, Fighting Demons, however, sees the quality of incomplete Juice songs heavily drop.
While releasing hours upon hours of unfinished music that Juice probably chose not to release for a reason seems scummy enough, X’s estate has done even more despite a far less extensive cabinet of unreleased tracks.
Skins was released six months after X’s death and is the closest thing to real music that X’s estate has released, comprising just under 20 minutes of his signature styles like trap, lofi-rap, and screamo rock.
Members Only, Vol. 4 was released on what would have been X’s 21st birthday, and serves as a weak compilation project that hardly features X and is nothing more than a send off for some of X’s old collaborators like Craig Xen and Killstation. Clutching at straws, X’s estate then released a deluxe version of his second studio album ? in 2019, adding instrumentals, voice memos, and songs from an old EP.
Their next decision was to release an hour-long album of songs that X had barely started, where they slapped on a shiny coat of 21 features on a 25-track-album. Bad Vibes Forever is the furthest thing from X’s music that you can call X’s music, with its choppy production and plastered-on features it is truly not worth listening to. Most recently, in 2022, X’s estate released a compilation album called LOOK AT ME: The Album, which is a simply a rerelease of some of his most popular tracks like “Jocelyn Flores” and “SAD”, with the addition of a few of his Soundcloud songs that hadn’t previously been available on streaming services.
Unfortunately, Pop Smoke’s posthumous releases fall on both sides of this spectrum, with his estate releasing the pathetic Faith in 2021. Working with the unfinished songs that weren’t good enough to be on SFTSAFTM, Faith appears as nothing more than a money grab after seeing the incredible success of his first posthumous album. Even more staggering than the features on SFTSAFTM, Faith calls in Kanye West, Pharrell, Dua Lipa, Chris Brown, Future and many others. Faith is most comparable to Bad Vibes Forever, as it seems like both estates dealt with the issue of a drought when looking for complete songs in the archive, so they took a left down Feature Avenue. These projects sound like Frankenstein’s monster looks, a massive jumbled together glob of incomplete and deformed music.
Conclusion
Despite the voracious pressure from fans to release more music following a rapper’s death, we all need to acknowledge that releasing music that the artist didn’t want to release simply doesn’t make sense. Xxxtentacion delivered two incredibly well-received projects in his lifetime, but now when you click on his Spotify you need to weed through all of the new nonsense to find his real music. Juice WRLD and Pop Smoke both started with successful homage albums, but proceeded to release more albums despite lacking the completed songs, simply in an attempt to grab some cash. Mac Miller’s estate chose not to release anything but what Mac had planned to release, and look a lot wiser than X, Juice, or Pop’s estates in hindsight.
In dealing with the death of a rapper, there seems to be a clear line where estates cross into simply using their loved one’s name for profit and clout. Unfortunately, it is likely that we will see more posthumous albums in the future, but here’s to hoping that these artists are respected after their deaths with appropriate releases.
