Widely advertised Juice WRLD collaboration with Cordae has dropped as a posthumous video with some heavy involvement from AI.
The song itself was recorded in September 2019 but only now it was fleshed out into visuals by Cole Bennett. In the accompaning video “Behind the Scenes of Juice WRLD & Cordae’s “Doomsday” Music Video”, Bennett says that it was the only video for which Juice has a vision, has his own idea. Also, he wanted a video for this song to be “gory and funny, like Eminem videos”. The director used this idea chematically in the outro for his own narrative. But reference to Eminem, justified by Juice’s fantasy and the musical bones of the track, was brought to life from the very beginning. In short, the track “Doomsday” sounds like a freestyle recorded by two friends over a famous beat of a hip hop star. It starts from a naked beat, clearley showing the roots of the song: “Role Model” by Eminem. Than AI generated Slim Shady peek’s through a rubbery yellow curtain to recite lines from the intro to “Role Model”. It’s blurry and fuzzy like an old video tape or an image you cannot focus on. And that’s it, kids.
The quality of this image cannot be blamed on technology, Cole Bennett did exactly what he wanted. Constant face swaps, when Cordae morphs into Juice throughout the video, are flawless.
At the same time, the energy, the wordplay, the texture of the song deserve respect and recognition. And to be honest, they shouldn’t have been overshadowed by unjustifiebly stoked expectations from Eminem fans, whom Cole Bennet teased relentlessly lately. We would have noticed all these references and inspirations on owr own, we are accustomed to piking up crumbs and put them together.
However, technically, Cole Bennet didn’t do anything wrong. He clearly had a permission from Shady team to do what he did, he credited Dr. Dre and Mel-Man as song producers, he said special thank you to Paul Rosenberg and Marshall Mathers on the credit roll.
It is just there is a feeling that Juice and Cordae didn’t really need any artificial hype, or maybe even artificial intelligence, to draw the audience to their old/new track.
Watch Juice WRLD & Cordae – “Doomsday” and tell us what you think:
