One Liner: Goofy looking white kid who metamorphized into a legit rapper
Wikipedia Genre: Hip Hop
Home: Louisville, KY
Poster Position: 4
Both Weekends.
Saturday at 7:20 on the Miller Lite Stage.
Thoughts: Huh. Unexpected rapper here - with a name like Jack Harlow and a face like a college hockey player's mugshot, I had no clue I was about to log in to a rap thing. His top track is called "WHATS POPPIN" and has a remix with DaBaby, Tory Lanez, and Lil Wayne, so maybe we'll get a DaBaby sighting on stage for this dude's show. The beat for this track is cool - the quick little piano bit and the heavy 808s is nice. The original version has more streams than the remix, so here is the OG, with 483.7 million streams.
Dude. This guy looks about 90% like I did at age 13. Just a goofy ass, skinny white kid with glasses. Wait, he even had a lazy eye! AND HIS NAME IS JACK!?! This is me in an alternate timeline, apparently. And for him to turn some little stolen-beat freestyles into a career where now he has Lil Wayne on one of his tracks? This is kind of amazing. I need to read more about him.
"Whats Poppin" was indeed made popular by TikTok, but it looks like Harlow was hustling his rap game long before that. Dude opened for Vince Staples when he was still in high school! Now he just played SNL in March! This is wild. Here is an amazing quote from an article I just read about him: "As his parents pulled into the driveway, Jack Harlow had a question from the backseat. He was 12. “Mom,” he said, “how do I become the best rapper in the world?” His mother had just read the book Outliers, which popularized the theory that the secret to greatness is 10,000 hours of practice. With Jack’s 18th birthday as a deadline, she did the math. For the next six years, her son would need to work on rapping for four or five hours every day. “OK,” Jack said." Truly, wild. Like, this goofy kid just decided he was going to be a famous rapper and then, like, made it happen. In seventh grade, he made a mixtape and gave it away to all the kids at school. After high school, he moved into his own apartment, working for his parents during the day and then doing music at night. That article also mentions that he is managed by C3, who also runs ACL.
He also says something only a crazy person would say: "When he was 10 he asked for permission to listen to the explicit albums in his mom’s collection. A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, N.W.A. “A lot of people regard the ’90s as the golden age of hip-hop, but” — you can determine whether or not you’re too young to even be considered a millennial by how you react to what he says next — “my generation, who we’ll be talking about in 10 to 20 years, realistically, is Drake.” " Uggghhhh.
Six albums, with his most recent in 2020, called Thats What They All Say. "Baxter Avenue" has a real heart on the sleeve chunk about him feeling uncomfortable in his industry and wishing things were different for him and his black friends. The album also has "Whats Poppin" (and no, although it is killing me, I am not omitting apostrophes in these song and album names) and is second-most streamed track, named after a Miami Heat player, "Tyler Herro." 181.9 million streams.
Instead of a piano run, it uses a little flute melody. Feels kind of the same though, like a cuteness added to the track over the brawny bass. The thing that is kind of wild? His first album, 2016's 18, is a fully formed thing with him sounding pretty much like he does now. I figured it would sound like that goofy kid up there, riding in a skid steer bucket and rapping about homeroom class, but this album is legit too. That being said, the new album definitely adds a lot of famous collabs to the mix, with Lil Baby, Big Sean, Chris Brown, Adam Levine, and others. He wasn't getting platinum artists to help with his stuff back in 2016. I like the laid back track "Keep It Light." Sounds kind of like Mac Miller.
He also has a track on the soundtrack for the new Fast and Furious movie. Well, it is him with Ty Dolla $ign and something called 24Goldn. It also calls back to "Poppin" with a little piano trill that weaves through the whole song. Nothing great.
I think I actually like it. I'd go watch this.
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