![]() ![]() The city’s music, he said, “has this silk to it.” He grew up in the Highlands - a neighborhood that was “very accepting, diverse, a place that you can walk around and not have to look over your shoulder.” But he was also in contact with artists and producers from other neighborhoods, and sought to cultivate audiences in both white and Black Louisville.Įven though the city is not a nationally acknowledged musical hotbed, Harlow hears a through line of smooth-talking between him, EST Gee and the R&B star Bryson Tiller. Instead, he steadily released albums that were sharp-tongued and self-awarely nerdy. Local success led to meetings with management companies and record labels when he was still a high school freshman, though nothing came to fruition. He began self-releasing music in short order. She told him he’d need 10,000 hours of practice, after the rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. A 2017 profile in Louisville Magazine relates a story of how, at 12, he asked his mother how to become the best rapper in the world. Harlow, who was born and raised in Louisville, Ky., has been studying for this moment for more than a decade. And also the genre is as broad and as street-immediate as it’s ever been in the mainstream - Black innovation remains at the forefront. More broadly, skilled white rap stars aren’t as novel as they were in the Eminem era, which automatically dims the spotlight on Harlow slightly. I just let it be.” Over the years, he observed white rappers - whether Eminem, or Asher Roth, or Mac Miller, or Macklemore - and decided what approaches made sense to him. ![]() “I am aware of it, but it’s not something that I’m battling against or lifting up. “I’m not preoccupied with my whiteness,” Harlow said. ![]() These informal interactions have been crucial to Harlow’s fluid path to hip-hop’s top tier, and are an implicit rejoinder to earlier generations of white rappers who drew incessant attention to their whiteness, often in ways that felt compensatory, or penitent. The Louisville rapper EST Gee told a story on the No Jumper podcast about how the local police had attempted to dissuade Harlow from working with him, but Harlow disregarded them. “It’s crazy how the narrative has changed.”ĭrake posted casual footage of a Turks and Caicos vacation with Harlow on his Instagram, crowing, “Shorty, don’t try and hit my phone now ’cause you see I’m chilling with Jack.” When Harlow posted an awkward video of himself rapping as an 11-year-old, Kendrick Lamar, who hadn’t clicked to favorite a tweet in two years, emerged to smash the like button. “My compilations used to be ‘Jack Harlow being sus,’” he said with a big smile, using a slang term for awkward or lame. It’s prominently included in a fan-assembled YouTube compilation titled “jack harlow being a natural flirt for 5 mins straight” that currently has over 6.6 million views. ![]() The playful face-off had been captured by a camera from the gossip site The Shade Room, and the video spread quickly. “At the time, though, I was like, I hope that don’t go on the internet.” “I was like, that wasn’t the interaction I was hoping it would be,” Harlow said on a Thursday evening late last month at the unflashily sleek Generation Now Studios. What unfolded for the next 20 seconds was a rather epic tug-of-flirt, his charm bumping up against her arched eyebrow. And so he strolled up, tilted his body slightly in her direction, smoothly extended his hand and said hello. He had appeared on a remix of her hit “Tap In,” but the two hadn’t yet met in person. ATLANTA - Last June, on the red carpet at the BET Awards, Jack Harlow finished up an interview and noticed that the rapper Saweetie was nearby. ![]()
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