Jack Harlow won’t appear on stage for five more hours, but his fans have been mustering beneath the sky-high white colonnade of Kia Forum in Los Angeles since dawn. A long queue, comprising mostly young women, snakes around the edge of the car park. Attendants in neon vests seem flummoxed by the crowd, first redirecting those gathered to another entrance, then to a VIP check-in tent. The line moves compliantly from place to place like a tentacle.
Four gregarious women at the front, Theresa, Ivy, Mackenzie, and Geneva, arrived at the Forum at 4am and waited in the street until they were allowed into the grounds. Theresa, with long false eyelashes, sleek black hair, and sharp contouring that seems calculated to set her apart from the blur of faces at the front of the crowd, went to her first Jack Harlow show in 2021. Tonight, she says, will be her 47th. (“I know who you’re talking about,” Harlow tells me later when I mention her. “She’s a fucking legend.”)
“But – and not to brag – we’ve been here longer,” Mackenzie says, to laughs from Theresa and the others. “She just has more money.” Mackenzie has hot pink hair and glasses, and she lifts up the lower left side of her shirt to display a tattoo she had done in 2019, of Harlow’s name in swirling script.
That these women are among Harlow’s earliest fans speaks to the rapidity of his ascent. Mackenzie recalls a show at The Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood in November 2019 – “pre-‘Whats Poppin,’” she specifies, referring to Harlow’s 2020 breakout track. “We showed up, I wanna say, at like 3pm, and we were stressed out that that was gonna be too late. We were the first in line for hours. Nobody else came,” she says. “After he really blew up, it was like, you’d better be there overnight!”
Harlow’s career can be neatly divided into pre-“Whats Poppin” and post-“Whats Poppin.” Although he’s been rapping since he was 12 and releasing music with the Atlanta-based label Generation Now since 2018, “Whats Poppin” was the turning point. The two years since have been a kaleidoscope of milestones: hitting the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100; remixes and collaborations with industry greats; blessings from other industry icons, including Drake; piles of award nominations.
Harlow rode into 2022 with his tank still full from “Industry Baby”, last year’s mega-hit with Lil Nas X (1.5 billion Spotify streams and counting). He spent the spring filming his big-screen debut, in a remake of White Men Can’t Jump. And in May, he released his second studio LP, Come Home the Kids Miss You. Kanye West shouted out the album’s lead single, “Nail Tech.” “First Class”, also off the new album, went viral on TikTok before it was even released, when Harlow teased a 13-second sample. The track also topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and was declared Song of Summer at the VMAs.
At the same time, Harlow has become the darling of chat shows and award shows: smart, but unpretentious; cocky, but coming across as humble; provocatively funny, but never crossing the line.
Online, he has become a totem of quiet confidence (the subtler cousin of “big dick energy”). “Jack is just a genuinely nice dude,” Pete Davidson, the US comic, possessor of BDE and friend of Harlow, wrote in an email. “His talent speaks for itself, but I think the way he conducts himself is even more impressive.”
It can sometimes feel like Harlow is Forrest Gump – if Forrest Gump had “game”. He appears everywhere, creating headlines just by being himself. At the 2021 BET Awards, Harlow slid into a red-carpet interview with the rapper Saweetie to introduce himself. The resulting “Jack Harlow shoots his shot with Saweetie” videos have been viewed more than 20 million times. And at this year’s Met Gala, he signed off an interview with YouTube personality Emma Chamberlain with “Love ya, bye,” prompting Chamberlain to instinctively reply “Love ya!” back, only to look mortified once Harlow had stepped away.
The ladies of the line warn me about Harlow’s charisma before I head into the dimly-lit warrens under the Forum to meet him. “He’s, like, so unnecessarily suave and I hate it,” says Mackenzie.
“He doesn’t even try,” says Ivy.
I find Harlow, who has just finished rehearsing, sipping a Perrier in the green room. He stands when I arrive, then slouches comfortably on a deep leather sofa beneath a large photo of a hot dog-shaped hot dog stand. He’s wearing a black sweatsuit with the Generation Now logo, accessorised with New Balance trainers (he starred in the company’s autumn campaign). Large diamond earrings – caratage unknown, he says, because they were a gift – glint in each ear. On his left wrist he wears a big gleaming Rolex dubbed “the Batman” by watch aficionados. He bought it this summer in London after a conversation with fellow rapper Pharrell. “He was like, ‘Go get you a Rolex, so every time you look down at it you think: take your time.’”
Fame has advanced upon Harlow rapidly. During his last tour, he played theatres; now he’s playing arenas. Many of his newfound fans are women. Those viral clips of Harlow were like when the quiet kid plays the heartthrob in the school play: suddenly all the girls who had thought Harlow was attractive realised they weren’t the only ones. “There was always women, but it’s definitely… I feel like people associate my shows and that shit with women now,” Harlow says. “I feel like that’s the biggest shift.”
His new followers are perhaps also responding to changes in his look. Between 2020’s Thats What They All Say and this year’s Come Home the Kids Miss You, Harlow streamlined himself. He doesn’t snack any more, he says, and he stopped drinking last year. His face hasn’t lost its friendly roundness, but it’s gained definition. He also exercises with a trainer every morning, chiefly because he likes how it makes him feel for the rest of the day. That, and he didn’t want to wait until 40 to start getting into shape. (As Mackenzie said: “He’s huge, he’s so big. He’s just a large individual – you know that already – but then you see him and you’re like, ‘Damn, he’s built’.”)
Now his fingernails have a high shine, his shoes are sponsored, and his theatre-kid glasses are long gone. His hair, which used to form a triangular mop, is now the stuff curly hair mood boards are made of. “I always say I looked like I worked at GameStop,” Harlow says. Generation Now co-founder Leighton “Lake” Morrison agrees: “He looked like a Napoleon Dynamite that could rap,” he says. “But I think, just like anybody, he grew into himself, he figured out what his swag was.” Now his hair looks expensively coiffed, like the locks on a Greek statue.
Sitting on the green room sofa, Harlow seems subdued compared to his public appearances. He is aware of the discordance between those energetic turns and the powered-down mode in which I find him now. “I hate the effect of that. I think I do that to people all the time, when I just want to be…” he makes a tlock sound with his tongue, widening his eyes and throwing his hands up in an expression of sweet apathy. “Because I’ll just be chilling and people be thinking I’m mad, or having a bad time, just because maybe the only things they’ve seen of me is, ‘He’s pretty upbeat.’ I’m moody.”
He’s also, he explains, slightly wary of journalists. “I don’t feel like I’m a darling in the journalism space. I feel like everyone in journalism is so sophisticated right now, or journalism is so sophisticated,” he says. “I’m not a niche artist. I’m out here killing shit. And I’m a white artist in a Black genre. Journalists can never show me too much love.”
If Harlow is feeling jilted by the media, it might be because while Come Home the Kids Miss You has been devoured by fans, the album landed badly with some critics, who decried the absence of the personality Harlow seems so comfortable parading in public. “He is funny online and in interviews and knows how to grab people’s attention. Without much to grasp with his music, it’s easiest just to stare,” declared a Pitchfork review. “He’s a cultural chameleon; someone that can simultaneously check every box he needs to gain attention. But that box-checking is, maybe, also the problem,” read another on the US’s National Public Radio. It was as if critics had found themselves in the green room with the off-camera, mellower Harlow and thought, he looked taller in his photos.
The reception of Come Home the Kids Miss You didn’t shock Harlow into any sort of professional reckoning. When the album was released in May, he was in Los Angeles shooting White Men Can’t Jump, and waited several weeks to read anything “official.” “I think I felt a little better than I probably would have if it was the night of…,” he says. He remembers when his first album came out, scrolling at midnight to see the online response in real-time. “I read it and I was like, Okay, I can deal with that, you know what I’m saying? There’s sentences that aren’t as fun, but I feel like I read it and I was like, ‘I can stomach this.’”
And some of the insights in the reviews he read of Come Home… made sense to him. “I feel like people have a hard time, like, being straight up with me,” he says. “I’ve asked for it.” He has received some constructive specifics from artists he respects – when Pharrell told him to go bigger with his hooks and choruses, Harlow, who feels most comfortable with verses, took it to heart – but not so often that he doesn’t see the value in an occasional dose of constructive criticism.
The critical response also hasn’t dulled the album’s reception with his fans. “First Class”, for example, popped off on TikTok, where the hashtag #jackharlow has 3.4 billion views. Harlow bristles at the label “TikTok song”. A track doing numbers on TikTok, he says, just denotes its wider popularity. “Almost all big songs blow up on TikTok. Now, some songs are literally rooted in some dance challenge that blew it up. But some songs go big, and as soon as they go big they’re gonna be big there, because it’s what kids are listening to,” he says. “That’s where kids are; sorry.”
TikTok can be a ruthless place for new artists; somewhere fame often really does last 15 seconds. Harlow himself has witnessed this, in the disproportionate number of one-hit and some-hits wonders coming and going. “I feel like I’m seeing a ton of, like, one-song moments, like, damn, they caught a catchy 15 seconds. Even I’m, like, I might even sing it in the shower, this little blip you heard. They have a name, and they might, for that month, have gained 40,000 followers. And then they vanish. It’s over.”
When Harlow is invested in what he’s saying, he unpeels himself from the couch and leans forward, his fingers pointed straight out at his interlocutor like fighter planes. But now he makes a “poof” motion with his hands. “And there’s always been artists that have had a hit and vanished, but now kids are just pumping out soundbites,” he says. “I just wonder how many kids we’ll look back on in 20 years and they’ll be like ‘Yo, remember I had this little nah nah, man dan buh nuh nuh? Remember that melody? That was me, bro. I actually got a record deal off that, I made a hundred grand, and that was pretty much where it ended.’ I feel like there’s gonna be 200 kids like that, that had a little song.”
The challenge of TikTok for new artists, he explains, is being “reduced to ‘the sound’” – the drop that lends itself to a cut between before-and-after images, the catchy opener, or the danceable chorus. Once that happens, an artist has stepped onto the TikTok hamster wheel and must keep delivering those tasty morsels or be spat out into oblivion.
Harlow concedes that rap is “a young man’s game.” He might be a young man, but he is already thinking about longevity. He looks often to rappers he admires, who have had enduring careers, and understands the importance of reinvention in sustaining an audience’s attention. But how much does a 24-year-old who has only been among the mainstream for a couple of years really have to reinvent? “People might not look at me and think ‘reinvention’ immediately,” he acknowledges, “but there’s a big difference between ‘Whats Poppin’ and ‘First Class’, sonically, and there’s a big difference between how I was associated culturally in 2020 and 2022.”
Then there’s Harlow’s charm. Not many musicians can attract new fans by sheer force of personality. “There’s so many artists putting out so much music so fast that the goal is to get attention first,” says Generation Now’s Morrison. “People get attracted to lifestyle, and who the person is.” The music an artist is producing is still paramount, Morrison adds. Once audiences are drawn to the artist as a person, the music has to hold their attention.
Harlow’s tracks are both catchy enough to lend themselves to video clips and dynamic enough for non-performative listening. Even on a lyrical level, he pursues long-tail appeal. He avoids Twitterspeak where possible, for instance. “It feels cheap and microwaved, doesn’t feel timeless,” he says, though he acknowledges that “those little modern sprinkles” can be appropriate on more fun tracks. “But your album intro or outro or something, where you’re pouring your soul out, you don’t want to say, ‘it’s giving.’”
He tries not to swear excessively on his records, too, because he believes swear words dilute his writing. “I want my verses to be just as potent if you Google the lyrics and read ’em, like I want the writing to be just as beautiful as the way I’m delivering it.”
With two hours to go before Harlow is due to appear on stage, Michael Kyser, Atlantic Records’ co-president of Black music, bursts in wearing a bright green tracksuit to congratulate Harlow on playing the Forum, his largest show yet. In the room next door, a woman is preparing a massage table. Pre-show massages are not customary for Harlow, he’s just been feeling especially wrung out by the physical demands of touring. In general, he likes to spend the time before each show with his inner circle, though he prefers to be alone in the minutes before he goes on stage, to “lock into a mode”.
His rider, he laments, is very tame. “It’s super bland cos I don’t want to eat bullshit every day, but I would like to put some eccentric things on there,” he says. “I feel like I’m at the level where people need to walk in and be, like, ‘Wow, you have that?’” Right now it’s mostly “granola and shit.”
Between his sobriety, his modest demands and his dialled-in pre-show routine, Harlow appears to have bypassed the “woooh” era that sometimes plagues early stardom. He looks after his mental health, scheduling phone appointments with a therapist as needed; two days ago, he says, he had a good cry while he was venting.
If he had a philandering stage, he seems to have emerged from it unscathed. “I’ve never been at a point in life where I was just fuckin’, fuckin’, fuckin’, – nah,” he says. “But I was at a point where I felt like I needed the company of a woman constantly.” This was when he was about 19, adjusting to attention from the industry and from women, too. Then, he hated being alone, and would often fall asleep talking to someone on FaceTime. “I don’t know if it was validation I was searching for, but there was something I wanted. Now I crave alone time; I love it,” he says. “I’m not running through ’em like that.” (The past tense prompts me to ask whether he has a secret girlfriend, which, for those invested, he will neither confirm nor deny.)
Later, after his support acts, The Homies and City Girls, have come and gone, Harlow takes to the stage. The show opens with him rapping in silhouette behind a white stage-length curtain. He likes that, for that moment, he’s recognisable by his hair. “It’s a Black genre, and I’m a white boy with curly hair,” he says, before sombrely adding that it doesn’t always behave as he’d like it to. “It’s curls, man. It’s curls. You don’t tell them what to do. They do what they want.”
But tonight, as he stands in profile like a Victorian cameo behind the curtain, his curls are a perfect groomed mass. I spot Mackenzie via her pink hair just below the stage, she and Ivy incanting every lyric in time with Harlow.
Then the curtain kabuki-drops to a rapturous roar, and Harlow appears dressed all in white. He strides across the stage and plants himself next to a smoke cannon, which, timed to a hip wiggle from Harlow, shoots an ejaculatory column of smoke out over the crowd.
Harlow seems to activate before an audience. He moves easily across the stage, his blue eyes, coupled with his scruffily-Satanic facial hair and brows, giving him a mischievous vibe. He’s 6ft 3in, so when Fergie joins him as a surprise guest during “First Class,” he towers over her, even though she’s wearing giant lucite platform heels.
When he was growing up rapping in Louisville, Kentucky, Harlow enjoyed a lot of attention. “It’s almost like I was bred for this.” Shows deliver a concrete, satisfying hit of that attention. Harlow has ascended in an age where celebrities are simultaneously more accessible to and more alienated from audiences. “It’s not that much of a barrier between you and these people,” he says. “You wouldn’t invite these people to your crib, but they’re in your crib if you’re reading all their thoughts. Should they have access to your brain, for real? That’s why you shouldn’t search for your name, that’s why you shouldn’t read the comments. Because a random person shouldn’t be able to reach someone who’s worked this hard. There was a time when people who worked hard could truly isolate themselves from the people that weren’t in their space, that hadn’t earned the right to have their ear. Now everyone has our ear if we go looking for it.”
Harlow tries to avoid social media, where millions spew hateful thoughts about him daily into the void. There’s love too, Harlow says, but somehow it doesn’t hit as poignantly as all the shit-talking. A cheering stadium crowd is an antidote.
He remembers feeling nervous before an audience in middle school, rapping at his school talent show, but now a crowd of screaming fans gives him no anxiety. In his early days, Harlow performed for many rooms with double-digit turnouts – he calls the tour he did in January 2018 “the struggle tour.” “Now that people have showed up and they’re here,” he says, “it’s more comfortable.” It’s not the crowds that make him anxious, but the alternative.
The day after Harlow’s show, we meet again in another cushy non-place: a hotel in West Hollywood. LA’s golden evening light shoots through the trees overhanging a cobbled lane, which leads to a discreet and celebrity-friendly hotel entrance. From there I am whisked up to an anonymous room on a high floor, where Harlow is staying while he’s in town. He has spent the day recharging after the night before.
“I just took a two-hour nap,” Harlow says, opening the door and beckoning me in to the suite’s vast living area. The space is sterile and reliant on greys and neutrals; it’s bright, but the light that had appeared so warm outside feels muted and airport-like.
Harlow wears a similarly subdued white tank top, swishy green joggers – the same ones he wore in his recent New Balance campaign – and New Balance clogs. He sinks back into a giant green-grey sofa in the middle of the room, his manager promising to return shortly with a dinner delivery for him. A few minutes later a cardboard bowl of nondescript grains and vegetables appears.
The nap had not come to him easily, he says. “You’re trying to sleep, and you’re not really getting to sleep. And you’re saying, all right, maybe I’ll work out. And then finally I was like, bro, fuck that. You’re exhausted. Even if you don’t fall asleep, just lay here and stop being beholden to shit.”
Nap secured, we rehash last night’s show. “I’m in a space now where I can rip theatres, because it’s all right in front of you,” Harlow says. He’s still getting accustomed to arena performances. Besides the artist’s delivery, he explains, there are thousands of production logistics in play. It’s also harder for Harlow to gauge whether the people in an arena’s eyries are “feeling” the performance. “I’m very conscious of trying to, like, overstate my body movements sometimes, and, like, project, and do things that reach the person in the balcony. Because it’s so far away, it’s harder to get that frenetic energy just trapped in a ball.”
The challenge is a welcome one. He recalls one of his most visceral memories, of a show he played at a local theatre in Wisconsin, pre-pre-pre-“Whats Poppin”. “It was about seven people, literally,” he says. “But what made it hard for me was that my family had come up and surprised me. And they had their family friends from up north there and, like, sat in the back. And there were more of them than the crowd. So I was not only embarrassed for myself, but – and my family didn’t care, they were proud of me no matter what – but I was embarrassed that that was the crowd I attracted… it’s more vulnerable when your family is involved.”
He compares the feeling of that show – and the horror of the possibility that if everything were to go sideways, he could one day play to an empty room again – to that of being an anxious kid.
“That is the core feeling underneath all the shit we’re talking about,” he says. “That feeling of, like, the parents having to see their kid go through that. That type of shit could make me cry. That’s the anxiety behind events, behind shows, behind anything: what if I put all this effort in and no one cares? My fear is like, I’m gonna have a birthday party and no one’s gonna come.”
It’s rare to hear such uncertainty from Harlow, someone who has previously been so bullish about his own career trajectory. (He once told another interviewer that he wanted to be “the face of my generation.”) But these brief strobes of vulnerability are also Harlow at his most endearing. In that viral clip from the BET Awards, for instance, Saweetie quickly defuses Harlow by asking, “Why you shaking?” “Nobody’s shaking!” Harlow says.
Saweetie, he adds in his retelling, went on to explain that it wasn’t his hand that was shaking as he held hers, but his lips. He demonstrates this: upper lip twitching, eyes craven. “I don’t recall it,” he adds, “but I’m not gonna say she’s lying.”
Harlow admits that he has not been as candid and laissez-faire in our conversations as is typical of him, chiefly because he feels a responsibility not to humiliate the four tour buses full of crew and friends who are invested in his career. “I have a very dark side, trust me, but you get to a space where it’s not just your life,” he says. He’s always thinking about who he’s talking to, and how what he’s saying might be perceived. “We work too hard for me to just say, ‘Well, I wanna show a little personality,’” he says. “I’m not playing with this shit. This shit is fragile as fuck.”
This is part of Harlow’s talent: he has a savvy not just for garnering attention, but for avoiding the infinite trip hazards that come with that attention. This skill is at least in part a function of being a young artist who has grown up heavily online. “Young people are just, like – and this is probably how it’s always been – it feels like they’ve just become more aware. So much information, like social context, is at their fingertips,” he says. The day before, we’d discussed how from a very young age, kids are gaining a strong sense of how people act by reading and watching videos. Being drenched in social cues is also, he adds now, shaping their sense of humour. “If you read those comments or you see some of these TikToks, these 14-year-olds or 11-year-olds are fucking hilarious because, for better or worse, they’re learning how socialising works so early.”
Our conversation is winding down, and the sky through the window turns a dull purple, then a dark navy. Soon Harlow will need to rally himself for an awards ceremony in the hotel downstairs, but he doesn’t seem hurried. He sits straight up on the sofa, his legs out under the coffee table like a kid waiting to get called into the headmaster’s office.
“You could also argue social skills are struggling,” he says, “that kids are more awkward, or not as confident. Face-to-face interactions are harder. But they understand things. They’re so intuitive.”
Harlow is speaking philosophically but perhaps also from experience, for he is also a highly alert person who grew up in the digital age, with the heightened social acuity that comes with that. This is part of Harlow’s charm: nothing he says sounds calculated, but you still walk away with the sense that he has gleefully two-stepped you around the dance floor and left you exactly where he intended.
Once Harlow has warmly deposited me in the hallway, I remember another fan I met outside his show; a lanky teenage lad with long ringlets who was standing with a very short young woman with impeccable cat-eye eyeliner. Both could have been characters in Euphoria.
“He’s very humble,” the man said of Harlow, his companion nodding enthusiastically, and he’s very “himself”. He’s also very charming, he added, and the woman nodded bigger, eyes widening.
“He knows what he’s doing,” the man said, with a laugh. “He knows what he’s doing, absolutely.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photography by Danny Kasirye
Styled by Angelo Mitakos
Tailoring by Vikkie Tarbuck at Karen Avenell
Grooming by Ben Talbott at The Wall Group
Set Design by Georgia Currell
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