Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/853426
52 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 in the room. On "Hitchcock," a single he'll release in February, he raps, "I'm just a guest inside the house of a culture that ain't mine and I'm just blessed to be around." And: "I've been trying to find the next step to make my best friends rich." In the maroon-ish room, the guys sit on metal chairs with cushions a shade darker than the walls. ey scroll through Snap- chat on their phones. Wyatt plays a little Pokémon on his handheld Nintendo DS. Harlow spies a 24-pack of water, which re- minds him: "We need to designate untouch- able water for the stage. Gotta have hella water to throw." O'Bannon is still DJ'ing, and the crowd knows every word to every song, includ- ing Kanye West's "Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1," which is about — well, it includes a line about having sex with a model who has "just bleached her asshole." And the point of including THAT detail in this story is to say that, if you're lucky enough to be at Headliners tonight, you get to experience the singular pleasure that is 400 mean-age-16½-year-olds yelling, in unison: "And I get bleach on my T-shirt?! Imma feel like an asshole!" Harlow finds himself alone backstage during the Homies' set. He removes the parka and jersey he's been wearing all night, puts them on hangers. He's feeling feverish, but this has nothing to do with the fact that he is a little under the weather and has been drinking tea all day. "I always get a semi-fe- ver before I go on," he says. en, because he can't get to a bathroom without fans seeing him: "I'm gonna have to piss in the trashcan." He grabs an empty water bottle and relieves himself. A little before 10:30, Craighead com- mands the crowd to chant: HAR-LOW! HAR-LOW! HAR-LOW! Showtime. Har- low puts the jersey and coat back on, the plan being to "rip them off sweatily" while performing. He climbs the six wooden stairs and pushes aside the black curtain in the doorway. Emerging from the darkness, wire- less microphone in hand, Harlow stalks to the middle of the stage, a captain at the bow of his ship. e shrieking teens are somehow louder than the bass tremors O'Bannon is pulsing through the floor. Harlow tells his fans to bounce and 400 Pogo Sticks form an undulating wave. His limbs flail, as if he's trying to kick the air's ass. He stands with one foot on the stage, the other on the alu- minum barricade, fist in the air. At times his mouth becomes a word processor going for the syllables-a-minute record. "Y'all are turnt the fuck up," he says, catching his breath between songs. "Not that I'm depressed, but this is a self-esteem boost." It seems the only lyric the crowd doesn't know is one Harlow tweaks: "I don't fuck with Trump but I rock New Balances." (About voting: "My dad has always told me how important it is to vote. When I told him I didn't he was pretty upset," Harlow says. "I don't even know if I was registered.") Harlow often says he doesn't have 45 minutes of songs that he likes, so after about a half-hour, he brings his younger brother, Clay, onstage. e final song of the night will be everybody wishing Clay a happy 16th birthday. But then "Happy Birthday" goes right into the first bubbly notes of "Ice Cream," which by the time you read this will have more than 700,000 plays on Spotify alone. e music video features Harlow and his friends riding around town in an ice-cream truck, and a beautiful woman in a bikini rubbing sunscreen on his pasty body. Tonight, Harlow almost screams the words: "Got the kids going wild like I'm selling ice cream!" His brother and the Homies unscrew the caps off hella water bottles and douse the bounding mass before them. Kids hoist a firefly swarm of cellphone lights into the air. Harlow hops off the stage and raps at the barricade. Hands reach for whatever part of him they can get to. He'll later say that what he does next is giving the fans too much but, in the moment, he decides to go overboard, drowning in the sea of bodies. Two weeks after graduating from high school, Harlow moved out of his parents' Highlands home and into a place on Berry Boulevard with Craighead and another friend, just around the corner from the Déjà Vu strip club not far from Churchill Downs. "In the Highlands, especially in a tucked- away neighborhood like I was in, there weren't people walking around out front whose lives have been shattered," Harlow said the first time we met, in August 2016. "You can smell the heroin on people. You see people who are zombies at this point." Most of his friends had just started freshman year in college. Harlow was "doing shit with PDFs" for his parents at their sign-making School, class of 2016 — released his most recent mixtape, 18, less than a month after graduating. One of the T-shirts at the merch table features the 18 cover art: Harlow strik- ing e inker pose in nothing but gray boxer-briefs and his signature black-framed Brooks Brothers eyeglasses. He released e Handsome Harlow EP in November of his senior year, and another T-shirt has its minimalist art: hair depicted as smoke swirls above the glasses. e green and pink pastel panties sell for $10 apiece. Harlow got them in bulk during a Victoria's Secret sale and had "Jack Harlow" printed across the butt. Check Twitter after a show: "blessed to have received underwear from @jackharlow." Harlow enters the venue through a side door and, hood up and head down, goes straight for the green room. At the barricade, a young girl cries, "Was that Jack?!?!" over bass that would register on the Richter scale. She and the majority of the crowd bear the markings of the underage: a Sharpied black X on the back of each hand. "e mean age tonight is gonna be like 16½," is how Harlow puts it. In the green room (really more of a maroon-ish room, if we're going by wall color), Harlow tears the plastic bags off his feet, balls them up and shoots them into the wastebasket. "Jack really killed it with the plastic bags," Dawoyne (2forwOyNE, or 2fo) Lawson says. "He's gonna name a song 'Plastic Bags.'" Lawson's twin brother, DaEndre (Shloob), sits on a folding table. Shloob is eating Sour Straws. During sound check, Shloob said, "When I played here the first time, the stage looked bigger. It doesn't look that big right now." Harlow, who was standing next to him, noticed a NO CROWD SURFING sign and said to nobody in particular, "Can I crowd surf? Wait, why the fuck am I asking? is is a rebellious-ass genre." en: "Are cuss words allowed in Louisville Magazine?" A Jack Harlow profile without profanity would look like a redacted CIA document. e twins, Ace Pro, Lucci and Marquis (Quiiso) Driver are a group of 23-year-old rappers/singers/producers/beat-makers named the Homies, part of Harlow's Private Garden collective. If Wyatt's not around, Harlow is used to being the only white guy "I'M YOUNG. BUT I'M IMPATIENT. IT'S CRAZY TO BE ABLE TO SEE YOUR PRIME AND NOT BE THERE YET."