Louisville Magazine

AUG 2017

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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54 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 All through kindergarten, Harlow had to wear a patch over his right eye in an attempt to make his lazy left one stronger. Kids always called him a nerd, so by third grade he'd learned the words to "White & Nerdy" by "Weird Al" Yankovic and made those same kids laugh. "It affects me to this day. Not in a dramatic, been- through-a-lot way but in how I use humor to interact with people," he says. He read all the Harry Potter books and a series called Warriors about clans of cats. "I grasped the power of speech and words super-early, and that's what got me into music," Harlow says. "Writing rap is just expressing myself through language." When he was 10 he asked for permission to listen to the explicit albums in his mom's collec- tion. 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 gen- eration, who we'll be talking about in 10 to 20 years, realistically, is Drake." Agree? You must use the word crispy. In sixth grade, Harlow used a micro- would just start rhyming." As an example, he freestyles: "Urban Wyatt. My Instagram was public, then I turned to private. Good person turned a pirate — see, it's addicting. It was kind of like subconscious training. I almost feel like it was part of puberty for me." Harlow was born on March 13, 1998. His mom, Maggie, played a lot of Eminem while he was in the womb. She and her husband, Brian, like to tell a story from when Jack wasn't even two years old. ey were visiting family in Michigan and having a long dinner at a restaurant. Jack didn't make a peep the whole night. Another diner approached their table. "He's like a little Buddha," the woman said. "He's a very old soul." On the playground, Jack would describe his brother as a "friend-making machine," while he was comfortable just sitting and observing. e house Harlow grew up in near Seneca Park has a #RESIST sign in a front window, a full-size gumball machine and empty candy wrappers as wallpaper above the kitchen cab- inets. e original art on the walls includes a large painting of Buster, a trail horse Maggie had to sell when the family moved from Shelbyville to Louisville when the boys were little, so they could be closer to other kids. e Sugarhill Gang's self-titled debut, the one with "Rapper's Delight" on it, was the first album Maggie owned, and she'd play that in the house, along with Gwen Stefani and the Black Eyed Peas. phone from the Guitar Hero video game and a laptop to record his first rhymes. He and his friend Copelan Garvey — "Har- low featuring Cope" — made a CD called Rippin' and Rappin'. "I wrote all his verses for him, so I wanted that seniority," Harlow says. ey burned 40 copies and sold them at Highland Middle School for $2 apiece. Early on, Harlow wasn't sure what to write about. "He was struggling a little bit with the fact that he wasn't a black kid from a rough neighborhood," Maggie says. "I said, 'e one thing I know about writing is they say to write what you know.'" "Black culture was the coolest thing to all kids growing up, whether they want to say it like that or not," Harlow says. "But I didn't want to copy. I didn't want to steal from it. I wanted to put my own twist on it, tell my story." His sixth grade science teacher, Walker Swain, produced music and asked Harlow to be on a song he was working on. It never got released, but Harlow rapped, "Texting with some other dude is something that I hate to see, but honestly another dude is something that I'd hate to be." He got a professional microphone in his "I'D BE AT SOCCER PRACTICE, AND I'D HEAR WORDS AND WOULD JUST START RHYMING."

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