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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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 51 BY JOSH MOSS 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 popular- ized 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. Jack Harlow is in the driver's seat of the 2005 Pontiac Grand Prix he bought off his grandparents for $2,000, lead-footing down dark and drizzle-slicked Cherokee Parkway on the way to his anksgiving Eve concert. e speedometer's needle ticks toward 50, 15 over the 35 mph speed limit. Harlow and some friends are returning to Headliners Music Hall after a pre-show din- ner at the Highlands Qdoba, though Har- low didn't eat because his stomach typically won't let him before a show. Which is saying something because he has even rapped about Doba, as he sometimes calls it: "Pinto beans in my burrito, roll it up and shove it in me." On his phone inside the restaurant, he pulled up a WAVE-3 interview he'd done to promote tonight's gig. "He's actually kind of adorable," anchor Dawne Gee said after the segment, "but I don't know if a rapper likes to be called adorable." In the backseat, Harlow's roommate Chauncy Craighead, who goes by Ace Pro, is on FaceTime with DJ Ronnie O'Bannon, aka Ronnie Lucciano, aka Lucci. "Let's see the crowd!" Craighead says to O'Bannon, who's already onstage. A couple hundred fans are sardined toward the front. "Oh, shit!" Craighead shouts. Harlow swivels his head and snatches the phone. "Oh, shit!" he shouts, his face transforming into a real-life toothy and dimpled smiling emoji. "is show is gonna be fire!" (Quick attempt at translating: "Fire, dope and crispy are synonyms," Harlow says. Yep: crispy.) His longtime friend Urban Wyatt is riding shotgun and asks to see the screen too. "It's gonna be so lit!" says Wyatt, a photographer and self-described "creative-director type" with blond locks that would make a Disney princess jealous and high-top sneakers that say "Fuck Em" all over. e car lists across the double yellow line. Moments before parking on the side of Headliners, Harlow pulls up the hood of his '90s-era, neon-accented Nautica parka, to conceal his identity from the kids waiting to get inside and to protect his corkscrews of brown hair from the raindrops. All night he has been wearing plastic grocery bags over his New Balance sneakers, which he buffed with a toothbrush and a laundry detergent-water mixture while choosing his outfit for this evening: khakis with cargo pockets, and the Nautica over a hockey jersey. Harlow owns more than a dozen pairs of New Balances, every color in the spectrum, but the brand got press recently because a higher-up at the company made favorable comments publicly about then President-elect Trump. A white-supremacist website claimed the company made "the of- ficial shoes of white people." Photos of New Balances on fire — actual fire, not dope fire — or impaled with knives made the rounds on social media. "Like they haven't always been the shoes of white people," Harlow says. "It just obviously makes it worse when neo-Nazis say it." Harlow — who had meetings with Def Jam Recordings and Atlantic Records during his freshman year at Atherton High A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF TEEN RAPPER JACK HARLOW.