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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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 57 my scope to make almost everything I write profound," he says. To him, every line in "Too Much" is a metaphor for his life. e opening couplet is, "She say that I tell her that she pretty too much. I grew into them skinnies used to rock them bootcuts." "ere is a girl that didn't want me back because I was almost too nice to her. She likes assholes, she historically has, and that line encapsulates that situation for me per- fectly," Harlow says. "And then that second line, I dead-ass used to rock goddamn mom jeans, so I got some thinner jeans that look better on my frame. But the metaphor in that is, 'Damn, he grew up.'" Harlow says he's sitting on about 10 songs that he'll put out. Or maybe not. Last Sep- tember, for instance, he spent half a day polishing two tracks at Head First, a studio in a former church in the Shelby Park neighborhood. Har- low said one of the beats reminded him of walking outside in the morning, hair still wet from the shower, sun shining. He rapped about how "my girl the same age as my ACT — 27." And about having "a couple issues with driving": speeding ticket, skipping traffic school, suspended license, to- taled car, skyrocketing insurance. (It's prob- ably worth mentioning that, when Harlow was heading to Qdoba before the anks- giving Eve show, he performed a 25-point turn maneuvering out of the parking lot at Headliners.) e engineer burned the tracks onto a CD because Harlow thought they should listen to them in the car. He cranked up the volume. "Whoo!" he shouted. "at shit is flawless!" Never released. Harlow doesn't really like the 18 cover art anymore, the one of him in his underwear. Or the "Ice Cream" video. He has taken a lot of his music and many videos off the internet because he's afraid his past work will diminish his credibility. "Sometimes I want to take all of it offline," he says. "Even the shit I'm making now I probably won't like in a year." He used to always keep a rap he'd written — four lines, eight bars, never a whole song — folded in his pocket at all times, one that he still considered perfect. "I would be so scared to add to it and ruin it," he says. "at dynamic has moved with me as I've gotten older. I'd be happy for a crutch or a gimmick. I just want it to be: 'He makes good music,'" he says. (He declined to be on an MTV reality show about up- and-coming rappers. "I think I'd win but that's not how I want to make it," he says.) "I have to think about my image, especially with how superficial my generation is. I tell videographers to really capture how I look. Even me, I'm more likely to click a video of someone who looks interesting." One day in the front room of the house, Harlow mentions that he goes to Salon Bac- co on Bardstown Road. "If it's in a salon, is it a barber?" he asks Craighead. "You know I'm not gonna call it a barber," says Craighead, who, like the rest of the Homies, gets his hair cut by 2fo. "Well," Harlow continues, "my mom put me on to this great dude, and he was like, 'Listen, it doesn't look like you're going bald, but I know your dad is bald, I know your grandpa on your mom's side is bald. You could go bald one day. So I'm gonna tell you this: You need to go ahead and get on this Rogaine wave now.' I was like, 'No shit?' So I'm already putting Rogaine in this joint. I'm out here getting ahead of the curve. I'll have girls come over and see that Rogaine and they're like, 'What the hell?' I'm like, 'Just know I'm on top of shit.'" He wears the glasses because his lazy left eye is "trash as hell." "It could probably get worse and get on some Forest Whitaker shit," he says. He never used to want to be seen without his glasses, which have become a staple. "But I don't want to show up to a show and have a promoter say, 'Whoa, why aren't you wearing them?'" When he doesn't have them on, he puts a contact lens in the left eye. And he's been wearing a new pair of black frames. "ey look like I know I have glasses on, as opposed to before when it looked like I had to wear glasses for my eyesight, which was in fact the case," he says. "Now that I think about it, maybe that's not such a cool switch. Luckily I haven't blown up to the world yet, so my impression isn't made. But I can't decide how I want to look." Or how he wants to sound. On one unreleased song, "Too Much," Harlow sings in a high register that — well, he doesn't even seem like the same person who once rapped, "I'm an aggravatin', masturbatin' rap sensation with the swagger of a premature ejaculation." It sounds so unlike anything he's released that, even after hearing it more than 10 times in the studio, I ask, "Wait, who is that singing?" "I've tried to narrow moment. It was almost like I had everything on my end taken care of internally. But that feeling is temporary." He'd read the rap the following day, then again the next. Eventual- ly, he didn't think it was good anymore. "It's like looking at a car. It won't look dirty, but then I get up close and see specks of dirt," Harlow says. "I'd have to find something new to write to keep with me." Harlow nev- er recorded those raps, though his parents found about 50 of them in a box when he moved out. Matthew Rhinehart was Harlow's English teacher junior year, and he remembers Har- low liking Hunger, a book from 1890 about a man who suffers for his art. "It was about how art is a full expression of one's individuality and how you don't compromise on that," Rhinehart says. "at really resonated with Jack." Harlow's mom studied oil painting in college, and she says her son, as a paint- er, would be a super-realist, obsessing over every detail. e cover illustration for the "Routine" single is a bird's-eye view of a sleeping girl and a wide-awake Harlow on his mattress, with Raybo, a pair of New Balances, a Spinelli's pizza box and a "Private Garden" book on the floor. His glasses and charging phone are on the nightstand. "I pick apart the things that nobody else is really gonna see," Harlow says. "It might be one word in a song. I wish I could make masterpieces quicker. "I've heard about monks who would spend a whole day on art and destroy it at the end of the day no matter what it was. at slowly detached them from what they were creating. Sometimes it's so hard for me because I start creating something and as soon as I start liking it, it becomes very precious to me." On his mattress, Harlow will flip his iPhone to "airplane mode" and write in the Notes app, on a screen that shattered when moisture from the shower built up and caused the phone to slip off the windowsill. "I wanted to stay true to the paper, bro, but it's tragically inconvenient compared to the phone," he says. Plus, you need a light on to write on paper, and Harlow prefers to create in the dark. He'll get a beat from the Homies and will listen without headphones — "For hours and hours and hours and hours," Craighead says. He still makes sure "YOU CAN HEAR MY VOICE CHANGING OVER THE YEARS. I SOUND LIKE SIMBA COMING INTO HIS OWN."

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