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“I love Black music. I love the sound of Black music. And of course, I’m hyper-aware of the politics of today, that safer landing spot that a lot of my white contemporaries have found. And of course, it appealed to me to do something that I felt, at a time when there’s certainly people that expect me to take the routes y’all are taking, to take the route that not only might not be expected but is also the route that I genuinely want to take. So all the stars aligned in that way for me, to be honest.
I’m not gonna pretend that what you’re talking about, I was like, “Huh, I guess you’re right!” I know that there are multiple things appealing about this route, but I also came to the decision, I’m proud to say, off of what feels good in my ear. I love R&B music. I love the sound of soft, intimate, melodic music. So I want to be understood. I want to write melodies that invite people to sing along…
I’ve always loved D’Angelo. I’ve always loved Erykah. I’ve always loved the intimacy and plush quality of that music, and if you look at my discography, there’s little hints of this. There’s Rhodes piano playing on “First Class.” There’s songs throughout that are — I really don’t like erratic music. I don’t like loud music. I like soft music. I like smooth music. I spend a lot of time sitting in silence. I like silence. So when I play music, I don’t want it to part from silence. I don’t like going to the club because of the volume.“
- Jack Harlow, via Stereogum
What an insult to Black music. Given that the sound of this album is about as vanilla as all of his other output in recent years, his proclamations of leaning into smoother RnB grooves reads more like he’s trying to convince himself that he’s pulled something off. Programmed dequantised percs and major 7th chords are not really enough for Harlow to make the grade, and that would be the case in any other context. The content of this record is simply too hollow to be so confidently self-assured of its artistic and aesthetic realness. His drowsy, monotonous vocals across the project hinder more than they help, and the redundant lyrical approaches engender more of a sense of deja vu than they do any semblance of thematic cohesion.
If you’re going to use Black culture to amplify your upcoming release, you should at the very least delve beyond the absolute surface level of what it has to offer. This cop-out of not caring for more aggressive styles of music (not liking the implications there at all) is not the flex you think it is. You want and have cherry-picked forms of contemporary Black music that are palatable to your white Kentucky man sensitivities. It isn’t cute, it isn’t admirable, it’s pathetic. Seriously, the instrumental selections here sound like he thought to himself “ooh, black people LOVE organs and saxophone, THAT’S how I can make it sound more black!”. There is next to no soul, no passion, no desire to go to the next fucking level. It is nine songs that amount to an incredibly passive vibe experience. So passive that I could feel my neuronal capabilities start to atrophy by the third track. If this is your take on the best that Black music has to offer, then I have no other choice but to believe that you are a Klan member masquerading as a “rapper”.
Fuck you for this Jack Harlow. Fuck you for daring to insult the intelligence of the people that still listen to you. Get royally fucked for assuming that anyone was going to be stupid enough to fall for this average marketing gimmick. Take a long walk off a short pier for reducing Black music down to a set of dawdling RnB clichés, and eat a bag of shit for making the laziest placeholder of an album and refusing to accept that you just didn’t care. You muddy the waters of the Friday release day with this slop, and for what? What is the point of this album otherwise? My bigger question here is: who in the actual fuck is bumping this crap? Wind your windows up, turn the volume all the way down. Better yet, hit shuffle on a Spotify generated fake genre playlist, it’s about the same as throwing this tripe on, and the result will somehow be more gratifying.
Dan Will Review 