"That to grow up is to exchange the niggas, bitches, hos, guns, sex, drugs, sagging pants, and ego-driven drum machine nonsense of hip-hop for real music with real instruments and moral integrity. As if, behind all of the burning incense and astrology of Mama's Gun, Erykah Badu wasn't talking cash shit; as if the nuanced yearn-fest of Raphael Saadiq's Instant Vintage wasn't also horny as hell."
"Jack Harlow didn't get the memo. Apparently, the 28-year-old hitmaker's pivot from pop-rap player-he's often compared to Drake, but his feelings are nowhere near as extreme; I think of his recent hits more the way I do the kinda witty radio rap love joints of the 2000s like Fabolous' 'Can't Let You Go' and Chingy's 'One Call Away'-to sultry and half-wounded R&B city boy was motivated by a change in lifestyle."
"Ahead of his new album, Monica, he moved from his home state of Kentucky to New York and started thumbing through James Baldwin paperbacks, dressing like Be-era Common, hitting up independent Manhattan movie theaters (watching stuff like Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel and John Cassavettes, according to his Letterboxd account, conveniently made public in the weeks leading up to his album)."
The meme about aging rappers transitioning to jazz or neo-soul suggests maturity requires abandoning hip-hop's explicit content for 'real music' with moral integrity. However, this oversimplifies neo-soul artists like Erykah Badu, Raphael Saadiq, and Bilal, whose work combines spiritual aesthetics with raw sexuality and complex emotions. Jack Harlow's recent pivot from pop-rap to R&B exemplifies this superficial transition. His move to New York, adoption of intellectual aesthetics—reading James Baldwin, watching art films, preferring dinner to clubs—appears performative rather than substantive. This lifestyle curation suggests a calculated image shift disconnected from genuine artistic depth.
Read at Pitchfork
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