There’s a meme I’ve always found pretty funny but never took that seriously, some form of Niggas pushing 30 still tryna rap… it’s time for jazz. You could easily replace jazz with neo-soul: The gist is, it’s time for earth-toned turtlenecks, evenings spent in the crib with a glass of Merlot, and, above all, spiritual maturity. 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; as if Bilal didn’t use his jazz-trained vocals on 1st Born Second to be nearly as obsessed with pimp culture as Too $hort. The best neo-soul is raw, prickly music that’s way too emotionally complex to be reduced to a moodboard aesthetic.
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), and becoming the kind of guy who, as he told The New York Times’ Popcast“would much rather go to dinner than go to the club.” Admittedly, yes, it sounds cool to live like a character in Love Jones, but on Monica, Harlow tries to prove his emotional and intellectual depth with cultural signifiers rather than the music.
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“It just struck me that I would want to do something a little more egoless,” said the Jackman in that same Times interview, later adding, “As I’m getting older, I’m having more trouble reconciling being braggadocious on record.” On to neo-soul, a genre that could only be seen as a vessel for humble, egoless artistry to someone who has engaged with the genre primarily through interracial couple TikTok accounts and Instagram slideshows. To his credit, though, on the album, Harlow—along with Norwegian producer Aksel Arvid, known for his work with PinkPantheress—flexes the checkbook like a SEC football booster to recruit a team of jazz and R&B pros. Here and there Robert Glasper is on the piano, every now and then Cory Henry brings his organ, and Jermaine Paul is on the bass with a whole team of session musicians. Meanwhile, overqualified singers like Ravyn Lenae, Mustafa, and Omar Apollo do some of the background vocal riffs that Harlow’s limited range won’t reach. It’s the sort of musical infrastructure so reliable and expensive that you could pull damn-near anyone off the street and prop them up like the boss in Weekend at Bernie’s and they’d still sound half-decent.
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