Jack Harlow Said He Got ‘Blacker’ With 'Monica.' Did He? An Investigation

From the album title to the track list, we’re checking the receipts on "Monica."

(Screenshot from Jack Harlow’s “Trade Places” video)

Jack Harlow, a popular, million-selling rapper who recently released his fourth studio album, Monica, has found himself at the ass end of quite the discourse of online mockery. To be sure, it is a mockery entirely of his own making, but he received an alley-oop from other white people, and that part isn’t being discussed enough. I don’t care to discuss it in full here, but it is absolutely worth noting.

So what happened? During the promotional run for Monica, which came out on March 13, Harlow ventured to the New York Times’ Popcast show, hosted by critic Jon Caramanica and reporter Joe Coscarelli. In the midst of their due diligence of discussing the new project’s sound, the topic of white rappers pivoting into “white genres” (whew, chile) and being taken seriously by the media and consumers came up. More specifically, they pointed out that he didn’t do that, and that’s when it all went downhill.

“[White guy] Jon is saying you didn’t retreat into a white genre. In fact, you arguably went deeper into Black music,” said white guy Joe. To which white guy Jack responded, “I got Blacker!” I added the exclamation point for effect; Harlow is tremendously lowkey in this interview, but I feel like anytime you say you went Black, you need to be hype. They then discussed if it was a conscious choice, to which Harlow talked about his love for Black music, yada, yada, yada. It was the kind of convo three white guys have when talking about making Black music. Harlow was soundly (and rightly) dragged with the most hilarious of memes. The Black community has taken to redoing vaunted, largely neo-soul, Soulquarian-esque album covers—for instance, adding Harlow’s face to Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun album, or Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides and changing it to White on Both Sides—Beyoncé’s internet is truly a hoot.

But you know what? The discourse got me thinking that maybe we are being too hard on Jacky Boy. Maybe he has a point. Maybe you can get Blacker musically as a white guy than being a rapper. Perhaps his decision to delve deeper into Black music should be studied: Where did he get Blacker? How did he get Blacker? For Black artists, they wake and make a song, and #wallahmagic, they have made Black music, but for Harlow, he intentionally did what he viewed as foraying further into Blackness than just being a rapper allowed.

Since I’m a man of the people, I decided to take a listen to and figure out if maybe he’s right and the jokes aren’t warranted (spoiler alert: they are). Also, for what it’s worth, by this point in his career as a rapper, Harlow should really know better than to make such one-off, social media murder-ready statements. Nobody cares about nuance (and even there he was lacking, in my opinion), but the internet really doesn’t care.

Let’s see where Monica got, ya know, Black(er) as a project. And yes, I listened to the album. I will never do that again. Not because it’s bad—it’s not—but because it is unremarkable.