Concert review: Did Louisville rapper Jack Harlow win over Rupp crowd of ’859-ers’?

If Jack Harlow were ever to consider a career change — you know, a shift away from the frills and fortunes awarded by his platinum selling profile as a rap artist — he might want to check out the Kentucky Department of Tourism. Judging by the way he promoted his home state before a crowd of 13,000-plus Sunday evening at Rupp Arena, Harlow might just be a guy they would like to enlist.

The Louisville-based artist opened his performance amid the requisite booming, bass heavy echoes and dramatic synths necessary for your modern-day, serious-minded arena performer to prove he means business. But the massive video screen behind him offset the pomp with a mini travelogue clip that began with the highway sign “Welcome to Lexington.”

From there, the film shot through Keeneland, the University of Kentucky and other obvious local ports. Then as the warp-speed lyrics of “Nail Tech” began, up shot Harlow through the stage floor. From that point, the race, as they say, was on.

What followed over the next 95 minutes was, in many ways, a one-man parade. There was live instrumentation to flesh out the more mechanized beats and grooves, although the stage musicians were set so far away from the action that they essentially played out their parts in darkness. There were a few guests that Harlow brought onstage, include studio pros Ky Engineerin’ and Nemo Achida, both of whom were mentoring figures for the rapper early in his still-young career, as a well as a cameo during “Tyler Herro” by, well, UK basketball alumnus and current Miami Heat player Tyler Herro.

But for the most part, Harlow kept all of the massive Rupp stage, including the runway that extended out half-way through the arena floor, to himself.

Now, if you caught Harlow via national television on Thanksgiving Day performing at halftime during the Detroit Lions/Green Bay Packers NFL game, you earned a dose of skepticism. That show was so anemic, visually as well as in the live performance, that one had to wonder if Harlow could sufficiently navigate through a full-length concert on his own.

Well, he did, and with seemingly natural ease. As arena-size hip-hop shows go, this was one of the cleanest in terms of a simple sound mix in recent Rupp memory. During early offerings like “Route 66” (no, not the often-covered Bobby Troup R&B song of the same name) and “They Don’t Love It,” every phrase, every proclamation and every F bomb were delivered with remarkable clarity.

Granted, Harlow may not be the most electric rapper to command a stage, but he displayed a level of unassuming confidence that his recent TV outing largely kept under wraps. Similarly, he seemed genuinely good-natured, recalling an initial 2018 show for UK students and then acknowledging how the Rupp appearance was really his first full public concert in Lexington.

The Rupp crowd ate it all up and cheered Harlow on. Well, they did until he expressed how he remains an ardent University of Louisville Cardinal fan at heart. But the admission, the inevitable (and thundering) booing it triggered from the crowd of, as Harlow referred to them, “859-ers” and then the acceptance of that flack by the artist who poked the proverbial bear in the first place were all openly playful. I think.

The pace of the performance was remarkably brisk. Few of the roughly 30 songs performed broke the two-minute mark. Most of Harlow’s between-song chats were longer. As for the songs themselves, some were meatier certainly than others. Yes, several were smothered in hip-hop’s almost expected level of male bravado. But there also instances where Harlow put a mirror up the stardom that shot his way out of nowhere in 2020 and made what he saw rhyme.

A fine case in point was “Denver,” an observation from his 2023 album “Jackman” of social decline on a mass level that grew as personal gain thrived, along with an ensuing sense of guilt. Harlow, a Louisville native, defined the conflict succinctly in the song’s opening verse as “walking past the homeless in a Rolex.” Later in the program, “Churchill Downs” (from 2022’s “Come Home the Kids Miss You”) upped the ante and toughened the reflective stance (“I know I should be humble, but it’s something I just haven’t learned; soon enough, I’ll have to make these bad habits burn.”)

Less appealing was the unannounced addition of three opening acts — all Kentucky based — to the bill: DJ Warren Peace (from Lexington), vocalist James Savage (from Henderson) and the hip-hop/funk hybrid group Black Sheep Mobb (also from Lexington.) All had appealing moments, especially Savage, but clearly none were ready yet for the scale, pace and polish of an arena setting. Black Sheep Mobb’s set, for instance, didn’t formally conclude. It just stopped and sort of evaporated.

As this was the final evening of a two-weekend, six-city run of home state performances for Harlow, fittingly dubbed the “No Place Like Home Tour,” the stage screen flashed bits of Kentucky trivia before the show started.

My favorite factoid of the lot: “Bowling Green is the home of the Kentucky Corvette Museum. Let’s not talk about the sinkhole incident.”

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