Jack Harlow dined alone on Valentine's Day

A single image has occupied my mind since three of my friends sent it to me: Jack Harlow dining alone on Valentine’s Day at Balthazar. 

It’s so evocative and rich with detail for a blurry photo reposted by pop culture aggregate accounts. He’s sitting on the booth side of a table framed by red leather, drinking a glass of champagne in a black turtleneck. There’s the glint of his diamond earring, a napkin placed on his lap, and a bread basket. It’s an image ripe for projection and he knows it!

And perhaps it’s Jack Harlow’s courting of projection that makes him so attractive to me and so many other women — he credits his success to the support of women, specifically black women. To dine alone at Balthazar on Valentine’s Day as someone with a female audience is frankly crass as an obvious ploy for lust and attention.

While Jack Harlow doesn’t inspire the sort of fandom other Altar Boys do — there are no fan accounts analyzing his every move nor is there a name for his fanbase — he does inspire the same comparison over and over again. In the comments section of his Chicken Shop Date video, the definitive text of his flirty persona, viewers again and again compare him to a high school classmate. One writes, “Jack is like the cute guy in Biology class that flirts with everyone.” Another says, “he’s literally the boy in english class you’re obsessed with cuz he’s so funny.” 

Even in Tess Garcia’s excellent profile of Jack Harlow, she opens by comparing interviewing him to working on a group project with the most popular guy in school. And ends with an apt quote from the rapper, “I feel like I went to school with a girl like you…she did her homework.”

Maybe it’s because you did go to high school with a boy like him. For the first half of his career, he looked like the rough outline of someone you would’ve known: black rectangular glasses, unruly curls, and a square unremarkable face. It’s only after “WHATS POPPIN” found success on TikTok that he got his popstar makeover. He ditched the glasses, got ripped, a hairstylist, and a beard (chin implant).

But his shameless confidence isn’t a result of his glow up, it’s a through line in all his music dating back to his remix of Mims’ “This Is Why I’m Hot,” which he wrote when he was 15-years-old and recorded the music video in the halls of his high school. Most of my favorite songs are off of one of his pre-hot albums, Loose. It’s his cockiness that first attracted me to his music — and the fact that my roommate met him after a show in 2019 and told me, “he’s the dumbest person she’s ever met” — it rubs off on you when you listen. It’s the kind of self-assuredness that disappears outside the four walls of high school.

Jack Harlow curates his class clown, campus crush persona in songs like “9TH GRADE” and in his catalog he’s sure to include whatever type of girl you are or were in high school as an object of his affection. In “Like A Blade Of Grass,” he sings, “You the type of girl I would’ve flirted with in class / Copied every test, be the reason that I passed.” It’s important to note that he ridiculously rhymes class with, “Like a blade of grass wants sunlight, I just want that ass.”

To so readily inspire a high school crush is a feat because high school is famously the site of the crush. I often track famous men onto the high school experience to understand their appeal and to make them more vivid in my mind. Like you would have flirted with Dominic Sessa in APUSH and totally had a crush on him, but called him “gross” to your friends. As Alexandra Molotkow points out in Crush Material, this taxonomizing can work against the thrill of attraction, but it puts excess longing to use. 

Crushes are a sight of exploration, imagination, and creation. An obsession is at its most fun when you spin a tale with a friend. Inventing who a celebrity crush was in high school is similar to when you spent the duration of your girl sleepover hypothesizing about what might be happening at the boy sleepover. Even if you’re just doing it in the comments of a YouTube video of a white rapper no one should take seriously.

INDULGENCES: MY ALTAR BOYS

Former Skins cast members, anyone Irish, British actors whose breakout role was “playing gay,” rappers from Kentucky, and men in Ocean’s Eleven (and their codependent best friends) are all fair game.

CILLIAN MURPHY accepted the award for Actor in a Lead Role at the Irish Film and Television Awards. It’s rare that there is a truly perfect moment, but his acceptance speech comes close. “Boys in the Better Land” by Fontaines D.C. played as Cillian took the stage and he started out apologizing for beating out all three Kneecap lads, “Sorry Kneecap. You had me outnumbered.” Something that can be so personal when you develop a parasocial relationship with the proud and gorgeous nation of Ireland!

JOSH O’CONNOR supported the ACLU in a TikTok video. In it he said, “immigrants make our communities stronger.” This statement from Josh is very fork found in kitchen as he starred in the anti-Brexit romance Gods Own Country and played a supporting role in Aisha, a film documenting the anguish of seeking asylum in Ireland, but love that he’s sticking to his guns!

@aclu

Josh is right: Our country is better because of immigrants.

DJO (Joe Keery) covered HAIM’s horniest song in a t-shirt over a long-sleeve shirt.

I’m waiting with bated breath for Harris Dickinson’s Chicken Shop Date’s release today!

As always I’m open to your feedback and suggestions of what to include in Altar Boys. I’m still off of social media, so if you see an Altar Boy, say something! I promise not to talk about Jack Harlow again for a while. Thank you for reading.