Jack Harlow at Wembley Arena: great rapping, pity about the shoddy show

I’m not sure if this is what passes for a compliment in hip hop circles, but Jack Harlow seems like a nice young man. The 24-year-old American rapper appeared genuinely humbled by the enthusiasm of the audience at the cavernous Wembley Arena.

“I gotta be honest, I’ve been thinking I could maybe spend some of my life in London,” he announced. “I love the energy, I love the architecture, I love how intelligent the girls are.” This latter produced a deafening communal shriek of appreciation, perhaps because “intelligence” is not a feminine virtue routinely celebrated in the genre. But it was amusingly on point that this resolutely polite Kentucky native gave the architecture a nod too.

Harlow is a fast-rising star, with two US chart topping singles (both reached number 2 in the UK) and a transatlantic top 5 album, cutely titled Come Home the Kids Miss You. A handsome, charismatic, skillful rapper with a lot of wit and charm and a nerdy, unaggressive persona, he has already been courted by Hollywood, where he has been cast in the Woody Harrelson role in a remake of the 1992 interracial sports comedy White Men Can’t Jump.

In some interviews, Harlow has been prickly about suggestions from American music critics that white rappers have an unspoken commercial advantage. On the slick groove Tyler Herro – named after a white National Basketball Association (NBA) player – he tosses out the line “the ones that hate me the most look just like me” but really makes a stronger point by demonstrating an impressive range of flowing rap skills all night, switching up tempos, making clever rhymes, and frequently letting the beat drop out to rap a capella with exuberant flair.

On Already Best Friends (a cheery ode to threesome sex mysteriously adopted as a paean to female friendship), thousands of young women in the Wembley audience joined in, until the whole place was wondrously full of high voices rapping complex lyrics in enthusiastic sync, with Harlow bouncing excitedly around the stage, feeding them answer phrases.

Harlow is part of an ongoing decades-long shift from rap’s more abrasive edges. Like young British rapper Aitch, Harlow can come across as utterly sex-obsessed (the biggest response of the night was for a track called I Wanna See Some Ass) but there is usually an underlying romantic element, with a welcome absence of the derogatory terms for women that can make the genre appear so socially backward. Reading cardboard signs held up in the crowd, he expressed comical shock at one licentious message. “Really, that’s the best you got? I thought this was a sophisticated city!” He was more impressed by the lovelorn humour of “DISAPPOINT ME SO I CAN MOVE ON”. “Amazing sign,” he declared, appreciatively. “But I don’t wanna disappoint you.”

British rapper Dave arrived for a warmly received guest slot. Dave may be more psychologically adventurous than Harlow but certainly shares his sense of respect and propriety. They hugged at the end with unabashed affection, declaring their “true friendship”. These are both artists who in different ways occupy the new centre of a genre that has effectively become the pop mainstream.

All that being said, however, this was a shoddy show. It remains baffling why young audiences have come to be so accepting of cheap production values. Harlow stood alone on Wembley’s vast stage, performing to pre-recorded backing tapes, in front of a screen that barely occupied a third of the available space, displaying the kind of graphics that might have just about passed muster as screensavers back in the early days of home-computing. His smart rapping has put him well on his way to major stardom. Perhaps by the time he returns to these shores the rest of his act will have caught up.