Jack Harlow’s rehearsals for the upcoming remake of White Men Can’t Jump paid off during his recent co-hosting appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. During a round of random object shootout, the rapper beat out the veteran host 7-0 in a messy game that included tossing a cornucopia full of eyeballs, a vase filled to the brim with applesauce, and a Mike Myers Halloween mask through a basketball hoop.
During the final round, Fallon passed his turn off to Dwyane Wade, whose win could have brought the score up to a less embarrassing loss of 7-5. But even the three-time NBA champion couldn’t land the shot. Teetering on starstruck, Harlow’s sole reaction to the close-call basket before he sat down to help Fallon interview Wade as the night’s guest was: “I’m wet.”
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Harlow was the star of the show for much of the night. During a sit-down with Fallon, the Kentucky native recounted his first late-night appearance, thanking the host for taking a chance on him way back in 2020 before his breakthrough single “What’s Poppin” became a Grammy Award-nominated hit.
“I feel like a lot of artists, when their song finally is in super rotation on the radio, then it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s get him up here,’” Harlow said. “You were, to me, a tastemaker in that moment. You were really early on that, so thank you for having me.”
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His gratitude showed through when he recruited Fallon as one of his airplane passengers during a recent performance of “First Class” at the MTV Video Music Awards. The night also saw the rapper bring the song’s guiding inspiration Fergie to a roaring crowd. During the Tonight Show, Harlow revealed the backstory behind the full-circle moment of sampling “Fergalicious” on the track and having her join him to perform, recalling a time he was barred from performing the original 2006 hit in an elementary school talent show.
“When I was in fifth grade, I tried to do ‘Fergalicious,’ and, you know, the lyrics are suggestive, I guess,” he explained. “To me, it wasn’t anything. But I didn’t even get to finish the audition. I was halfway through and they cut me off. They’re like, ‘You can’t do that.’ So that’s my rapper origin story.”
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