Aussie pop prince The Kid Laroi is living the dream ahead of the 2021 MTV VMAs
The Kid Laroi was only 10 when he decided he wanted to be a rapper and eight years later, he is now one of the world’s biggest pop stars.
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Top of the Kid Laroi’s rider for his backstage comfort is a ball pit.
Success for the 18-year-old Australian hip pop star means he can indulge his teen desires and more importantly, realise his dream of providing for his mother Sloane and younger brother Austin.
“I’m definitely blessed that I’m able to do that,” he says.
“I always pictured it happening like this though so I can’t really say that I’m surprised because this is what I’ve worked towards to do.
“But I’m definitely very grateful.”
It may appear his meteoric rise to the pop summit for the kid born Charlton Howard and raised in Sydney’s inner city is a classic tale of rags-to-riches overnight stardom.
Yet he decided on his dream of a life in music when he was just 10 and his uncle, a father figure in his life who encouraged his love of rap, was murdered.
His music manager mother split with his producer father Nick when he was an infant and fostered his love of rap music playing a wide selection of 90s hip hop artists from 2Pac to the Fugees and Erykah Badu.
His early songs told the stories of his family’s struggles, living hand-to-mouth and forced to couch surf with family and friends after they were kicked out of their Redfern public housing accommodation because of noise complaints.
“That’s really why I started music in the first place, was to kind of like talk about the stuff in my music that I didn’t feel comfortable with talking about in real life,” he says.
He derived his artist moniker from his Indigenous heritage; his maternal great-great grandfather was a Kamilaroi man of the Stolen Generation, who was told he was Spanish and didn’t discover his cultural identity until he was a young adult.
Laroi started recording raps over beats on his mother’s iPhone and uploaded them to hip hop nursery Soundcloud where he built a following eager to support this developing artist.
By the time he released his debut EP, 14 With A Dream, and reached the finals of Triple J’s future star-spotter Unearthed High competition, the teen rapper’s ambition drove him to find ways to connect with rising American rappers who were touring Australia.
He shrewdly called on a network of other young fans to find out where they were staying or haunted the backstage doors of their venues so he could pass on his mixtapes in the hope of making connections which could take his music to the world.
“That was my way of getting my music out there I guess,” he says.
“I would see on their Instagram stories and stuff where they were and me and my homies would follow where they were going and try to find the perfect moment to go and do it.
“One of my older friends knew lots of girls in the city and we would find out from them where they were at because they would get invited to places.”
Eventually the young Australian teen came to the attention of Chicago manager Lil Bibby who set in motion the relationship which would eventually take Laroi from Sydney’s underground to multi-billion streaming pop prince.
Bibby’s other charge was the late emo-rap star Juice WRLD, who became Laroi’s mentor, inviting him to open for his Sydney and Melbourne concerts in 2019 and famously gifting him a verse for his 16th birthday for his song Go, which would become the first single from his F*ck Love mixtape.
“That’s a $200,000 gift lil bro,” Juice WRLD says in the home studio clip when they were recording the song which would land in the Australian and American charts, serving as a tribute after the rapper’s death of a drug overdose in December 2019.
That song catapulted Kid Laroi to global attention and set the scene for a succession of singles – and a F*ck Love mixtape trilogy – would saw him take the baton from Tones and I as Australia’s hottest music export.
While his Juice WRLD collaborations brought him to the attention of hip hop fans, his next two superstar collaborations would break chart records, making him the youngest Australian artist to claim the No. 1 summit.
His single Without You – from F*ck Love (Savage) mixtape – got a boost towards the billion streams milestone when Miley Cyrus added her vocals to its remix in April.
But its his fresh bromance with Justin Bieber which has seen him crowned the world’s reigning pop prince.
Stay, the lead single from his third mixtape F*ck Love (Over You), has outstripped Without You on streaming platforms and spent nine consecutive weeks on top of the ARIA charts and became his first No. 1 in America.
Laroi said he was blown away when Bieber sent him a message out of the blue to compliment him on his music.
Bieber enlisted the young Australian – who now shares a manager with the Love Yourself pop megastar – to sing on Unstable, a track on his latest record Justice.
“That definitely shocked me. I was like, ‘Oh, shit, this is crazy’ because I looked up to him when I was little, so, yeah, yeah, that was crazy,” he says.
“And then we kind of left it like that for a month and then he sent me (Unstable) and we did that. Then we just started out playing basketball and shit.”
Who is the better player?
“Me. For sure,” Laroi says.
While he professes he dreamt he would be No. 1 in America one day, he admits his 14-year-old self would never have imagined it would be singing a pop smash with Bieber.
“No, he would have thought he would have had the biggest rap song in the world,” he says, wryly of his younger self.
Bieber has become a mentor, as they share not only music but life advice and a bond through faith.
Laroi has credited the pop star – who knows all about the travails of teen success – with advising him on how to stay grounded, and Bieber and his wife Hailey have been photographed hanging out with the Australian pop star and his TikTok personality girlfriend Katarina Deme.
How to deal with the relentless presence of paparazzi documenting the teen’s every move would certainly have been a subject discussed by the pop brothers.
“Yeah I didn’t think about that when I was younger until it actually started happening. I can’t even lie cuz it’s definitely annoying sometimes. I mean, most times, actually, all the f**king time, it’s annoying,” he says.
“Sometimes I want to do regular stuff but at the end of the day, if it means I have to put up with that to provide for my family and make other people in the world happy and stuff like that, I don’t really give a f***. It’s really a small price to pay.”
The Kid Laroi is up for three awards and will perform at the MTV VMAs on Monday, live from 8.30am for red carpet and 10am for the ceremony via Foxtel and Binge.
The Kid Laroi by the numbers
Global streams: over 5.2 billion
Australian streams: 350 million
Spotify big hits
Stay with Justin Bieber – 571 million
Without You – 549 million
Without You (with Miley Cyrus) – 83 million
YouTube big hits
Stay – 151 million
Without You – 74 million
Go with Juice WRLD – 57 million
Chart No. 1s
F*ck Love mixtape – peaked at No. 1 on ARIA charts; gold status. Also US, Canada, Norway.
Without You – No. 1 on ARIA (youngest Australian artist to achieve the summit), Belgium, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia,
Stay – No. 1 Australia, US, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, India, Israel, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Sweden, Global 200 (Billboard)
2021 MTV VMAs
Nominated for Best New Talent, Push Performance of the Year (Without You), Song of the Summer (Stay)
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Originally published as Aussie pop prince The Kid Laroi is living the dream ahead of the 2021 MTV VMAs
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