The 20-year-old rapper and singer had one of the biggest hits of last year with “Mood,” and is easing into the life of a celebrity with the release of his debut album, “El Dorado.”
It wasn’t supposed to be the right time for a breakthrough, but 24kGoldn had a career-making hit in hand.
Spring was turning to summer last year, and the coronavirus was surging worldwide. “Mood” — a two-and-a-half minute, guitar-driven, melodic-rap confection — did not exactly fit the vibe. But nearly two years into almost making it after signing a major-label contract, Goldn and his team were in throw-it-at-the-wall mode: This is the best record we have, they told themselves. Let’s go.
To say it worked, in spite of the circumstances, would be an understatement: “Mood,” by Goldn and the like-minded sing-rapper Iann Dior, spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year, plus another two weeks in January, boosted in part by a steady flow of TikTok memes, a Justin Bieber and J Balvin remix and little competition. The song has been streamed more than 1.5 billion times globally.
But even more impressively in a fragmented market, “Mood” also dominated across old-fashioned radio formats, including rhythmic, rock, alternative, Top 40 and adult contemporary, making it officially uncategorizable as anything but a true smash.
So while Goldn may have entered the pandemic as yet another teenage rapper who scored a record deal off social-media buzz and songwriting talent, only to risk getting lost in the shuffle, he is leaving it as a newborn pop star, with every industry tool at his disposal to help him grow into the role.
“You’re important,” Goldn’s friend and creative director, Be, teased with an added expletive in a tiny Midtown hotel room this month, in between promotional appearances and remote record company meetings to finalize an album cover. “Conference calls, bro!”
Goldn, now 20 and caked in TV makeup for the first time, turned a bit bashful, but concurred: “Stretch is getting like 500 emails a day now,” he said of his manager, “and it used to be like seven, a year and a half ago! I went from Squidward to handsome Squidward real fast,” he added, referring to a “SpongeBob SquarePants” meme.
Now, with the world and the music business easing back into more normal operations, Goldn has to actually seize what his big song set up for him. His first album, “El Dorado,” is out Friday via the Records label, a joint venture with Sony Music, and its partner Columbia, and it represents one of the first major trial balloons for the emerging-artist machine during a still-tentative moment. The tough part for Goldn, especially in the age of masked semi-isolation and no concerts, is putting a memorable face (and personality) to the high-grade melodies, in hopes of becoming a true multi-hyphenate.
Fortunately for him and those betting on him, the artist — born, somehow, Golden Landis Von Jones to two former models in San Francisco — was seemingly built in a lab that mints charisma-oozing, genre-agnostic Gen-Z pop acts. Fizzy, warm and winning, he’s the kind of young man whom a friend’s parents would swoon over upon first meeting — a popular kid who’s avoided alienating any outsider constituencies. With a Cheshire cat smile in width, if not mischievousness, he is likable even while deciding which pair of leather pants to wear to a fashion magazine.
“Goldn very much reminded me of a young Will Smith,” said Barry Weiss, the veteran music executive who signed Goldn to Records, and who previously helped jump-start the careers of a teenage Smith, Britney Spears, ’N Sync and Chris Brown. “If this kid wanted to go into politics …,” Weiss said.
Musically, Goldn found another sweet spot. His songs are part of the sanded-down long tail of SoundCloud rap, braiding together two dominant strands of recent rock-adjacent hip-hop: the bouncy, pop-punk-inflected melodies warbled by Chief Keef, iLoveMakonnen, Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti and Juice WRLD, plus the guitar loops that have become a go-to foundation for earwormy beats. “El Dorado,” which features Future and DaBaby, also finds Goldn showing flashes of Bruno Mars, Chance the Rapper and Post Malone.
Goldn cited some modern punk-rap reference points as influences, but also his latent familiarity with the alternative hits of his youth. “Pop-punk was a part of pop culture at the time,” he said. “You turn on ‘Cheaper by the Dozen’ and you’ve got ‘In Too Deep’ by Sum 41. You’ve got games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero selling millions of copies around the world. So whether I was aware of it or not, that type of stuff was really shaping my childhood.”
“When those styles started getting popularized by artists like Carti and Uzi,” he added, “it hit my generation in places that we didn’t know we could be hit before.”
Weiss, who was introduced to Goldn by the producer and A&R man D.A. Doman, first heard him as “much more of a pure hip-hop artist” on early songs like “Ballin Like Shareef” and “Valentino,” which would go on to become Goldn’s first TikTok success.
Taken by the rapper’s hooks and look, Weiss quickly jumped on a plane to Los Angeles, where Goldn was studying finance on scholarship at the University of Southern California, and pursued what he called an old-school, “don’t let the kid out of the room” strategy to signing him. (Goldn still managed to hold off for a while and, during a follow-up trip to New York, even took a meeting at another major label after telling his primary suitors that he had “to do some family stuff.”)
“It felt like I was going after Patrick Mahomes — a franchise player,” Weiss said. “I wanted to put the whole company behind this kid.”
But when Goldn returned later, as a signed artist, with the song “City of Angels” — a track he made with Omer Fedi, an Israeli guitarist, songwriter and producer — Weiss was confused. “It was a head-scratcher to me,” he said, recalling telling Goldn’s circle, “Guys, this is like, a rock record.”
Goldn’s response? “Kids don’t think that way!”
The track became the centerpiece to Goldn’s first official release, the “Dropped Outta College” EP, released in 2019, after he did just that — a gradual process that hinted at Goldn’s overall savvy.
“I figured out a way that if I dropped all of my classes except for one, I could still get my full scholarship to live on campus for free and eat on campus for free,” Goldn said, grinning. “I got to live on campus, keep promoting my music, keep being a public figure there and not have to really worry about school too much.” (The one class he did take, on international commerce, came with a trip to Japan.)
A naturally graceful social maneuverer, Goldn found that his time at U.S.C. also introduced him to a moneyed, well-connected milieu that he had not encountered growing up as a biracial, working-class kid in the Oceanview neighborhood of San Francisco (which, like a true Bay Area native, he refers to as Lakeview).
“In L.A., kids have whole positions in the social hierarchy just based off who their parents are,” he said — a good primer for the shmoozy politics of the music industry.
But he also made real friends in high places. After leaving campus, Goldn moved into the guesthouse of a classmate whose mother just happened to be Nancy Josephson, a partner at William Morris Endeavor. She is now his agent, and a loosely autobiographical show starring Goldn is in development — “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” as his life blooms into “Entourage.” Goldn half-jokingly refers to himself as the Black Vinnie Chase.
Like his parents, who got by on commercial work and then service-industry jobs, Goldn modeled and acted some as an adorable child with “a huge Afro.” The attention from his classmates — not to mention the spending money — was thrilling, he said, and the work got him comfortable in front of a camera. “I was really good in the auditions,” Goldn said, stating the obvious.
But despite his Hollywood inroads, the pandemic might very well have halted whatever momentum Goldn had generated around town. Instead, another guitar riff from Fedi, cooked up while Goldn was playing Call of Duty, led quickly to “Mood.”
“A lot of bigger people took their foot off the gas during uncertain times,” KBeazy, a producer behind the hit and other tracks on Goldn’s album, said. “For us, who still weren’t established, we were like, ‘It’s go time — now or never.’”
For its collaborators, “Mood” was more than just a defining track — the song was also a path to the signature sound that Goldn had been lacking, not to mention a group of friends and now roommates.
Along with Fedi and KBeazy, Goldn’s 21st-century equivalent of a session band also includes Blake Slatkin, another young songwriter and studio whiz who started his career as an intern for the hitmaker Benny Blanco, and whose parents’ house in Beverly Hills provided some isolated studio space during Covid-19. (“Oh, we all got Covid,” Slatkin said, though they were careful to stay — and even sleep — in the studio.)
The tight group, which is just as likely to listen to Modest Mouse and Weezer as Uzi and Lil Baby, assured that “El Dorado” would have a cohesive feel, instead of the more predictable method of sticking Goldn in the studio with a slate of hot producers who were strangers.
“I already tried that line of thinking where we make every song as different as possible and try and get a hit off of it,” Goldn said. In the industry these days, “I think there are a lot of things that feel more futuristic that aren’t really as helpful as people think,” he added. “And I think there’s a lot of stuff that worked in the past that people forgot worked.”
For better or worse, like most artists his age, Goldn also doubles as a trend forecaster and digital marketer — innate skills that he can’t help given how he grew up, scouring SoundCloud, buying sneakers online and lurking a Kanye West message board.
He first earned industry inquiries after submitting his music to a DJ Booth blogger who promised to review anything sent to him (the verdict: “just a bit of exposure away from being a certifiable hit”). And, when his labels were skeptical of his progress, Goldn worked the nascent TikTok market, meeting with various influencers while on tour and posting constantly to seed and tease his songs. (Never one to miss an optimized opportunity, Goldn also put out a song called “I Go to USC” while the 2019 college admissions scandal swirled.)
“The crazy thing about marketing is it changes every day,” Goldn said. “Even the way TikTok was when ‘Mood’ was blowing up versus how it is now — in only a span of eight months, it’s two completely different playing fields.” The labels, he said, are “just flooding it, and they don’t understand how it fully works.”
In an S.U.V. this month after taping an appearance on “Desus & Mero” — where he gushed with the hosts about having a Jewish mother and loving “Survivor,” a show that premiered six months before he was born — Goldn was scrolling through photos and videos of himself. He’d been sent a promo clip for his album that was designed for Instagram, but the video quality was lacking.
“That always makes it perform worse,” he said as he demanded a cleaner version.
Goldn mentioned his fondness for examining the data himself, explaining that he could tell when a song of his was about to blow up when its daily streams increased on a Sunday, when they should be declining. A booming track’s growth chart “looks like a hockey stick,” he said.
But these fixations meant that Goldn knew full well that “Coco” and “3, 2, 1,” the follow-ups to his No. 1 hit, were not the same sort of unstoppable rocket ship that he’d gotten used to. “How come it’s not doing like ‘Mood’?” he admitted asking himself before realizing “not every song can be ‘Mood.’”
Still, Goldn was obviously itching to bask in the success of what he’d already accomplished during such a bizarre period. He noted that he’d yet to experience playing a sweaty, mosh-heavy festival set or being mobbed by fans in front of his hotel. Releasing “El Dorado” was the first step to these pop-star rites of passage, he knew, but as he continued a promo tour low on crowds and high on health-and-safety protocols, it was clear that he would have to wait just a little bit longer.
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