Hobo Johnson (pictured above) is a musical artist who has been gaining popularity since the release of his 2016 album The Rise of Hobo Johnson. Johnson uses a blend of hiphop and the spoken word in his music. The full title of Johnson’s band is Hobo Johnson and The Lovemakers, which is composed of six members all together (courtesy of Kingaurther Aus on Flicker).
Frank Lopes Jr., the titular hobo of the Sacramento-based musical group Hobo Johnson and the Lovemakers, is the utterly fascinating spokesperson of the manic and lonely. According to Ones to Watch, Lopes Jr. was kicked out of his parents’ house at the age of 19 and subsequently had to turn to his 1994 Toyota Corolla for shelter—the bout of homelessness served as inspiration for his “Hobo Johnson” stage name.
Since then, Hobo Johnson and the Lovemakers have been on a rapidly rising career trajectory stemming from a viral entry for NPR’s “Tiny Desk Contest.” The group’s video for their song “Peach Scone” blew up—it currently has almost 16 million views on YouTube, got them a deal with Warner Records and has positioned Lopes Jr. to be one of the most enigmatic figures in popular music today. Hobo Johnson, WTF?
When you press play on that aforementioned “Peach Scone” video, sensory overload sets in almost immediately. You’re greeted by a group of five painfully stereotypical hipster-types in a quaint, urbane backyard. After a brief introduction by an uncomfortably up-close Hobo Johnson, the group starts to get into the actual song and what follows can only be described as manic.
“Peach Scone” is a neurotic, hectic spoken-word poem set to some folksy instrumentals that would feel at home on a Cage the Elephant album. Everything seems hectic and stream-of-consciousness but it is in fact incredibly choreographed, purposeful and electric, which can be used as a metaphor for his wider musical style in general.
Despite every precognition I had that begged me not to like it, I found the video incredibly endearing and the music is some of the most innovative and earnest stuff to be released in years. The “Peach Scone” video is intimate and uncomfortable, which forces the viewer to think about the music in the same way that it’s presented—and it hits at a guttural level.
Hobo Johnson’s music is like if you read a 15-year-old’s diary over the instrumentals from a Front Bottoms album but in the best way possible. There’s a very real possibility that the group is the next big thing in music and now is the perfect time to jump onto the bandwagon. On Friday Sept. 13 the group released their second studio album titled The Fall of Hobo Johnson. The new album is a marked improvement over their previous work, maintaining their neurotic, poetic musical style while exploring new thematic territory by serving as an intense, painfully honest examination of the relationship between external and internal conflict.
I think some of the problems people have with Hobo Johnson comes from the way everybody tries to put a label on his music. Rap and hip-hop purists hate when he’s lumped into their genre so I think a different label is in order. The artist himself doesn’t even consider himself to be a rapper. In “Peach Scone,” he says “Oh yeah, my name’s Hobo Johnson / People like to say I’m a rapper, I’m actually not.”
He doubles down on this identity in a Genius lyrics annotation where he writes “I don’t know if I’m a rapper or not. I made a song on Mathematics’ beat with Mos Def, that’s fun. And that’s kind of rap. But some of my shit’s just strictly poetry, so I’m a little bit in the middle, I think.”
So the artist himself has established that he’s not a rapper, and I think that any labels for his music in general contradicts what Hobo Johnson and the Lovemakers are all about. If people demand a label, however, he’s less a rapper and more a musical slam-poet. All songwriters are poets to an extent, but the way Hobo Johnson blends genres, including nontraditional genres like spoken word, is reminiscent of how a literary poet will take liberties with form and play with white space on a page. The Fall of Hobo Johnson is an album pervaded by an addictive authenticity and, if it serves as an indicator of what’s to come, this new artist is one to watch.