“What up, Bob!”
In March, these three words introduced one of 2018’s unlikeliest breakout acts. Twenty-three-year-old rapper Frank Lopes Jr., who released his first project under the name Hobo Johnson in 2015, had already generated significant buzz in his native Sacramento, Calif., and landed a three-album deal with Reprise Records. The Warner Bros. subsidiary gave Lopes’ DIY debut, The Rise of Hobo Johnson, a wide-scale release late last year.
But the record didn’t really catch, at least not initially. That was before a music video submitted on a lark to NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest — the “Bob” in that “What up, Bob!” is Bob Boilen, host of the Tiny Desk Concerts series — launched Lopes and his ragtag four-piece band, the Lovemakers, into the stratosphere.
Hobo and friends filmed the quick-and-dirty clip in a junk-strewn backyard in one take with one camera, which the disheveled, boyish bandleader stares directly into as he speak-sings manically with an awkward confidence. The song is called “Peach Scone,” and while its message is simple — unrequited love hurts — its unique point of view and fusion of emo, rap, folk-punk and slam poetry is a little more complicated to untangle.
But the numbers don’t lie. The video reached 3 million views on Facebook in its first week alone. It’s currently at more than 10 million and counting on the social media platform, and the count tops 11 million on YouTube. On their first U.S. tour, the Lovemakers handily sold out Nashville’s roughly 400-capacity Basement East when they came through in June. Just five months later, they’re at the 1,800-capacity Marathon Music Works.
“We never toured in a van,” Lopes tells the Scene. “We completely bypassed that tier of touring, which is really wild.”
The only time Lopes had been across the country before this year, he adds, was when he took a 28-hour solo bus ride to Minneapolis in ’16 to audition for a spot on alternative-rap label Rhymesayers’ Soundset Festival.
He didn’t get that gig, but the Lovemakers did secure their Tiny Desk appearance. The full four-song taping recently went live, complete with Boilen presenting the band a basket of homemade peach scones.
For Lopes — a high school dropout who used to live out of his car while slinging pizza and honing his craft at open mics and house parties in California’s capital city — the week “Peach Scone” went viral “was absurd,” he says. “Completely surreal. The views kept going up, up, up. My family made me a cake that said ‘1 million.’ It sounds cliché, but you think you’re in a dream.”
Like most overnight phenomena, “Peach Scone” is polarizing. But whether you love it, hate it or can’t decide, you won’t forget it. Lopes’ presence is odd, unnerving even, yet magnetic. His verbose lyrics feel at once tossed-off and tightly crafted, and the band’s gang-vocal asides are tailor-made for group sing-alongs. There’s a bit of early Modest Mouse in the music’s dry, plunky sound and lazy gait. Maybe some Cake, another Sacramento group underestimated as a novelty act when they emerged in the ’90s but who’ve enjoyed a long career. During our phone conversation, Lopes drops a pair of reference points that explain a lot.
“I was really into Eminem growing up,” he says. “Then my ex-girlfriend got me listening to Bright Eyes. Once I heard that, I was like: ‘Oh shit, the power of words is so great. You can do so much with just a few sentences.’ ”
On The Rise — which features just Lopes, no band — the self-taught singer, producer and lyricist shoots from the hip in a manner reflective of a generation reared on social-media oversharing. Sounding constantly on the verge of either laughing or crying, he shifts between funny, deep and flat-out weird throughout the 10-song set, setting his clipped, conversational raps to minimalist beats prominently laden with spooky, elegiac piano. One moment he’s going on about classic NES games (“Mario and Link”) or his hometown’s lovable losers the Sacramento Kings (“DeMarcus Cousins & Ashley”). The next, he’s delivering a heartstring-tugging soliloquy about his parents’ divorce (“Romeo and Juliet”) or daydreaming about a life of luxury while toiling in poverty (“Sex in the City”).
Hobo’s style isn’t exactly graceful, but it’s honest, and packed houses of teens and early 20-somethings are responding. Look up the video of “Peach Scone” from The Basement East: The crowd isn’t just hanging on his every anxious word (and there are more than 600 in the song) — they’re reciting them right back to him. Not only that, they’re pouring their hearts out at the merch table after the gigs.
“What hits me the most every time is when people say they didn’t kill themselves because of the music,” Lopes says. “Having listened to certain bands and albums when I felt so bad in my life, like, ‘What’s the fucking point,’ to know how they feel — or even a sliver of how they feel — really gets me.”
