Las Vegas rapper Lurk Franklin carries his JBL bluetooth speaker around for occasions like this. The scene is the Arts Factory parking lot on a cloudy day. We’ve just finished our iced lattes at Bungalow Coffee Co. across the street, and now he’s ready to reveal some unreleased tracks.
Dressed in Vegas Golden Knights swag, he raps along to “Jabberjaw,” a cutthroat Franklin classic that’s hard enough for the streets, but brief enough to keep people wanting more. He’s very aware that his fans want more.
“I do have a fan base, but I’m not feeding them enough,” says Franklin, who moved to Las Vegas in 2018. “I want to make these 20, 30 or 40 songs, put them where they have to be, then go forward. I’m starving my people in a way. They want to eat.”
Lurk Franklin (no relation to gospel rapper Kirk Franklin, though the Vegas MC hat tips the Black trailblazer for breaking down barriers) grew up in Marietta, Georgia, where he developed his love for music from his father, also a rapper. That led Franklin to join the hip-hop collective Lurk Gang. “With my group, I was the wildest one,” he admits. “Everybody else was turned up, like it was Georgia, we got that sauce. But I was on some other sauce, and then I applied that here.”
Lurk Franklin is a character, plain and simple. The same way, “there’s Shawn Carter, and there’s Jay-Z,” he explains. Franklin puts his persona out there in various ways, like through filmed skits, in which he plays his songs for Downtown strangers and captures their honest reactions, and when he fires up crowds for a moshpit.
“I’ve got a lot of Odd Future influence, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Wu-Tang,” he says. “I got a lot of pent-up energy, pent-up aggression just from life, and instead of using it for negative, I just use it there. People know to have that type of energy when they come to one of my shows.”
Performative punk rappers like Rico Nasty have inspired Franklin’s stage antics, too. “The bands are way more popular here than the rappers. But if you’re a rapper who can master that type of energy that the punk bands have … but don’t make it in a corny way, you can really get in that pocket,” he says.
Franklin offered a “sample size” of his abilities on the 2022 EP Franky 5 Pack, a tightly produced burst of energy reserved for the most lit underground rap parties one can imagine. You can practically feel the floor bouncing in “Alley Oop,” and the deafening salvo of “Inferno Black” slaps on impact. It’s heated hip-hop, fine-tuned by Franklin and his musical partners Zerby and Marco4D.
Franklin’s latest music signals the next era. The unreleased track “Wednesday” channels the slinky Afrobeat style that put prominent Nigerian sensations like Wizkid on the U.S. radar, and Franklin says he deliberately did it for the ladies: “I honestly wanted to make something that my mom would listen to.”
As he dives deeper into his craft—and into the studio for weeks at a time—Franklin seems laser focused. Performing for fans, he admits, has taken a back seat as he makes dropping “good music” a priority. “Because, at the end of the day,” he says, “the people that are in the studio making the product and building their fan base solely through that. The show is gonna come to them.”
Lurk Franklin linktr.ee/lurkfranklin
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