This is Harry McKenzie, aka Harry Mack. He has some albums on Spotify but his real magic happens live.
He spent every day for the last 20 years refining his freestyle skills. He is a classically trained jazz drummer who knows a lot about musical improvisation. In fact, here’s a video of him drumming while freestyling.
Rappers imitate instruments with their voices, and they’ll often pattern their cadence after different parts of the drum beat, like Eminem will often mimic the high-hat snare in his cadence.
Improvisational jazz often features scat, which is when a singer will start wailing out nonsensical and emotive onomatopoeic syllables in place of real words. It allows you to get out what the music makes you feel in your heart without being impeded by the thought processes necessary to formulate words.
Except Mack has done it for so long that he forced himself to start putting in real words. He trained his brain to replace the improvisational scat syllables with real words. Here’s a clip of him explaining it himself in song (around 4:00 is when he goes deep on the scat).
And we’re only getting started at how far he’s taken it, because Harry Mack became a freestyle god by studying jazz and hip-hop. Not only that, but he is a savvy businessman who had zero fear in doing things a completely different way.
Mack is capable of a lot of complicated flows, and although he can produce his own beats, he now has a steady stream of musicians and producers wanting to collaborate. This helps him keep things fresh, which isn’t easy when you have 10,000 hours of recorded freestyles between Twitch and YouTube, and it’s all 100% off the top. He doesn’t even have time to write lyrics at this pace.
He started here. As far as I’m aware, this is the earliest video of Harry Mack rapping in his early 20s.
But about five years ago, he started catching attention for a freestyle he did on Venice Beach. When he speeds it up like Twista, everybody on the beach knows he’s serious.
And he continued pushing his way through the industry and created two shows by the end of the 2010s in which he continuously blesses us with almost daily freestyles.
First is Guerilla Bars, which is what the Venice Beach production turned into. Watch this entire video, but at a bare minimum watch the second freestyle when he troubleshoots a man’s phone on the fly to the beat.
Not only that, but he has a home studio where he does livestreams on Twitch and YouTube at least every Wednesday and Sunday. If you thought Juicewrld was crazy for his 2-hour freestyle on Westwood, Harry Mack publishes 2 hours almost daily.
In this format, he has a chat and super chat activated, and live fans are tossing him a nonstop barrage of words.
I haven’t kept up on those as much over the last year. But I do know that he continued doing increasingly longer freestyles as his YouTube sub count grew. This culminated in a 10-hour-long freestyle to celebrate 1 million subscribers.
It has over 420,000 views, and I know I’m not the only person who listened to the entire 10 hours. This one continuous freestyle is longer than your average radio rapper’s entire catalogue. And all 10 hours are at a level nobody but Mack has reached so far.
Of course, the pandemic lockdowns interrupted his grind, and Guerrilla Bars was replaced with something that turned out to be entertaining in its own way. Mack started putting on personal concerts for people on Omegle in a series called Omegle Bars.
Just think about how genius of a move that was. An up-and-coming artist wouldn’t do a personal concert because they want big crowds and co-signs from the industry. And industry majors wouldn’t want to ruin their brand value. But Mack literally gives away his music to anybody who will listen, and his style is a fusion of him and his listener.
This is one of my favorites:
Watch from 10:46 on, because the back half of this episode contains two freestyles that beat anything you ever heard from any other freestyle rapper, period.
In one, he’s given the words “imported, lurking, and automatic,” and these multi syllable words always get gold out of this man’s brain. Some classic lines include:
They wanna use my style; can’t afford it,
your whole entire flavor been imported.
Y’all know that my lyrics are gigantic,
my vibe been imported from a whole other planet; I’m ill.
I said I’m shining like the stars,
I am not from earth, I’m imported here from Mars.
And that’s just his launching point. He creates entire songs out of the words they give him that are so good he goes out of his way to keep pointing out what’s happening in real time to make sure they know he’s making it up on the spot.
By the end of the last freestyle on Omegle Bars 6 (sofa, juice, octagon), when he’s explaining the eight sides to his brain, you’ll realize just how much better Harry Mack is than any freestyle rapper you ever heard in your entire life.
And aside from the million sub video, pretty much everything I showed you happened two to three years ago. He’s gotten better with age, and he’s comfortable pushing out episodes of Guerrillas Bars on the move anywhere he wants to travel. He’s touring and doing concerts too because he’s becoming more popular.
Here he is in DC still spitting pure fire.
It doesn’t matter at what point you heard Harry Mack freestyle for the first time. It doesn’t matter how many rappers you’ve heard freestyle before him. Harry Mack is the best.
And because he stays on his grind, I can keep posting proof. Here he is impressing Kendrick Lamar.
Here’s a completely off the top banger about books, spirituality, and meditation.
Here’s a solid 4 minutes going in on addiction.
Here’s one of many times somebody gives him supercalifragilistexpialodocious as a word, and he kills it.
Here he is connecting with some people in Morocco, turning their conversation into a beautiful song of hope.
This is what he came up with to make guy smile who was obviously heartbroken over a failed relationship.
Although his entire flow in Guerrilla Bars 4 is fire, I especially love at 4:08 when they start him off with pussy thinking he’s going to be a joke. What ensues is Mack in his zone just machine gun poster dunking on this crew of women at the swap meet.
What’s so brilliant about him is he’s so grounded yet he knows the answer when he says to that girl with confidence “Tell me I’m not the best rapper you ever heard.”
Most rappers, you can tell when they’re freestyling or writing. No matter how good of a freestyler your favorite rapper is, they can’t destroy beats the way he does. No commercial rapper is going out among the people on the streets the way he is. His lyrics are impeccable, he can make his own beats, he redefined the business model, and he achieved a career doing what he loves.
Harry Mack is hands down the undisputed greatest freestyle rapper in history so far. And he set a very high bar for the next goat to reach. He’s better off the top of the head than most people are writing things down and rehearsing them into the ground for a year.