August 25, 2021

24kGoldn | Never Mind the Medium, Just Make It Golden

by Madison Douglas

MM6 MAISON MARGIELA jacket, FENDI shirt, TELFAR pants and shoes, LOEWE sunglasses, and talent’s own jewelry worn throughout. — **MM6 MAISON MARGIELA** jacket, **FENDI** shirt, **TELFAR** pants and shoes, **LOEWE** sunglasses, and talent’s own jewelry worn throughout.

With a name like Golden it’s hard not to be confident.The California native, born Golden Landis Von Jones, decided to make clear his golden purity with the self-dubbed moniker, 24kGoldn. The young rapper arrived on the scene in 2018 when he caught the attention of his future label with song “Valentino.” Since then, the artist has been cranking out hit after hit, including his most recent project, El Dorado.

MM6 MAISON MARGIELA jacket, FENDI shirt, and LOEWE sunglasses. — **MM6 MAISON MARGIELA** jacket, **FENDI** shirt, and **LOEWE** sunglasses.

TikTok played a serious role in catapulting “Valentino,” but it took a minute for it to get there. After months of the track not performing well, the musician and his team held a funeral dinner for the song just a few weeks before it found liftoff. “It was crazy,” Golden says, “because I had just gotten my wisdom teeth out, and I was laying in bed, checking out my different songs on TikTok, seeing how many videos had been made to them, and ‘Valentino’ had maybe 10,000 videos. I thought that was pretty cool. The next morning, the song had 12,000 videos, and I had to wipe my eyes and make sure I was seeing it—and that was it. It became my first hit.”

PRADA bodysuit and pants. — **PRADA** bodysuit and pants.

The young rapper carries himself with an unbridled confidence and knows a thing or two about the power of persistence. Despite contrary feedback from the label, Gold- en marketed his song “City of Angels” as a single until it was playing on every Spotify playlist. “I went on TikTok, and I found this guy named Illusion, and I had him do a remix to it,” Golden explains. “Then I found these kids, and I asked them to dance to it. And then I took like $3,000 and just started paying people to do it.”

MM6 MAISON MARGIELA coat, vintage FICCE jacket, KAPITAL pants, BOTTEGA VENETA shoes, TELFAR durag, and MARTINE ROSE belt. — **MM6 MAISON MARGIELA** coat, vintage **FICCE** jacket, **KAPITAL** pants,
**BOTTEGA VENETA** shoes, **TELFAR** durag, and **MARTINE ROSE** belt.

PRADA coat, bodysuit, and pants. — **PRADA** coat, bodysuit, and pants.

Golden, who will release a deluxe version of El Dorado later this summer, fol- lowed by a tour this fall, shares that this self-confidence isn’t a new trait for him and shares with a laugh, “I’d seen a friend from high school a while back, and I asked him,

‘What’s the biggest change that you noticed in me since then and now?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. It’s kinda weird to be honest. Before you were always confident, but you never really had a reason to be. And now I guess it kind of makes sense.’”

DRIES VAN NOTEN coat, TELFAR sweatshirt, vintage MICHAEL KORS COLLECTION shirt, ISSEY MIYAKE pants, and custom LANVIN sneakers. — **DRIES VAN NOTEN** coat, **TELFAR** sweatshirt, vintage **MICHAEL KORS COLLECTION** shirt, **ISSEY MIYAKE** pants, and custom **LANVIN** sneakers.

In this new multi-layered era of music consumption, Golden isn’t concerned with what people think of him. He reiterates that the labels people try and attach to you ar- en’t a new thing “Back in 2015, 2016, 2017,” he shares, “everybody used to say if you made music and put it on SoundCloud— no matter how good your music is—you’d be labeled as a SoundCloud rapper. That was viewed as a negative thing. I don’t let
it bother me,” he continues, affirming that whatever the next popular platform is, he’ll be on there, “because at the end of the day, you shouldn’t be judged on the platform your music is popular on—you should be judged on the quality of your music.”