Limerick viral star Lynchy keeps it steady in the rap game
IT’S the little things that make a difference, that show your songs have made an impact, that you’re going places. Jack Lynch hasn’t really gone anywhere yet, but the 18-year-old rapper from Ballyneety, Co Limerick, is gleefully getting a kick from small things like a bouncer at a club — “where everyone would have a hard time getting into” — simply letting him skip the queues.
Better known as Lynchy, he’s made himself better known to bouncers not for causing any trouble but for his freestyles. He’s been rapping since he was 11 or 12, and has been uploading videos of them to Facebook since he was 13.
In December 2014, a four-minute clip of him rapping at a bus stop, in his St Clements Redemptorist College uniform and playing with a rollie cigarette, went viral. It got 100,000 views on Facebook that evening, two million in two days. Lynchy was snapped up by Universal and recently released his debut single, ‘Spotlight’, featuring another one to watch, the acoustic guitar-wielding Rainy Boy Sleep.
So a viral hit and a record deal — not bad for a teenager who’s just done his Leaving Cert.
“If none of this happened, I’d be standing in my kitchen right now looking out at my chickens in the garden, it’d be the same old thing, I’d be in college or have a job doing the Tesco checkout counters, but a lot of stuff is so much different out of this,” he says.
The Facebook freestyles are rugged and the sound isn’t the best, but the views still clock up at a rate as fast as his lyrics. “What we’ll do is normally I’ll just listen to the song before I actually do the recording of it. I’ll just pick a certain flow for it, and then blast the song away and just think of whatever comes to my mind. I’ll just go boom, and hopefully I’ll get it good in the one take. And if it’s all right, then, if I think it’s all right, we’ll throw it up on Facebook and leave it to the public to decide if it’s good or not.”
‘Spotlight’, Lynchy admits, is a big change from what his Facebook fans might have been expecting, plucky pop music and an Ed Sheeran-style chorus screaming radio hit. Recorded in the same Temple Bar studio where Rihanna put down ‘Love The Way You Lie’ — another ‘oh my god’ moment for Lynchy — he wasn’t daunted by the situation.
“I’d say the hardest part was trying to focus on writing meaningful lyrics that made sense and stood out,” he says.
Alongside the radio play and YouTube views for ‘Spotlight’, he’s still uploading freestyles to Facebook, lining some things up in front of him and seeing what comes out. It sounds like Lynchy is almost building two fanbases, keeping the old ones happy and bringing in new ones as ‘Spotlight’ spreads.
“I like to do the original-style videos that I’d have put up on Facebook just to keep up with those people into that side of things. And then for ‘Spotlight’, that’s more along the commercial side of things... but everything that goes up on Facebook, for the videos, I’ll keep it my old self, do what I used to do at the start, keep the videos dirtier with unknown tracks or music.”
With plans to record another few songs over the coming months, what do his friends think of his growing fame? “They think it’s hilarious… I’ll try not to get a big head over it anyway. There was a gig I was at the other night, and a girl turned round and was like, ‘It’s him!’ I was like, ‘Relax, it’s only me, I’m nothing special, I’m not Justin Bieber, I’m not Jesus, I’m Jack Lynch from Co Limerick. Relax.’”
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