Jalen Lamkin: Class of 2025 Rockstar
By Joe Anillo
“She wears short shorts, I wear crop tops,” Jalen Lamkin proudly declares on an unreleased song, with the flow of Taylor Swift’s 2009 hit, “You Belong With Me.”
Despite the song’s upbeat and pop-inspired beat, Lamkin, stage name Room-41-More, bops his head and danced along as if it was the hardest headbanging hit of the year. That line wasn’t a lie either, he can be seen on the University of Miami’s intramural fields practicing with the club rugby team in his Anne Arundel County rugby t-shirt that he cropped himself. He was also seen walking through the narrow halls of Stanford Residential College in a girl’s sports bra on his way to the gym.
I first came to know Lamkin during summer 2021 through an Instagram account dedicated to UM’s incoming freshmen and meeting other incoming freshmen. The post dedicated to him didn’t seem too dissimilar to most of the others, but the Instagram page tagged in the post stands out from the crowd. On its own, Lamkin’s Instagram, @room41more_, is an adventure. He has filled it to the brim with photos and videos of him. On the surface he may seem like the average young musician trying to make it against all odds, but just a little bit of digging reveals a method to his madness; and there is a lot of madness.
Lamkin first released music on Soundcloud in 2018 under the name DuckSauXe, and later two songs on Spotify in March and April 2020. Shortly after the second song on Spotify, Lamkin changed his stage name to his current Room-41-More, and started to seriously pursue a music career, and took a unique approach to building a following and feeling out what people like. Back home in Annapolis, Md., Lamkin and his friends took a big speaker with them downtown, gaining publicity for himself and his music.
“If you don’t have a venue, you gotta make one yourself,” he explains, adding that it was also a way to “see if our music is actually testable, the best way to do it is ask two people in the street if you could play a song and perform it for ‘em.”
He’s continued the unique practice here on campus too, first taking the DJ’s microphone at a university-sponsored welcome event and freestyling for hundreds of incoming freshmen before many of them had even moved into their dorms. Since then, the Stanford/Hecht dining hall on the UM campus has become his makeshift venue instead of his usual downtown Annapolis spot. On Monday and Thursday nights, Lamkin will turn the dining hall into a mini dancefloor, often gathering a small crowd to listen to music and dance, whether it be his own music or not. In the background, uninterested students and employees alike go about their business like normal. He claims that people rarely get upset at it, but does recall one instance where he felt sympathetic for a girl who asked him to turn it down.
As the dining hall started to empty one Thursday night after my first time witnessing the spectacle for myself, I yelled over the music and told him that his music reminds me of the late Juice WRLD. His face lit up. He dapped me up with an approving nod. Everyone has that one compliment, the one that drives them to do what they do, one that is only meaningful to them. For Lamkin, the comparison between himself and Juice WRLD is that compliment. After all, Lamkin idolizes the Chicago-native star, and credits him as an inspiration to start making music.
“Juice WRLD dying, and the mix of quarantine was just like, you know, what are we ‘bout to do here? I feel like that’s what really sparked it. That’s when I started like making like actual stuff,” Lamkin explained.
On a separate occasion being in the dining hall with his speaker, Lamkin approached sophomore Chris Damond, who he had never met before, and asked if he could sit with him. As Lamkin roamed around the dining hall singing along to Trippie Redd and Diplo’s “Wish” in his bright blue vintage Michael Jordan NBA All-Star jersey, Damond looked confused and surprised, as if he was contemplating how he ever got into such a situation. Lamkin later put on Michael Jackson’s “PYT,” turning the dining hall into a 1980s disco; except without the alcohol, disco ball, or dimmed lights.
He knocked on my door at around 10:45pm on a Tuesday night wearing a bright orange shirt and told me he was ready to hop into his dorm room studio to make some music. The LED-lit room has the same floor plan as my own room, right across the hall, but his carried a completely different aura. Even without music, the room strikes as a place to be, a place where exciting things happen, cluttered closets and all. Lamkin’s modest setup consisted of two microphones, two chairs, and two headsets, one of each for Lamkin and his roommate Miles Quaye, in the open space between the two beds and desks. Lamkin kept a water bottle next to his chair too. The space taken up by the mics and chairs took up most of the room to walk in or out of the room. On the wall was an iPad to control the LED lights, and a monitor hooked up to Lamkin’s MacBook hung from the shelf.
Lamkin and Quaye sat down, wasted no time and got straight to creating. They went back and forth rapping, and for a few minutes both of them freestyled off the top of their heads as a trap beat with an acoustic guitar melody played in their headsets. The soundwaves of the vocals, reminiscent of his idol Juice WRLD, showed up on the production software on the monitor. This was meant to be only a warmup for them, yet the talent and enjoyment of the process was clear. Lamkin started off the warmup by dissing Quaye for poor grades, to which Quaye responded with a playful, “f*** you.”
“It’s like living with a version of myself,” said Quaye, “He’s got a lot of energy and he’s just a good person at the end of the day.”
After the warmup, he brought up some unreleased tracks he’d previously worked on to flex the variety of his creativity. One track had a jazz melody, another had a bouncy-pop inspired beat, and another reminiscent of something off a Lil Uzi Vert album. He doesn’t own any of these beats, or any of the ones used in his released songs either, which means he cannot collect any of the money coming in from streams. He hopes that one of his songs will go viral and establish his name in the scene, and from there he would start worrying about bringing in streaming revenue.
Lamkin stands out in any crowd because he’s usually trying to find a way to make the crowd himself or get himself up in front of it. Whether it be online, in downtown Annapolis, Md., the usually mundane Stanford/Hecht dining hall, or anywhere else he chooses. He has a special ability to make a name for himself among his peers. But above all else, he’s a kid with unique methods of getting where he wants to be in life. Love him or hate him, Room-41-More does things different.