The 2020s File Feature
So Done
The Kid LAROI's "So Done": A Breakthrough Moment for Australia's Most Watched Young Artist When "So Done" by The Kid LAROI entered the Billboard Hot 100 in N…
01 The Story
The Kid LAROI's "So Done": A Breakthrough Moment for Australia's Most Watched Young Artist
When "So Done" by The Kid LAROI entered the Billboard Hot 100 in November 2020, it arrived as confirmation of something the Australian music industry and international streaming platforms had been observing for months: that a teenage rapper from Sydney was developing at a pace that could not be explained by ordinary commercial momentum. The song, characterized by the raw emotional intensity and melodic instinct that would come to define The Kid LAROI's early catalog, peaked at number 59 on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 21, 2020, just three weeks into its chart run, demonstrating a speed of commercial ascent that reflected genuine audience enthusiasm rather than manufactured promotional activity.
The Kid LAROI, born Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard in Waterloo, Sydney, Australia, had grown up in circumstances marked by significant hardship, including the death of his cousin and close collaborator Lil Codec in 2018, whose passing left a profound mark on the young artist's emotional development and artistic sensibility. He had come to wider international attention through his relationship with the late Juice WRLD, one of the defining figures of emo rap's commercial breakthrough, who had mentored and collaborated with LAROI before his death in December 2019. This mentor relationship gave LAROI not only direct musical guidance but access to audiences who had loved Juice WRLD and were seeking artists who continued that emotional and sonic tradition.
The commercial context for "So Done" was The Kid LAROI's debut commercial release, the mixtape F*CK LOVE, which had been released in July 2020 through Grade A Productions and Columbia Records. The project performed strongly from the outset, driven by a combination of The Kid LAROI's existing streaming audience, his prominent social media presence, and the quality of the music itself, which demonstrated a level of emotional sophistication and melodic craft unusual for an artist who had not yet reached his seventeenth birthday when the project was released.
"So Done" made its Hot 100 debut on November 7, 2020, entering at number 77. Its chart movement over the following weeks illustrated the patterns of streaming-era chart dynamics: the song climbed to 97 in its second week, a dip that might have suggested fading momentum, before jumping dramatically to number 59 in its third week on November 21, 2020, its peak position. This pattern, dipping before a major surge, sometimes reflects the lag between streaming momentum building and chart methodology capturing it, particularly when a song is receiving viral attention on platforms whose data feeds into chart calculations on a delay. The song remained on the chart through December 2020, accumulating 15 total weeks on the Hot 100.
The production on "So Done" was handled in the sonic idiom that had come to define the emo rap movement: guitar-inflected production that blurred the line between hip-hop and rock-adjacent sounds, a melodic approach that privileged emotional expressiveness over technical lyrical complexity, and a production aesthetic that gave the vocals an intimate, almost confessional quality. These choices were not simply stylistic but reflected genuine influences: The Kid LAROI had grown up listening to artists like Juice WRLD, Lil Peep, and XXXTentacion alongside more mainstream hip-hop, and the convergence of these influences produced a sound that felt both specific to his generation and broadly accessible.
The emotional content of "So Done" matched its sonic character precisely. The song dealt with the feelings of emotional exhaustion and frustration in a relationship that has demanded too much without returning enough, a theme that resonated powerfully with the teenage and young adult audience that formed the core of The Kid LAROI's listener base. The specificity of the emotional experience described, the weariness of someone who has tried everything and found that nothing is working, gave the song a quality of authenticity that more calculated commercial product could not replicate.
The approximately 52 million YouTube views the song accumulated in subsequent years reflect the consistent engagement of an audience that found in The Kid LAROI's early work a kind of emotional mirror. The YM view count is particularly notable because it continued to build long after the song's initial chart run, suggesting that new listeners discovering The Kid LAROI through his later, even more commercially successful work were returning to his earlier catalog and finding "So Done" as part of that discovery process.
The song's release coincided with a broader moment of commercial and critical recognition for The Kid LAROI at the international level. In November 2020, as "So Done" was charting, LAROI was increasingly being identified as one of the most significant new artists in the global streaming market, with streaming numbers that placed him alongside much more established artists in terms of audience scale. This parallel visibility, chart success at the same moment as broader industry recognition, amplified the impact of both.
The commercial success of "So Done" and the broader F*CK LOVE project set the stage for what would come in 2021, when The Kid LAROI's collaboration with Justin Bieber on "STAY" would become one of the biggest global hits of the year, spending multiple weeks at number one on the Hot 100 and confirming that his commercial potential extended far beyond the niche of emo rap into the broadest mainstream.
Australia's International Music Presence and LAROI's Significance
The Kid LAROI's emergence represented a significant moment in the history of Australian artists achieving international commercial success in hip-hop, a genre in which Australia had previously had minimal mainstream global presence. The path he traveled, from the Western Sydney hip-hop underground to global streaming charts, demonstrated that the streaming era's algorithmic infrastructure had genuinely democratized geographic access to international audiences in ways that the previous system of physical distribution and radio promotion never had. An Australian teenager could now build a global audience purely through the quality of his music and his ability to connect with listeners through digital platforms, without the relocation to a major music market that previous generations of Australian artists had typically required. His success opened awareness of that possibility for subsequent generations of Australian artists working in hip-hop and related genres.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of So Done: Emotional Exhaustion, Relational Burnout, and Teenage Disillusionment
"So Done" by The Kid LAROI addresses a specific and recognizable emotional state: the point at which emotional investment in a relationship has been depleted to the point of exhaustion, where the effort of maintaining connection has become heavier than any benefit the connection provides, and where the dominant feeling is no longer hurt or anger but a kind of numb finality. This emotional experience, sometimes described in contemporary vernacular as being "done" with someone or something, is particularly resonant for teenage and young adult listeners who are often navigating their first serious romantic disappointments without the resilience that comes from having experienced and survived similar situations before.
The word "done" in the title and throughout the song carries multiple connotations. It means finished, completed, resolved, in the sense of a relationship that has run its course. It also carries the colloquial meaning of being emotionally spent, having nothing left to give. These two meanings work together to create a portrait of someone who has reached a genuine conclusion, not out of anger or drama but out of simple depletion. This is a more sophisticated emotional register than the more common breakup-song mode of anguish or accusation, and its sophistication is part of what made the song feel authentic to its audience.
The Kid LAROI's biographical circumstances, including the loss of Juice WRLD and the earlier loss of his cousin and collaborator, inform the emotional tenor of his early catalog in ways that go beyond what any single song's lyrics can fully convey. The experience of grief at a young age, and of watching people you love disappear from your life before it feels like they should, produces a specific kind of emotional intelligence about loss and ending that surfaces in songs like "So Done" as a quality of knowing that exceeds what a seventeen-year-old might be expected to possess. The weariness in his delivery is not performed weariness but something that sounds genuinely earned.
The production aesthetic on "So Done" reinforces its thematic content through sonic choices that prioritize intimacy and emotional rawness over production polish. The guitar-inflected trap production creates a sound that feels simultaneously contemporary and emotionally unguarded, drawing on the tradition of emo rock that had been translated into hip-hop contexts by Juice WRLD, Lil Peep, and their peers. This sonic environment is one that signals vulnerability and emotional honesty as values, preparing listeners to receive the emotional content of the lyrics in a frame of openness.
The emo rap tradition in which "So Done" participates has its roots in a set of aesthetic choices that challenged hip-hop's historical resistance to open emotional expression, particularly around experiences of sadness, vulnerability, and romantic failure. Where earlier generations of hip-hop artists had often addressed heartbreak through anger, bravado, or the objectification of romantic partners, emo rap artists chose instead to foreground their own pain and confusion, presenting themselves as subjects of suffering rather than agents of response. This shift in representational strategy resonated powerfully with audiences who had grown up in a cultural environment that was more accepting of male emotional expression than previous generations had been.
The cultural impact of "So Done" extended beyond its chart performance to the conversations it contributed to about mental health, emotional expression, and relationship navigation among young audiences. Songs that name specific emotional experiences, particularly experiences that have previously lacked adequate vocabulary in mainstream music, perform an important cultural function by providing listeners with a language for their own feelings. The exhausted finality that "So Done" describes is a real and widespread emotional experience, and the song's ability to articulate it clearly contributed to the therapeutic value many listeners found in it.
The relationship between The Kid LAROI's Indigeneous Australian heritage and his artistic identity is a dimension of his work that has received attention in discussions of his cultural significance. As an artist of Kamilaroi descent navigating the global music industry, his success carries meanings beyond the purely commercial, representing a form of visibility for Indigenous Australian voices in an international cultural space where such visibility had been extremely rare. The emotional directness that characterizes "So Done" and his broader early catalog is connected not only to the emo rap tradition he absorbed through American hip-hop but also to broader cultural values around storytelling and emotional honesty that have significance within his Indigenous heritage.
The song's enduring presence in streaming culture, reflected in its substantial view count, confirms that the emotional experience it describes continues to find new audiences in each successive cohort of young people navigating their first serious romantic disappointments. Music that accurately describes the feeling of being emotionally done with a relationship will always find an audience, because that experience is both universal and sufficiently specific to require skilled articulation. The Kid LAROI provided that articulation with unusual skill for an artist at his stage of development.
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