Wealthy, impatient and not without a few rough edges, A$AP Rocky comes by his rap handle honestly.
In late 2011, this young Harlem MC announced his arrival with an impressive mix tape, “Live Love ASAP,” that married a streetwise lyrical sensibility to plush, pop-savvy beats.
Now, less than 18 months later, he’s releasing his feverishly anticipated major-label debut, “Long.Live.ASAP.”
It’s similarly titled but considerably splashier than its predecessor, with input from A-list producers such as Danger Mouse and Skrillex and guest appearances by Drake and Florence Welch.
And it reportedly earned A$AP Rocky a multi-million-dollar record deal, the kind, he boasted to Pitchfork, that hasn’t been handed out since 50 Cent’s heyday a decade ago.
“It feel good waking up to money in the bank,” he admits in the album’s lead single, “Goldie,” and you can hear in his unhurried swagger that he knows the security of which he speaks.
His rise was fast, but its speed was matched by action. Perhaps it’s that concentrated rush of experience that accounts for how preternaturally assured A$AP Rocky sounds on “Long Live ASAP.”
At 24, he’s seen it all before many MCs have seen much of anything.
He appears to have heard everything too. Though his videos for early songs like “Peso” and “Purple Swag” made purposeful use of his uptown stamping grounds, A$AP Rocky hardly limits himself to a New York state of mind here.
Instead he pulls from a number of regional hip-hop variants: Houston’s woozy chopped-and-screwed sound, the fleet vocal gymnastics associated with Cleveland’s Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Atlanta’s obsession with the future of funk.
In his lyrics, A$AP Rocky mirrors the music’s worldly vibe with a nonchalant bravado, coolly outlining an ultra-high-end lifestyle populated by beautiful women and designer clothes. (No rapper has embraced fashion more enthusiastically since the mid-’00s, when Cam’ron, another Harlem native, was often photographed wearing a hot-pink fur coat.)
Yet, if the stakes on “Long Live A$AP” can sometimes seem perilously low, the disc’s opening couplet puts “expensive taste in women” and “probably die in prison” on equal footing A$AP Rocky’s songs don’t lack for emotion.
In the scratchy, slow-rolling “Suddenly” he recounts the indignities of a tough childhood (“Roaches on the wall, roaches on the dresser / Everybody had roaches, but our roaches ain’t respect us”), but projects the relief that he’s moved beyond them.
Elsewhere he summons a disarming tenderness in “Fashion Killa” as he lays out a lover’s top-dollar wardrobe: “She got a lot of Prada, that Dolce & Gabbana,” he marvels over a sparkly electro-pop production, “I can’t forget Escada and that Balenciaga.”
Does the bewitching result live up to the price A$AP Rocky’s label paid for it?
What’s clear is that A$AP Rocky thinks, indeed, he knows, he’s worth the cost.
“Long.Live.A$AP” won’t take long to convince you he’s right.
- MCT Campus