The One Where I Break My Longstanding Silence On A$AP Rocky
I sort of thought A$AP Rocky was lazy, over-hyped, boring, and un-talented. Until I gave his mixtape about five good listens. Now I see him as the unlikely center of the whole indie/lo-fi-/bedroom rap movement that I love so much. (Main Attrakionz forever.) The thing about the Clams style (which is going to be the predominant style soon, I think) is, well, I don’t know, more emotive. It could be the rockist in me, but I don’t think it is. There’s something to the music that’s just so fucking real and immediate, and it’s a feeling that’s not being conveyed by much else right now.
His apparent lack of ambition is galling until you really think about what LiveLoveA$AP accomplishes. Listening to it, you sort of get the feeling Rocky just DMed the best indie lo-fi producers he could get ahold of once he got that major label money. That is so cool. Earlier this year, Clams griped that rappers would request beats and then never do anything with them. A few months later, I saw the producer play a set at MoMA PS1 that amounted to him pressing play on an iPad. Now, Clams Casino is playing actual gigs with an actual rapper with whom he’s got some charisma. The Clams-produced tracks on LiveLoveA$AP are some of its strongest. “Bass” is a surprisingly screwy production, and one of my favorite tracks of the year. The songs that aren’t produced by Clams have his style dripping off them (“Peso” is the second-best Clams production on the album, except it’s not actually by him.)
Where he’s not making the logical choice of combining the syrupy slow Houston style with Clams Casino’s syrupy slow (in a different way) productions, Rocky is picking beats by Atlanta producer DJ Burn One and Miami rapper/producer/lo-fi blog rapper Spaceghost Purrp, and enrolling the services of the aforementioned Main Attrakionz. The tape is seriously stacked with the brightest up-and-coming producers and rappers from all around blogland. It’s a sort of lo-fi version of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but made with a different sort of hunger.
