Rocky’s voice - the timbre, the tics of pronunciation that nip at the starts and ends of words-is recognizably New York, but the lyrics themselves, like the screwed-up, pitched-down vocals in the song’s hook, are an extended ode to Houston’s rap culture, woozy fare for slow-moving cars and slower-still nervous systems. “Purple Swag” is as reasonable an introduction as any to the sound Rocky and Yams had settled on. The figure itself became as effective a teaser as any single could be, and in the weeks leading up to $AP’s release, the curiosity of underground rap fans and industry watchers dovetailed in a way not seen since. In the summer of 2011, the video for “ Purple Swag” became a minor internet sensation - on its musical merits, sure, but also for its famous opening close-up of a white girl baring gold teeth to mouth the line, “This is for my niggas getting high on the regular.” By the fall of that year, the hype around Rocky had snowballed to the point where the Sony and RCA subsidiary Polo Grounds Music gave him $3 million to sign. “‘It might be Texas, it might be L.A.' So he'd put that out there because he's trying to make it seem like he didn't know me like that.” “He'd just be like, 'Yo I like this kid from Harlem, but I don't know where he's from,’” Rocky would later recall his partner posting online. (His aesthetic sense bled out and onto his body, the tattoos and gold teeth he bought with a student loan complementing the unmistakable birthmark that covered part of his face.) While Rocky honed his vocal approach and highly manicured presentation, Yams started seeding his music on the blog.
LIST OF EVERY ASAP ROCKY SONG FULL
By that point Yams was elbowing his way to the center of the rap internet: His Tumblr full of scans from old magazines, mp3s, and mixes would soon be widely read by fans, critics, and executives. In 2012, Yams gave an interview to the writer Jeff Weiss, saying that in ‘08 Rocky sounded “like Kid Cudi mixed with Lil Wayne,” and that it was he who told Rocky to listen to the Houston records that would eventually shape his sound.
Rocky and Yams met in 2008 through a mutual friend. Yams was an archetypal New York rap kid for the 21st century: enamored enough by the Dips’ chaos mythos to work for free, street smart enough to see what levers they were pulling to finance the whole thing, yet with enough lingering love for golden-agers and Five Percenters to write raps of his own under a name like Sensei the Golden Child. When he was 16, he dropped out of high school so he could focus on his unpaid internship with Dipset, packaging mixtapes while slipping a few into his backpack to sell on the side. Steven Rodriguez, who would later rechristen himself A$AP Yams, was letting his mind drift-cutting class to hunt for obscure records on Canal St. Meanwhile, also in Harlem, another young man was studying the game from the inside. He was caught with a gun, charged with attempted murder, and spent a couple weeks on Rikers Island before getting off. By the time he was a teenager, Rocky was trafficking a bit as well, though he says he generally kept that to the Bronx. At one point after his father was sentenced to prison on drug charges and his older brother was killed, he and his mother stayed in a shelter. He lived briefly outside the city, in Pennsylvania, but for the most part grew up in Harlem. Rocky was born Rakim Mayers in the fall of 1988, and named after the rapper who ruled New York at the time (an older sister is named Erika B. It’s best understood not as a hard break in the genre’s history but as something fleeting, a snapshot distinct and elusive as its airiest Clams Casino beats. But the paradigm shift it seemed to signal never really came. It made Rocky as big a star as anyone could have expected. A decade after the fact, $AP sounds as hazily inspired as ever. While Rocky remains an A-list rapper - it is something of a running joke how frequently he appears atop festival flyers, even between album cycles - he has also always seemed like a relic of that moment, a little talisman of the early 2010s. Last week, having paid whatever publishing ransom necessary, A$AP Rocky and RCA Records announced that $AP, the Harlem rapper’s debut mixtape, would finally be available on digital streaming platforms in time for the tenth anniversary of its Halloween release.
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