A$AP Rocky - Live.Love.A$AP (2011) [A$AP Worldwide] // Grade: B+

On “Brand New Guy” — one of the hardest, chest thumping, shit talking songs on Live.Love.A$AP — A$AP Rocky says “fuck fly, I am fashion.” For the last week I’ve been trying to figure out what the fuck that means. Don’t get me wrong, the line sounds unbelievably cool. But the shit doesn’t really make sense if you think about it too long. At the same time though, rap was invented so dudes could say wild shit like that to an audience bigger than the 10 assholes they hang out with on a regular basis. If this was ’03, there’d be about ten thousand questionably attired dudes on MySpace using that quote as their headline. None of them would know what the fuck it meant either, but, you wouldn’t be able to tell those dudes shit. And that’s kind of what the record is all about. Live.Love.A$AP takes the feeling of being so fly that a motherfucker can’t tell you shit and stretches it out for about an hour. The record slows down time and lets you bask in your own reflection, daring anyone to challenge your swag.

One of the things that make Live.Love.A$AP work is that it sounds like nothing else out today, yet, it sounds like everything going on today. It’s a weird paradox. The Schrodinger’s Cat of rap if you want to get unnecessarily philosophical. The production pulls overt references from a ton of different places and times and synthesizes them into a style that unique to A$AP Rocky. There’s some Bone Thug flow, a bunch of nods to Houston and Memphis production, some post Kanye designer shoutouts, Clams Casino cloud rap production and a ton of Cam’ron’s dapper dandy narcissism. All mixed up in service of aggrandizing A$AP Rocky — and by the transitive powers of rap, the listener.

After hearing the single “Peso” — which sounds like a dude trying to kick game to a chick from inside a scene of a cartoon having a hallucination — you won’t be surprised to realize the entire album sounds like it was crafted by Darth Vader, DJ Screw and the ghost of Zack Morris from that one episode where dude almost smoked a joint. It wavers between sinister, screwed up tracks that sound like bad trips where machine elves tell you about their secret plans to invade our dimension and wavy compositions that sound like spending an afternoon doing the Dougie with those elephants from Dumbo. When the album gets full on hallucinatory, it’s a thing of swagged out beauty. “Wassup” produced by Clams Casino, sounds like heaven and Rocky just floats all over the track, knowing exactly when to dart in between the spaced out claps and when to sing song into the background ghost sounds. At the same time, the track speaks to the reoccurring theme of being fly as fuck and having everyone know it. Rocky spends the song talking about getting recognition in the hood and gangsters celebrating him for being “that pretty motherfucker.” Heads that fucked with The Wire can think of it as a song that expounds on Marlo’s motivating desire to have his name ring out. It’s about the desire for recognition and respect over all else. Heads that didn’t fuck with The Wire can think of it as a requiem for the girl who campaigned really hard to be prom queen and just ended up being a title less face in smeared eyeliner getting finger banged at a bonfire. “Trilla” sounds like a song written while A$AP Rocky was riding a horse in those Jeremy Scott winged Adidas kicks. That’s to say it’s got an ill country twang but it’s still over the top shit talk. “Leaf” featuring Main Attrakionz is classic Clams Casino cloud rap that makes you wonder if dude has an amazing connect to deadstock New Age records.

Live.Love.A$AP ultimately feels like fashion rap. Not because of the obvious shoutouts to Jeremy Scott and Rick Owens, but, because it feels like a suit you can put on and stunt in. It’s not so much about the lyrics individually or the production or delivery. Instead it’s the cumulative feeling from listening to the record, a feeling that you too can be a “pretty motherfucker”

Download A$AP Rocky’s Live.Love.A$AP (Click Here)

- Behold the Destroyer