Too many tracks minimise his strengths: the AutoTune-garbled mumble he deploys on the FKA twigs-assisted Fukk Sleep, for example, is an uncomfortable fit. Rocky similarly hopped between styles on his two previous albums, $AP and At.$AP, but Testing is a spottier affair. On the latter, Rocky slices into Ocean’s lane rather than vice versa, but this is a very good Frank Ocean song, and you can never get enough of those. The biggest marquee guest, though, is Frank Ocean, who appears on the soul-buttered Brotha Man alongside Snoop Dogg and French Montana, and on the acoustic guitar-led soul of Purity. Produced by and featuring Skepta, Praise the Lord is built around a simple flute-like riff that any American grime fan who liked Stormzy’s Shut Up will be able to get behind Dev Hynes serves up the album highlight, Hun43rd, a doomed sermon that finds Rocky reminiscing about the days when he hustled on street corners and took fashion tips from Cam’ron. It’s a shame, then, that the album version adds TI and Kid Cudi, out-of-towners who dilute the concept. It sounds like a mixtape experiment rather than the marquee single for one of the year’s biggest rap joints (good luck finding a clutch of singles on here, by the way) yet by tying his uptown hip-hop with Moby’s heavenly trip-hop Rocky’s lovingly brought together two New York sounds. No trends past or present can explain A$AP Forever, on which Rocky raps over a heavy sample of Moby’s Porcelain, with its swooning strings, foggy vocal loops, hard-angle chord changes and health-spa drums.
Testing is completely out of step with any mainstream rap album you’re likely to hear this year. Just as striking is the acid-laced, psych-rock freak-out Kids Turned Out Fine. Consider the opener, Distorted Records: it takes supreme magnetism to make the song’s analogue buzz sound musical but Rocky’s braggadocio (“If I’m in your top 10, mine better be the first name,” he sneers) brings the grating orchestration into line. Racked with tension and twistedly psychedelic, the record sees the 29-year-old take his unusual proclivities to even more outlandish destinations. What’s clear from Testing, his third studio album, is that Rocky won’t totally abandon the universe he has created for himself. Can Rocky’s decadent vision of the world also evolve?
But this is 2018: cloud rap beats are old hat, and the very meaning of that flag is being bitterly fought over. The cover of his breakout mixtape, $AP, featuring the star standing in front of an American flag, has become modern rap iconography – one nation under Rocky’s cool.
Whatever “swag” meant to early-2010s rap kids, Rocky was dripping in it. He raps cleanly but not uniquely and his lyrics show him to be a man of simple tastes: threads, thuggin’ and admiring his own fine looks. A$AP – real name Rakim Mayers – will flow over the kind the dusty boom-bap associated with the legendary rapper he was named after, but also acidic Skrillex beats. Who else could be pitched as the successor to New York’s golden-age legends while leaning on subwoofer-rumbling, screwed-up Southern hip-hop? Rocky is an ostentatious impresario who took hollowed-out cloud rap and Odd Future’s lo-fi aesthetic and made it all sound like high-end fashion. A $AP Rocky’s great gift isn’t that he flies above rap trends – it’s that he contorts them at will.
0 kommentar(er)
