A$AP Rocky has released his new album a week early - but is it that surprising?
A$AP Rocky has released his new album a week early - but is it that surprising?
A$AP Rocky has released his new album a week early - but is it really that surprising?
Let's just get this out of the way first: This is Beyoncé's fault.
Release dates, once fairly reliable promises of new music, now pack all the credibility of posted city bus arrival times.
They are suggestions, rather than guarantees, and anticipation - now passé - has been supplanted by surprise.
Rapper A$AP Rocky, 26, is the latest artist to employ the surprise release, following the examples of Beyoncé, D'Angelo, Drake and, most recently, Kendrick Lamar.
Rocky's release, like D'Angelo's, falls into the subcategory of "modified surprise" - that is, he dropped "At.Long.Last.A$AP a week ahead of schedule rather than completely without warning.
But the unexpected factor is a suggestion of bigness. It's meant to convince you that he's in the same league as the other stars who used the element of surprise, and that he too is capable of introducing a phrase that instantly becomes adopted and referenced the way "riding through the six with my woes" was.
We spend quite a bit of time dissecting the way female stars offer up carefully curated versions of themselves, especially through social media, but the same is true for guys like Rocky, even if they have more freedom from the constraints of social convention.
Just like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, Rocky is trying project something about himself to the world. He wants us to think of him as mature enough to amicably end his high-profile relationship with model Chanel Iman. He wants to engage with fashion in earnest. He wants to dabble in acting, and wants to be taken seriously when he does. He's making his feature debut in the hotly anticipated teen summer flick Dope.
Rocky wants to be able to move freely between different art forms, but he still wants to be commended for his indiscretions when he purposefully outs dalliances with Rihanna, Rita Ora and Iggy Azalea - in lyrics too explicit to write here - on new tracks Better Things and Jukebox Joints.
So what does all of this reveal about Rocky? He's a social climber. He's boasting about conquests while using hip-hop as a silk screen to justify it. Artful grandiosity is part and parcel of hip-hop's history, but Rocky didn't even bother obscuring Ora's or Azalea's identities with some clever wordplay and giving his listeners a bit of juicy gossip to puzzle through. Even Big Sean had the comparative decency to refrain from naming his former paramours outright.
If Swift is guilty of Strategic Friend Collecting, then so is A$AP Rocky - though we're using the word "friend" loosely here. The difference is the payoff: Swift documents herself amassing an army of said friends on Instagram so that she can later call upon them for a big-budget music video. Rocky amasses trysts with women far more famous than himself so that he can appear more significant by association.
And how does he let everyone know about those associations? He raps about them and calls them "b****es." Not only is A$AP Rocky telling us about his involvement with these celebrities, he makes it clear that he's torching those relationships because he no longer sees them as useful, hoping to elevate himself in the process. The only thing more arrogant than saying you pulled a famous starlet is being able to say that you dropped them too.
A$AP Rocky desperately wants us, and his 870,000 Twitter followers to believe that he's arrived. The big question is whether or not we're willing to buy the truth that he's peddling.
