Interview: A$AP Rocky

At the start of ‘Keep It G’ off A$AP Rocky’s mixtape LiveLoveA$AP, one of his managers Aaron ‘Chace’ Johnson doles out some advice: “Don’t let these motherfucking devils come in between y’all, start trying to separate shit… Y’all niggas got the motherfucking plan… Keep the team straight and keep that team G.”

Keeping the team straight sounds easy enough, but Johnson is advising a Harlem hip hop collective that, in the space of a few months, have gone from trying to stand out by walking around in Nike CBG trainers when everyone else in Harlem was wearing Timberlands, to securing a reported $3 million record deal, tour dates with Drake and the kind of blanket media hype that most rappers can only dream of. At least, de facto leader A$AP Rocky has. The rest of A$AP are keeping it G, waiting for things to kick off for them.

It felt like the team was straight over the summer, when Rocky rented out a swanky apartment in Midtown Manhattan and turned it into a kind of trap house where his A$AP crew bounced off long white walls chanting “asap” over and over. Girls came by, speakers blared home-cooked beats and the stench of dope crept under doors.

“Right there we was like a family,” says A$AP Ty Beats, the 18-year-old producer responsible for tracks ‘Purple Swag’ and ‘Peso’. “That was the stepping stone: everyone was writing music; me and Purpps [Floridian A$AP collaborator Spaceghostpurrp] was making beats all the time. A lot of work was done in the stash house.”

Black and white photos show A$AP members sleeping on stripped mattresses in hoodies and caps, unplugged alarm clocks pushed aside by empty bottles of Olde English malt liquor, cigarette papers and bags of weed.

Inevitably, they were thrown out for disturbing the peace and today Ty Beats is at his grandmother’s house in East Harlem, where he sleeps on a blow-up mattress in the living room, working on Fruity Loops with an Atari MPC and a stack of unlikely vinyl: Les Brown, Gone With The Wind, Doctor Zhivago, Bob Crosby, and Chopin.

A$AP Rocky seems constantly out of town on business — LA one week, Miami the next. He makes appearances at club nights wearing the designer clothes that have started arriving in boxes at his mum’s house in New Jersey. Girls trail after him, just like he boasts on nearly every track on LiveLoveA$AP.

That mixtape appeared for free online on October 31, a couple of weeks after he inked the mega-bucks deal with Sony/RCA-owned Polo Grounds Music. Nearly half of the money goes towards funding a new label called A$AP Worldwide, turning Rocky into a big cheese overnight.

“That’s exactly what I wanted,” he says when we catch up with him chilling by his new office inside the New York headquarters of Polo Grounds Music. “I said, ‘I don’t want to talk to anybody unless you guys are willing to offer me my own label.’ And they believed in me. Sony knows I’m going to be successful.”

Things may be moving too fast. Asked what magic goes on in his new office, Rocky replies: “Nothing! We sit on the internet and act like we businessmen and shit.”

The first time most people heard of A$AP Rocky was in July last year when he uploaded the chop and screw-styled ‘Purple Swag’ onto YouTube, complete with a video featuring a pretty blonde girl in grills lip-syncing his lyrics. It spread, instantly transforming Rocky’s life, just as ‘Gucci Gucci’ had done for Kreayshawn a few months earlier, and ‘Video Games’ did for Lana Del Rey. Then, later that month, a short mixtape called Deep Purple surfaced online. It was an unofficial rip of seven songs he’d been drip-feeding onto YouTube put together by someone in France, but Rocky didn’t care — it got downloaded in its thousands.

For years, Rocky supported his family by selling drugs. He worked his way up from running for a dealer as a teenager to pushing bigger quantities in the Bronx and Pennsylvania, where he could command higher profits. “I was ballin’! I got me a Mercedes Benz and bought a condo in Jersey,” he says of the apartment he moved his mum and little sister into, to get them off the street in Harlem where Rocky’s elder brother Ricky had been murdered in 2000. Unsurprisingly, Rocky always wanted out of dealing. “That selling drugs shit sucks,” he explains. “It never was my character. It was a way of surviving life because I didn’t have a job. My mum didn’t have a job. I didn’t have anything.”

Rocky was broke for two months before the record labels came knocking. In the stash house, he promised the rest of A$AP that things would come through for all of them, saying, “I know something about the game that they don’t know.”

When Rocky was a teenager, he ran with a Harlem crew called Million Dollar Babies. Some of the Babies went to parties at a new venue started by Timbaland on 128th Street and Amsterdam Avenue called The Cherry Lounge, which had opened to fanfare in 2004 when Bruce Willis, Lil Kim and P. Diddy turned out to watch Wyclef Jean perform.

Every Thursday, The Cherry Lounge ran an underage night, where teenagers sipped apple juice from bottles and snuck out an hour before closing to avoid getting robbed on the dead-end street. By 2006, two members of a crew known as Harlem Envy, Ferg and Jay West, were in regular attendance, dancing the Harlem Shake and the Toe Wop to the siren wail of DJ Webstar’s ‘Chicken Noodle Soup’.

“That club felt like our shit — our clubhouse,” says A$AP Ferg. “If you was there, then you was in the circle that was popular.”

It didn’t take long for Ferg and Jay West to encounter Rocky and bond over what Ferg calls a “Soho vibe” — an arty, downtown sensibility that they cultivated in shopping trips to Michael K, Atrium and Stussy, catching the D train to Broadway to mix with new crowds.

When Ferg’s friend Jibari, a Harlem native four years his junior, started a crew he called A$AP (a backronym for Always Strive and Prosper), Ferg and Rocky were among the first to join.

After Rocky got his deal, Ferg was top of the list with fellow rapper A$AP Twelvy to get signed to A$AP Worldwide. “Above the music, I want to prepare myself to find great talent,” Rocky says of his plans to become the next major rapper-turned-exec. “And I know A$AP Ferg is the shit!”

But right now, the spotlight is all on Rocky. “That’s the way it has to be,” says Ferg from Jay West’s Harlem apartment.

Rocky’s not so sure: “It’s like everybody’s drawing the attention on me, which is cool, but I came up with a group! Everyone thinks of Tyler, The Creator as part of his group, but people think of me as a solo artist.”

He starts talking about A$AP Ferg’s new track, ‘A Hundred Million Roses’, and new videos by A$AP Nasty and A$AP Twelvy, both of whom appear on Rocky’s track ‘Trilla’. “When these videos and these projects drop, the point that I had to prove to everybody, they’re gonna prove it,” he says. “And once that’s said and done, there’s no turning back.”

Back in Harlem, A$AP Ty Beats is still waiting to get signed to A$AP Worldwide. “I need to get a mentor,” he says. He’s struggled to write since A$AP got kicked out of their stash house. “I think we need to get that back again so we can get back to work.”

Since Ty Beats and Rocky wrote ‘Peso’ and ‘Get High’, bigger names have entered the scene, particularly Clams Casino (New Jersey’s Matt Volpe), a 24-year-old trainee physical therapist who only realised that rappers might be interested in his instrumental tracks when a friend started sending them out to people like Lil B and Soulja Boy. On LiveLoveA$AP, Clams lends Rocky electronic landscapes that make his lyrics about drugs and girls sound moody and real, not just the brags of teenagers.

As soon as Rocky gets back from his many publicity tours, A$AP are hoping to secure some studio time to work on their first group album, LongLiveA$AP. A deluxe version of Rocky’s LiveLoveA$AP is scheduled for release, making that his first album proper. Rocky’s tied into Sony for three or four solo records in total (he claims he can’t remember which). A$AP Worldwide is tied to them for as long as it lasts.

“I’m not looking at it like I’m tied down,” Rocky says. “I’m looking at it like I have a father company to teach me how to be a businessman. Because when I go to these meetings it’s not like, ‘Yo, Rocky, we need to do this, we need to do that.’ It’s like, ‘This is the way things are done, you might want to pay attention and do it like this.’ Eyes open, mouth closed. I look, observe, come, conquer.”

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