The album will potentially feature "Goldie", contributions from Santigold and Pharrell, as well as "Ridin'", Rocky's collaboration with Lana Del Rey that was pulled from the Kickdrums' recent mixtape.
(more info to come)
Until then, enjoy this video for "Brand New Guy", the Schoolboy Q-featured cut off of A$AP's 2011 mixtape LiveLoveA$AP.
A few hours after his rain-soaked performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago on Friday, A$AP Rocky still can't come to grips with what went down midway through his set: a few minutes after he stagedove into the poncho-clad crowd, he implored them to give him some of whatever they were smoking. Then he was handed some disappointing product.
"Somebody threw regular weed," the 23-year-old Harlem MC tells Rolling Stone, still exacerbated by the horror. "You cannot throw regular weed to the lords. Chicago don't do it like that. That's disrespectful. That's a sin. Forgive whoever did that. Forgive him. Forgive his soul."
The beauty of A$AP Rocky – one of the biggest names to emerge in hip-hop over the past year – is that whether he's actually upset about the earlier weed situation or not, the man who asserts in his mixtape cut "Wassup" that "the only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror" seems to believe everything coming out of his mouth. And it keeps coming. The next topic? His motivation for starring in fellow blog-fueled newcomer Lana Del Rey's music video for "National Anthem," a serious acting turn in which Rocky plays JFK to Del Rey's Jackie O. "I had a crush on her before I met her," he explains. "I wanted to **** her and ****. When I met her and really found out what type of person she was, she became more of a friend. And I loved the character that she was [in the video] and the artist that she is, to the point where I don't wanna **** her no more."
At this, Rocky's 10-deep crew, the A$AP Mob, breaks into laughter. Rocky gets upset. "Why the **** ya'll ****** laughing? Everybody in this room would **** her."
Things quiet down. Rocky gets to talking about the benefits of fame; on the strength of mixtapes alone (his official full-length debut, LongLiveA$AP, is due on September 11th) he signed a deal with Sony/RCA for a rumored $3 million. He's had some time now to process his rapid ascent. "It feels good,” he says of his newfound celebrity. "I ain't gonna lie to you. It's ***** all over the place, a lot of money to be made." Rocky says he's also become something of an expert at reading others. "You meet somebody for the first time and if it's genuine you know it," he says. "But when you meet a mother****er and you can tell he's suckin' dick and he just coming around 'cause you got this **** going on and everything is looking good – especially the mother****er that never spoke to you back in the days – those mother****ers, you be like, 'Suck a dick.'"
Rocky leans back in his chair. "Nowadays, everybody wanna be weird," he says. "We know how to manifest being weird. We know we some weird-ass looking mother****ers, and we know we do some weird ****." He pauses. "But at the same time, we some geniuses."
"Who's that?" A$AP Rocky asks when the Dirty Projectors begin their set and start emitting their pitch-perfect vocal harmonies at the 2012 Pitchfork Music Festival. When informed of the Brooklyn indie rock group's handle, Rocky stands up to get a better view of the group. When he sits back down a minute later, he asks an ASAP Mob member to write the name 'Dirty Projectors' down and asks, "What do they make? Reggae?"
So it goes at Chicago's Pitchfork Music Festival, where genres awkwardly bump against each other and tastemaker-approved artists unwittingly discover each other's mass appeal. An hour before speaking with Billboard.com, Rocky had wrapped up an unrelenting, brilliantly vacuous set alongside his A$AP Mob cohorts, stomping through "LiveLoveA$AP" cuts while threatening the audience to put their hands up. When the rain started and quickly intensified, no one in the crowd moved a muscle; instead, they bounced along with the bass of "Hands on the Wheel" and supported crowd-surfers during "Wassup."
For Rocky, a 23-year-old Harlem native who inked a deal with Polo Grounds/RCA late last year, performing at 5:30 PM to a crowd of indie rock fans is nothing new; in fact, it's sometimes preferred. "I got supporters from all demographics," says the rapper. "There are people that don't **** with rap but **** with A$AP, just because I give them a feeling that they can't explain. I'm used to this happening - even when it's not at one of these festivals, my crowd is real diverse. If you've ever been to one of my shows, you'd be like, 'What the **** did I just step into?'"
"LongLiveA$AP," Rocky's major label debut, is slated for a Sept. 11 release date, but the MC says that a record featuring his entire A$AP Mob hip-hop crew -- which includes A$AP Twelvy, A$AP Yams and A$AP Ferg, among others -- will be out before that. Rocky won't give an exact date, but says that fans will have it "in two weeks." A$AP Ferg chimes in that, on the Mob album, "Everybody has their own unique sound. Rocky set the tone."
One week after Friday's performance at Pitchfork Fest, A$AP Rocky will make his network TV debut on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," with a song scheduled for Friday, July 20. But when asked about a radio single from "LongLiveA$AP" that could provide a strong hook on "Fallon," Rocky insists that he's not going through the standard tropes of a major label artist.
"I'd put out some whack, slow ****, straight up. I'll just put out a song saying nothing - call me Pootie Tang," Rocky says with a laugh. "Putting out that mother****ing tastemaker music that we do, we change the sound of mainstream. The mainstream isn't gonna be that ******** that you hear on the radio all day. The mainstream's gonna be that A$AP -- we're gonna change the whole world with this ****. I have a dream! I'm the trill Martin Luther King, straight up."
LongLiveA$AP is going to be amazing. Less than two months away!
And we're getting an A$AP Mob album by the end of the month
