(RCA)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Those demanding to know why RCA paid $3 million to sign this guy are asking the question in the wrong way. Properly, it is: does A$AP Rocky use the opportunity of this coyly released free mixtape to prove exactly why he was worth that paycheck? The answer is yeah, absolutely and unequivocally. Rocky's debut tape is the most convincing act of self-proof by a young man since The College Dropout seven years ago. More than just promising, it's the most immediately striking and appealing mixtape to surface in many, many years.
One key is length; at just fifty-four minutes, you're actually left itching to spend a little more time with Rocky and the various well-chosen guests and members of his A$AP crew that come out for these sessions. The headliner's personality -- melodramatic, promiscuous, preening, but utterly young and charming -- is consistently appealing, through his various guises of swagger and sorrow all well-presented by his easy, silky flow. Which itself is deceptively simple; at the drop of a hat, on "Trilla" and "Peso" and "Out of This World," he can pull out the stops and go rapid fire full-force on us, suggesting he is keeping a lot of his tricks to himself as of yet.
But Rocky's endlessly smooth, eclectic taste in beats and producers is overall the element that puts LiveLoveA$AP on a level with the best hip hop records of the last few years. You get a full and mixed serving of hooks and strangeness here; not one song fails to stand out memorably from the rest in some fashion. The vibe of a carefree party with an undercurrent of sharp, steely-eyed conviction is brilliantly held up by the broad array of production ideas, from almost unbearably tight driving Southern funk on the magnificent "Trilla" to street jazz on Spaceghost Purrp's immediately succeeding "Keep It G" to clever, popcrafty syncopation on "Kissin' Pink" (and that's three songs in a row right in the middle!) to the urbane, carefully mounted menace and minimalism of Clams Casino's five cuts.
The impression we get, whether from the naked shout-outs to Naughty by Nature or the unveiled emotional pleas and storytelling of "Demons," "Houston Old Head" and "Leaf" or even the unabashed but clever weed rap of "Roll One Up" and the Slum Village throwback "Get Lit," is that all of this matters like hell to A$AP Rocky, which makes sense for a Harlem boy who decided to go full-bore on a rap career after his brother was killed in his neighborhood. ("He would make me feel secure," Rocky told the Fader recently, "and if it wasn't for him being able to get that confidence out of me, I wouldn't have had the balls to discover I had a talent.") Even when he's just talking about the joys of laying women and smoking up and being "pretty," a not at all insignificant choice of self-qualifier in the age of "no homo," his passion for his work is consistently audible. It's this dedication that seems to have made LiveLoveA$AP feel like so much more than a mixtape, feel like something that actively should not be available to us for free, and that makes me all the more excited for A$AP Rocky's future.
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