A$AP Rocky – Wassup
That Pretty Mother Fucker is back again. As A$AP Rocky’s ‘Love Life’ mixtape beds down into one of the most accomplished of recent times, the video for the Clams Casino-produced standout Wassap debuts online. Rocky met Vice global director Andy Capper in Brooklyn, and chatted about the movies Scarface, Belly, Enter The Dragon, The Warriors and, of course, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, and Vice ended up producing the above.
And it’s quite something. Much has been made, by us and others, of Rocky’s relationship to the other in rap, both chronological and geographic. His favoured production, he has acknowledged many times, belongs more to the slow lean of Houston screw than his tightened New York noise. In personality, too, he’s locked out of time, with his crew of weirdΩo aesthetes closer to the Native Tongues or KMD than much else on the scene today.
Which is what makes this video so interesting. Featuring a series of screen grab-able shots, from Rocky bathing in money to gazing with his collective over the Brooklyn bridge shore, to fronting outside purple trees with a FUNERAL hat to him waking, as if from a nightmare, on his sofa. It’s a rundown of alternative rap history, a shifted version of rap history, and an audacious move from a guy who actually might be changing music in front of us.
