Last week, having paid whatever publishing ransom necessary, A$AP Rocky and RCA Records announced that Live.Love.A$AP, the Harlem rapper’s debut mixtape, would finally be available on digital streaming platforms in time for the tenth anniversary of its Halloween release. While Rocky remains an A-list rapper — it is something of a running joke how frequently he appears atop festival flyers, even between album cycles — he has also always seemed like a relic of that moment, a little talisman of the early 2010s. A decade after the fact, Live.Love.A$AP sounds as hazily inspired as ever. It made Rocky as big a star as anyone could have expected. But the paradigm shift it seemed to signal never really came. It’s best understood not as a hard break in the genre’s history but as something fleeting, a snapshot distinct and elusive as its airiest Clams Casino beats.
Rocky was born Rakim Mayers in the fall of 1988, and named after the rapper who ruled New York at the time (an older sister is named Erika B. Mayers). He lived briefly outside the city, in Pennsylvania, but for the most part grew up in Harlem. At one point after his father was sentenced to prison on drug charges and his older brother was killed, he and his mother stayed in a shelter. By the time he was a teenager, Rocky was trafficking a bit as well, though he says he generally kept that to the Bronx. He was caught with a gun, charged with attempted murder, and spent a couple weeks on Rikers Island before getting off. He was 16.
