With his newfound fame A$AP Rocky sought to pad his highly anticipated Long.Live.A$AP EP with some of the biggest names in music today, with cameos from 2 Chainz, Kendrick, Florence Welch, and Skrillex, among others. Whether his collaborators were chosen for how their sounds might complement A$AP’s or to just provide big names and therefore hype and sales, is very much up for debate. Nevertheless, Long.Live.A$AP was destined to be different than Live.Long.A$AP which was mostly made by just A$AP Rocky and a familiar production team. The variety creates quite the hit and miss affair. Hits: The music world, due to singles and leaking, is already quite familiar with a number of the big hits, particularly the catchy star-studded “Fuckin Problems” and “1-Train”. Some of the lesser hyped soon-to-be hits include Fashion Killa, PMW, Angels, and Goldie. Fashion Killa is almost reminiscent of the Clams Casino produced tracks of old, with A$AP flowing over an enigmatic beat that uses luscious glowing female vocal samples. PMW, despite providing evidence for the negative stereotypes surrounding modern hip-hop with its mindless chorus of “pussy, money, weed” endlessly repeated, is top-shelf. Angels' beauty is found in the genius sampling and layering of Imogen Heap's beautiful "Headlock" and Goldie just another day at he office for the aptly named producer "Hit Boy". Misses: Previous album was successful largely due to the exceptional smooth hazy beats of Clams Casino. On L.L.A. his production is only featured twice and surprisingly they’re two of the weakest tracks. Maybe he realized that his music actually sounded better without A$AP after releasing his instrumental album and decided to keep his good stuff for himself, or maybe the magic’s just gone but regardless the best tracks on LLA have a different feel from his previous album. One of the most controversial collaborations on this somewhat experimental album has got to be "Wild for the Night", produced by Birdy Nam Nam and Skrillex. For a traditional hip-hop fan, who is possibly already on the fence about A$AP, this has to be an absolute nightmare of a collaboration. It was a dubious combination, at the very least, from the get go, and in my opinion the end result proves any doubters absolutely correct. It sounds cheap, thrown together, and while other producers admirably try to tailor their production to suit A$AP’s style, this is just cookie-cutter Srillex bro-step squeaks. I doubt that he spent more than an hour putting it together. [do action="play-this-page"/] The album can be bought on iTunes HERE
A$AP Rocky