Not long ago, A$AP Rocky found himself a bit player in hip-hop's most consequential beef of all time. It's easy to overlook now, given all the pyrotechnics that would ensue — but with his prickly appearance on the 2024 Future and Metro Boomin collab "Show of Hands," Rocky insinuated himself into the fray of Kendrick Lamar's extended OVO deposition, one of many former Drake collaborators turned piñata whackers. A few weeks later on "Family Matters," Drake took a moment to respond to Rocky directly, drawling the lines as if he could barely bother to engage. "I ain't even know you rapped still, 'cause they only talkin' 'bout your 'fit again / Probably gotta have a kid again 'fore you think of droppin' any s*** again / Even when you do drop, they gon' say you should've modeled 'cause it's mid again," he rapped. Funnily, his case was largely complimentary: Rocky was too stylish and handsome, had hit the jackpot with his partner and should leave rap alone to go home and be a family man. But it all hinged on a truly brutal creative own: that Rocky was more or less a mannequin inside his own career, and his songs were set-dressing.
As of "Family Matters," Rocky hadn't released an album in six years, and the Drake diss seemed to emphasize a collective shrugged response to his absence. Worse still for Rocky was a juxtaposition with R9 hardliners, who continue to hope against hope that they will be blessed with new Rihanna music someday. It took 19 more months, but the fourth A$AP Rocky album, Don't Be Dumb, finally arrived on Jan. 16. As I listened through it, Drake's "model" comment was ringing in my ears.
Rocky is undeniably suave and charming. As rap flexes go, few compare to being a luxury it boy with the Fenty billionaire on your arm. But engaging with his comeback release at anything beyond surface level feels disorienting. There are obvious gestures at post-genre intrigue, and something akin to curation — though at 17 scatterbrained tracks, it's hard to really consider its aesthetic sense choice, bold as it may be. He pairs Jessica Pratt with will.i.am on a song that tabulates a list of American ills, with the foggy perspective of someone trying to draw a stranger from memory ("It's hard to sing 'Sunshine, good morning' with global warming / Newsflash, we at war, a global warning"). The album is definitely taking swings, and yet the music lacks not just intention, but oomph, a real reason for existing beyond branding. Drake was hatin', but not off-base: At this point, Rocky should perhaps be Rihanna's Edie Sedgwick. Why is he still making records?
Or maybe the question is, where exactly did he lose the thread? A heightened sense of taste has always defined Rocky's rap intuition, and his early releases positioned him as a connoisseur of all manner of finery in ways that felt thrillingly enterprising. Lately, though, it's the explicit display of all his various labels that accounts for most of the head-turning; it has been years since anything felt especially urgent about him as a musician. It's tough to single out what has shifted, but there is at least one answer waiting at the very end of Don't Be Dumb: "Fish N Steak (What It Is)," the second of the album's two bonus tracks and a team-up with Tyler, the Creator.
Rocky and Tyler have become friends over the years, likely out of a sense of shared history. Both helmed rap crews that broke onto the pages of the early 2010s web, and extended their profiles as frontmen by 2015. They were ringmasters of the digital rap age, millennial tastemakers, next-gen Pharrells in different fonts. The greatest difference between them was that Rocky was clearly a star, with platinum records out the gate, while Tyler was on the auteur track early. In the years since, Tyler has become a star in his own right, stringing together a series of chart-topping albums that have only served to underscore his singularity and the raised stakes of his music; two of them won best rap album at the Grammys. In order to keep pace as an artist, Rocky would have to exert himself as a creative. To be fair, this was the tougher gap to close: Tyler is a rapper-producer who has signposted authorial intent at every turn, whereas there was nothing inherently sensational about the skills Rocky brought to his songs. Perhaps as a compromise, Rocky has leaned into his curatorial and sartorial instincts. But in the studio, the adjustments to his formula have been mostly cosmetic.
Ironically, "Fish N Steak (What It Is)" directly taps into much of what made Rocky feel novel in the early 2010s, as someone who could pull sweeping influences through a single point. The song is deeply referential of Houston's screw culture, it namedrops luxury hotels and Bottega Veneta, and its flows and lyrics bear a playboy mobster chicness that turn his distinct signature into logomania, like a Harlem lovechild of Dapper Dan and Bumpy Johnson. But it is, crucially, not the 2010s anymore. Everyone raps about Bottega now. NYC hustle rap has taken center stage again, thanks to a far more flamboyant personality. And in a post-internet rap world, there's nothing avant-garde about simply "being experimental." The posed, exhibitory nature of Rocky's runway raps would feel more at home these days on Instagram. His verse here, despite being performed from enriched and enviable circumstances ("I wake up, Four Seasons, no Ritz / She wake up and makin' me grits"), is largely forgettable. There is nothing particularly eloquent or vivid about it; it is a tableau of an ideal rap life without any animating power. As a personal achievement, it is worth marveling at, certainly. As an act of artistic expression, it is inert, no more useful than Rihanna's social feed.
Tyler has ventured in many creative directions in the nearly eight years between A$AP Rocky albums. But even his swerve into Rocky's lane, 2021's Call Me if You Get Lost, was couched in the idea that jet-setting was an adventure, its take on affluence and self-indulgence more glamorous than showy — and unmistakably Tyler. There is more character in the album's first few bars than in Don't Be Dumb's entire runtime:
Cookie crumbs in the Rolls, jet-fuel-scented vest
Swim trunks in the trunk, Geneva water the best
The passport lookin' thick, the afro need a pick
My skin soak up the sun, ain't shakin' hands with you bums
At this, Rocky's class reunion with Tyler, one could argue that they are still parallel stars in the same strata. Rocky is likely to return to No. 1 on the charts, where Tyler has resided comfortably across the four albums released in his absence. Both have become actors lately. They move in the same social circles and are recognized as rap power brokers. But you needn't zoom out much to reveal the distance that has opened between them as artists. Both present as auteurs; only one seems to have vision. I'm not sure there's a clearer summation of the gap that now separates them than the couplet that closes Tyler's verse: "Ain't the price of the engine, reason why they can't stand him / 'Cause my self-esteem could make a bucket ride like a Phantom." He used to rap about riding bikes; the car he's driving doesn't really matter. What has always made his music special, and continues to do so, is how much it exudes that singular self-esteem — from the beats he produces himself to the way he utilizes his voice to the ego-probing and status-quo-challenging he's done for much of his career.
Rocky is not at the center of his music in the same way, which is why "they only talkin' 'bout your fit again" feels like a glancing blow opening a much larger gash — that the attention paid isn't to Rocky himself, much less his music; that he is ornamental. His identity is borderless and without root, straddling art and couture, building a nitpicked and wide-ranging yet nebulous design palette that leaves him anonymous, and there's a limit to how far style alone can take you. It follows that Don't Be Dumb takes that eclecticism to its logical conclusion: It is so itemized, so contextless as to lose any narrative thrust or emotional weight. Clothes may make the man, but if the suit is empty, what is it worth?
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