Everywhere he went, from Sotheby’s on down, it seemed like Rocky belonged.īorn Rakim Mayers in 1988, Rocky fell in with the Harlem-based A$AP Mob in his late teens-a collective that, like Odd Future in Los Angeles, functioned as much like a creative agency as a rap crew, bringing a sense of self-sufficiency and independence to the mainstream machine. He made albums the way interior designers made rooms: unlikely juxtapositions, interesting connections. He was Gucci, he was street, he was New York without the burden of having to carry that New York torch. More than just a rapper, though, Rocky was a representation of a next-gen model of hip-hop, a post-internet artist who synthesized decades of rap history into a sound that was seamless, catchy, mainstream but with a sense of style that felt elevated. Still, the moment felt like a landmark, a measure of cultural influence that few rappers had attained. That Rocky moved in arty, high-society circles wasn’t news: He’d done the fashion thing, gone to the Met Gala, collaborated with Raf Simons when Simons was at Dior. In 2018, A$AP Rocky staged a “performance installation” called Lab Rat on the seventh floor of venerated auction house Sotheby’s.
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