It’s the A$AP Summit!
[Video][Website]
[5.62]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Over Snugsworth’s Looney-Tunes-gone-goth beat, A$AP Ferg talks about the length of his dick and compares himself to Liu Kang. A minute later, Rocky, melodically snapping around the track while borrowing his A$AP cohort’s flow, slurs the following line as if drunk: “all my Dominican girls demmmm / all my Carribean girls demmmm / all my West Indian girls demmmm“. The hook — “SHA… SHABBA RANKS! / SHA… SHABBA RANKS!” — could be considered to be Lil B plagiarism. My notes for this song have “gotta get drunk to this” scribbled underneath. To directly quote the wrestler Big E Langston — a song this ridiculous demands a ridiculous source — this is “the best nonsense rap in all the land”.
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: It’s kind of like a Lil B song, except I don’t want to hang out with either of these guys after listening to it.
[4]
Anthony Easton: There are things I like about this — how information dense it is, how little it pays attention to legibility, the shaded out, rough production, and the tension between a skilled flow and an aesthetic refusal. Not my favorite thing to listen to, but it’s artful.
[7]
Mallory O’Donnell: Dull minimal effort with light Caribbean touches and lyrics straight from the tuff guy dumpster. Offensive, but forgettable.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: More should probably be made of the influence, whether acknowledged or not, of dancehall on Internet-era hip-hop. I’m not the guy to write that essay, from either vantage point; but it feels like namechecking Shabba and getting him to appear in your video is hardly tribute enough, even as the ignoramuses on blogs lol at how “random” the shout-out is.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Shabba Ranks! As antecedent! This echo-laden production, punctuated by hi-hat and unexpected vocal interjections (including what to these ears sounds like M.I.A. on the m’s), tries to amplify — metaphorically at any rate — the length of the ASAP saps’ dicks yet they still sound like dumb asses whose contempt for bitches, themselves, and the enterprise stinks like day-old eggs on their faces.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Just because Ferg reduces Pitchfork’s demo to hippies in vans, I’m good. You got the cartoon-chase xylophone toiling away, Ferg drops into a decent blank badman dialect, and he even shows up Rocky to boot. The self-awareness here is kinda staggering. It’s like kids impersonating adults impersonating kids. An attractive dead end; I get the festival connection now.
[7]
Andy Hutchins: When will the A$AP Mob just open a Kinko’s? It is their destiny. (The “PAUSE” after “Skinny nigga, but my dick long” is either a half-assed joke or the sort of thing that makes Rocky once being positioned as the thinking man’s street rapper a sad one.)
[4]