A$AP Rocky - Testing

Pitchfork 67

On his third studio album, Rocky is more experimental and personal but for music that relies on the New York rapper’s artful intuitions, it’s unfortunate his intuitions are often very basic.

The Guardian 60

The rapper’s aversion to the mainstream takes his third album to some glorious heights, with the help of Skepta and Frank Ocean. But is his swaggering decadence wearing thin?

A$AP Rocky’s great gift isn’t that he flies above rap trends ­– it’s that he contorts them at will. Who else could be pitched as the successor to New York’s golden-age legends while leaning on subwoofer-rumbling, screwed-up Southern hip-hop? Rocky is an ostentatious impresario who took hollowed-out cloud rap and Odd Future’s lo-fi aesthetic and made it all sound like high-end fashion. A$AP – real name Rakim Mayers – will flow over the kind the dusty boom-bap associated with the legendary rapper he was named after, but also acidic Skrillex beats.

He raps cleanly but not uniquely and his lyrics show him to be a man of simple tastes: threads, thuggin’ and admiring his own fine looks. Whatever “swag” meant to early-2010s rap kids, Rocky was dripping in it. The cover of his breakout mixtape, Live.Love.A$AP, featuring the star standing in front of an American flag, has become modern rap iconography – one nation under Rocky’s cool. But this is 2018: cloud rap beats are old hat, and the very meaning of that flag is being bitterly fought over. Can Rocky’s decadent vision of the world also evolve?