The wait for “Don't Be Dumb” wasn't just a matter of time, but of pure brand management.
Lord Flacko has spent the last decade transforming his record inaction into a tabloid fetish, trading the microphone for the front rows of fashion weeks, high-class gossip and legal affairs.
After eight years of hiatus, the risk was collapse under the weight of its own mythology; instead, A$AP Rocky returns with a work that is a manifesto of post-modern arrogance.
Structurally, the album must be approached on two layers of reading: on the one hand the sonic hedonism of productive experimentation, on the other a lyrical framework that oscillates between nihilism and darkness.
In STFU, piece that chews up and spits out Prodigy's hardcore aesthetic, Rocky silences speculation about his private life with brutal pragmatism:
No time, look at the Patek (No time)
Keep looking back at it (No time)
Yeah, what's up, sir? I'm really up, up
Tell Gousse, tell these niggas duck-duck
When are you and Rihanna? (Shut the fuck up)
Like when's the new album gonna—? (Shut the fuck up)
Back the fuck up
Watch your mouth or get packed the fuck up
It is his statement: a peremptory invitation to silence addressed to anyone who tries to pigeonhole his trajectory between a designer stroller and a leak on Telegram.
Fatherhood, in “Don't Be Dumb,” is not a moment of pastoral redemption, but the ultimate extension of his vanity fair.
In Stole Ya Flow, the verse
Now I'm a father, my bitch badder than my toddler (Yeah, ready made, ready made)
My baby mama Rihanna, so we unbothered
says it all. It strips parenting of any sacred rhetoric, inserting it into the same scheme of self-celebration reserved for diamonds or weapons. It is an aesthetics of possession applied to affections: Rocky has not become more humble; it simply became more unassailable.
In the end, however, what interests me more is the musical part than the lyrical one, which I honestly struggle to decipher. I'm missing a thousand elements: too many terms and syllogisms that are difficult to understand in a context other than the American one.
Musically, it swallows up trap, psych-soul and fragments of film scores, without ever giving the listener the comfort of genre coherence.
Pieces like ROBBERYthe one with Doechii, are brilliant and incredible digressions.
And then we didn't talk about the feat. There's everything: from Damon Albarn to Jessica Pratt and Will.i.am, from Slay Squad to Tyler, The Creator, just to name a few.
It's a brilliant chaos orchestrated with an almost irritating clarity. Tim Burton's visual incursion for the cover is not a quirk, but the definitive certification of a versatility that seeks legitimation beyond the boundaries of the genre.
“Don't Be Dumb” is the account of a man who lives in his own contradictions with the naturalness of someone who knows he has won the game.
More than a return, it is a reaffirmation of status: rap is only the frame, the painting is Rakim Athelaston Mayers.
SCORE: 7.50
TO LISTEN NOW
Stole Ya Flow – STFU – WHISKEY – Robbery
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
A journey through the evolution of trap and rap to take from start to finish!
