“Gang, Gang, Gang!” the Harlem boy turned stonecold bars-killer A$AP Rocky cries out as Moby‘s orchestral grandiosity begins to fill in. “They talkin’ down on the gang, They wanna rep with the name, but this ain’t no regular name,” he continues as the halcyon antidote swells, meeting copious handclaps along the way.
It would seem that, like Moby, A$AP Rocky hopes to be an object of cultural permanence, making a difference in the lives of adolescence today just as Moby, electronic dance, and hip-hop had in the late ’70s, ’80s, and 90s when the genres and artist flourished in cutting edge capacity.
Perhaps, however, it’s simpler than that. Maybe A$AP Rocky really just wants a kid from the Bronx to listen to Moby.
“I like Moby — Moby’s dope,” he’s simply explained in the past. Regardless of the reasoning or an entire lack of depth entirely, when a new NYC virtuoso turns a classic anthem into a hip-hop hummer it’s ultimately inevitable that he’ll be met with side eyes, smirks, maybe even a little disgust. Though to little surprise, A$AP and his production are in top form on his heavily Moby-sampled “A$AP Forever.”
It’s an intelligible thesis where the rapper belts outs his feelings on his embedded cultural ubiquity, speaking for the entirety of hip-hop despite mentioning just his gang over and over. In doing so, he forces lovers of the classic onwards and upwards. This is for the kids, he tells us. Rap is the future. It’s punk rock and it’s here to stay. Who really knows if anybody will remember either of the two artists in 100 years. But with “A$AP Forever” a new generation of youth today will discover Moby, and that, sometimes that’s all music needs to do. Save from disrespect, Rocky does Moby justice, even fading out entirely, allowing “Porcelain” to play out for more than the last minute. If this is the direction Rocky’s undertaken with his rumored new album still looming he’s surely cementing the likelihood that we’ll all be saying “A$AP Forever.”
Source: dancingastronaut.com
