When his first songs hit the Internet 12 summers ago, they ushered in a paradigm shift. New York, hip hop’s ancestral home, was experiencing a period of dormancy. It had been nearly a decade since 50 Cent’s meteoric rise. And while Nicki Minaj’s Barbie-sized shoulders were doing more than their fair share to carry the city through this drought, things still lacked a little juice. New York was in need of something different, a new flavor to drag the city out of the shadow of its gilded past and into the future. Rocky and his mob of Black Scale and Rick Owens–clad co-conspirators were just that.
He certainly sounded new. Released in the fall of 2011, his first mixtape LIVE.LOVE.A$AP’s fusion of Memphis and Houston-indebted flows, spaced-out cloud rap production, and distinctly uptown swag was like a shot of adrenaline into the New York rap world’s heart. “Peso,” the single that would land Rocky on Hot 97’s hallowed airwaves for the first time, played like a compilation of all of regional rap’s best impulses: There were syncopated sprinkles of Bone Thugs, syrupy splashes of Pimp C, and the slick bravado of JAY-Z’s ’90s New York. At times a woozy, smoke-filled kickback and at others a raucous warehouse party, it was, as Jon Caramanica wrote in The New York Times, “deeply assured and heavily narcotic,” the rare instance where an artist emerged fully formed with their own unique look and sound.
