A$AP Mob headline The Rave on Thursday, Oct. 12, with openers Playboi Carti, Key! and Cozy Boys.
Like the best releases from New York’s fashion-minded A$AP Mob collective, A$AP Ferg’s 2013 debut, Trap Lord, was a striking aesthetic statement—dank yet immersive and peppered with strange, celestial production flourishes. Even more fascinating than that sonic backdrop, though, was the larger-than-life character the Harlem rapper created for himself, the Trap Lord, a wrathful, all-powerful deity, equally weird and menacing.
That fantastical persona was such a perfect platform for Ferg’s wild imagination and oddball charisma that it came as a shock when he abandoned it completely for his second album, 2016’s Always Strive and Prosper. On the surface, that sophomore outing looked like the last thing anybody wanted from an A$AP Ferg album, a commercial compromise that swapped out his debut’s rag-tag assortment of collaborators for a roster of A&R-approved sure things like Chris Brown, Big Sean and Rick Ross. We’ll never know how many listeners never even made it through the Skrillex cameo on the second track.
The old adage about never judging a book by its cover should also apply to rap album tracklists because, despite its generic packaging, Always Strive was one of the most revealing, vividly written rap records in recent memory. This time, the only role Ferg played was himself, the real Darold Ferguson, a driftless teen who worked his way out of a job at Ben & Jerry’s and into rap’s top tier.
“I wanted to make it the documentary of my life,” Ferg says of the record. “In order to get into A$AP Ferg or Trap Lord, you have to know who I am, so I had to walk you through my life before the fame.
“I felt like it was something I had to do in order to move forward,” he explains. “I gave them the character of Trap Lord. I gave them the persona, the shell. It was my ego, Trap Lord. But I wanted to give them the human being, somebody who was bearing themselves to the public and who was vulnerable, so people could relate to me—then I can be the Trap Lord and this aggressive guy. But with Trap Lord, that persona is so one-dimensional. I had to give them all dimensions of me.”
There’s nothing remotely novel about a rapper charting his rise from humble beginnings; it’s some of the most well-trodden territory in hip-hop. But Ferg’s telling of his success tale is distinguished by his novelistic attention to family. He populates the album with relatives: his mother; his grandmothers; his uncle Psycho—a wild card who roamed the neighborhood in an army coat with a .22 caliber in his boot, sometimes fighting in the park for money.
Ferg dedicated the album’s most moving song, “Grandma,” to his late grandmother, remembering her not just as the loving maternal figure that less detail-oriented rappers tend to commemorate their grandmothers as, but as a complicated human with concerns beyond her family, from ailments to relationship woes.
“It was actually the first song I recorded on the album,” Ferg says. “It was just me thinking of my grandmother and knowing that everybody is going to lose their grandmother, or most likely have lost their grandmother, so I knew they would relate to that song. But before I knew that, I just wanted to make a song for my grandmother, because she meant so much to me.”
Ferg still raps a fair amount about his family on his new mixtape, Still Striving, and he’s never more compelling than when he does so. But, aside from its sobering closer, “Tango,” about the aftermath of his father’s death, the tape is considerably less sentimental than its predecessor. It sounds a lot closer to the Trap Lord sequel some fans probably wanted the last record to be: 49 minutes of hard beats and cold raps.
The tape is also absolutely flooded with guest features, a product, Ferg says, of his open-door policy in the studio. For a guy who sure attracts a lot of features, though, Ferg insists he’s not a huge fan of them.
“I would rather not put anybody on my albums,” he says. “Because less people means more me. People want to hear a Ferg album because they want to hear me. They don’t want to hear the Migos or anybody. I would rather it not be that way, but it just turned out that way.”
During our conversation, I mention how features can rob artists of their individuality. When rappers pull from the same pool of producers and guest spots, their music can start to bleed together. He agrees.
“That’s why I’m just interested in working with the A$AP Mob and the people that we associate with nowadays, because we have done a lot of features,” Ferg says. “And you’re right, people do lose their identity, and I feel that kind of happened with us a little bit.”
I ask if that’s why, after a few years where members mostly dedicated themselves to solo endeavors, A$AP Mob has been making more of a concerted group push right now with their new album, Cozy Tapes Vol. 2: Too Cozy, and their current group tour.
“Exactly,” he says. ‘We back on our old A$AP shit.”
A$AP Mob headline The Rave on Thursday, Oct. 12, with openers Playboi Carti, Key! and Cozy Boys.
