I would rather it not be that way, but it just turned out that way.”ĭuring our conversation, I mention how features can rob artists of their individuality. They don’t want to hear the Migos or anybody. People want to hear a Ferg album because they want to hear me. “I would rather not put anybody on my albums,” he says. For a guy who sure attracts a lot of features, though, Ferg insists he’s not a huge fan of them. The tape is also absolutely flooded with guest features, a product, Ferg says, of his open-door policy in the studio. 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. But, aside from its sobering closer, “Tango,” about the aftermath of his father’s death, the tape is considerably less sentimental than its predecessor. But before I knew that, I just wanted to make a song for my grandmother, because she meant so much to me.”įerg 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. “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. “It was actually the first song I recorded on the album,” Ferg says. 22 caliber in his boot, sometimes fighting in the park for money.įerg 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. 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. But Ferg’s telling of his success tale is distinguished by his novelistic attention to family. 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.
I had to give them all dimensions of me.” But with Trap Lord, that persona is so one-dimensional. 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. “I felt like it was something I had to do in order to move forward,” he explains. “In order to get into A$AP Ferg or Trap Lord, you have to know who I am, so I had to walk you through my life before the fame. “I wanted to make it the documentary of my life,” Ferg says of the record. This time, the only role Ferg played was himself, the real Darold Ferguson, a driftless teen who worked his way out of a job at Ben & Jerry’s and into rap’s top tier. The old adage about never judging a book by its cover should also apply to rap album tracklists because, despite its generic packaging, Always Strive was one of the most revealing, vividly written rap records in recent memory. We’ll never know how many listeners never even made it through the Skrillex cameo on the second track. On the surface, that sophomore outing looked like the last thing anybody wanted from an A$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. 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. 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. 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. 12, with openers Playboi Carti, Key! and Cozy Boys. A$AP Mob headline The Rave on Thursday, Oct.
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