Whereas his predecessors and collaborators built their careers on roughness and volatility, Rocky remains a polished product. $AP, which boasted cameos from Main Attrakionz and production from both Purrrp and a few of Lil B’s core producers, was important mostly for how well it articulated and branded these impulses. DIY in the extreme, they mostly operated without PR or label support, instead sprawling their catalogs across homemade YouTube clips and slapdash free-download collections with sub-MS Paint artwork. Those tracks, and the October 2011 $AP mixtape that followed, came at the crest of a sea change in underground hip-hop, as regional-rap-obsessed online addicts like Lil B, Spaceghostpurrrp, and Main Attrakionz reshaped the genre into a bizarre, lo-fi data dump. None of this happened in a vacuum, of course. Fusing the fashion of ’90s West Coast rap with the sonics of ’00s Southern rap (and the swagger and fog of ’10s Internet rap), the clips slowly racked up millions of views across the cool-kid blog network, earning Rocky a (reportedly) million-dollar deal with RCA/Sony. In 2011, with just a pair of videos - “Purple Swag” and “Peso” - the Harlemite became the instant poster boy for post-regional, post-generational hip-hop. Perhaps no rapper of the social-media era earned a better return on investment than A$AP Rocky.

At long last asap vinyl exclusive