Album review: ASAP Rocky makes big jump with 'Long Live ASAP'

January 14, 2013|By Mikael Wood, Los Angeles Times

'Long Live ASAP' album review: ASAP Rocky keeps his star rising with his major-label debut.

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ASAP Rocky's latest album is "Long Live ASAP." (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles)

Wealthy, impatient and not without a few rough edges, ASAP Rocky comes by his rap handle honestly. In late 2011 this young Harlem MC (born Rakim Mayers in a nod to the New York hip-hop icon) announced his arrival with an impressive mixtape, "Live Love ASAP," that married a streetwise lyrical sensibility to plush, pop-savvy beats. Now, less than 18 months later, he's releasing his feverishly anticipated major-label debut, "Long Live ASAP."

Drake
Take Care
Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Republic

Rolling Stone: star rating Community: star rating Comment 64 By Jon Dolan November 11, 2011 Hip-hop has never produced anything quite like Drake a guy with a Jay-Z ego and a Charlie Brown soul. The Canadian singer-rapper introduced his melancholy-player persona on 2010's platinum Thank Me Later, spooling out alarmingly mellow confessional brags over synthstreaked tracks that suggested someone had spiked his Cristal with NyQuil and truth serum. "Famous like a drug that I've taken too much of," he rapped, and somehow made you sympathetic to all his stardom-is-hard meditations. So, how's he feeling these days? The cover of Take Care says it all: Drake sits forlornly in the depths of a mansion he could've bought from 1970s Jimmy Page, slung over a golden goblet of $50-a-glass painkiller. Dude probably had sex two minutes ago, but he looks like his dog just got run over by a garbage truck. The music is grandiose, full of big names and weighty references from the drunk-dial epic "Marvins Room" to the N'awlins hip-hop tribute "Practice" to cameos from Andr 3000, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne and Stevie Wonder. Where Thank Me Later was airy and spare, Take Care truly goes for it with luxe, expansive production: On "Cameras," beatmaking prodigy Lex Luger provides diamond-bright high-hat clicks, low-end vroom and soulful background vocals as Drake struggles to convince his girl he's not cheating on her after she sees him in a magazine with another woman; on "Lord Knows," Just Blaze laces a shake-the-sky mix of gospel choir, gauzy R&B sample and stomping beat, and Rick Ross swoops in for a hilarious freestyle: "Villa on the water with the wonderful views/Only fat nigga in the sauna with Jews." There's even a funky thank-you letter to Drake's mom.

Mostly, Drake stretches out over languid, austerely plush tracks that blur hip-hop, R&B and downtempo dance music. "Over My Dead Body" opens the album with a dreamweave of cascading pianos and plaintive backing vocals from Canadian singer Chantal Kreviazuk: "I was drinking at the Palms last night/And ended up losing everything that I came with," he raps in his finest just-woke-up voice. It's what Drake does best, collapsing many moods arrogance, sadness, tenderness and self-pity into one vast, squish-souled emotion. On the elegant title track, Jamie Smith of U.K. band the xx lays down house-music pianos, ice sheets of guitar and a sample from recently deceased R&B radical Gil Scott-Heron as Drake and Rihanna do their laid-back, realist appraisal of the love game: "When you're ready, just say you're ready," he reassures. Is it going to work out? Maybe. But like most hopeless romantics, Drake favors the illusion of infinite promise over the reality anyway. "We live in a generation of not being in love," he says over Stevie Wonders harmonica on "Doing It Wrong." It's as close as Take Care gets to a message for our times. But deep down you wonder if he'd have it any other way. After all, in a fully requited world, who'd need Drake?

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Justin Timberlake
FutureSex/LoveSounds
Jive Records

Rolling Stone: star rating Community: star rating Comment 0 By Robert Christgau September 21, 2006

On his 2002 solo debut, Justin Timberlake was so delighted with his own audacity he could make jaws drop just by saying "good morning" to the ladies. On his skilled but sometimes labored follow-up, however, the liberated 'NSync frontman bears the weight of experience that drags down so many maturing lovermen. No longer an innocent on the cusp, he knows more about sex than you do, and when he talks about whips he doesn't mean cars. Why this or anything else qualifies Justin in particular rather than Usher, say, or new confederate Will.i.am to "bring sexy back," as the follow-up's Timbaland-produced lead single boasts, isn't altogether clear. Although his best new tracks are thrilling even the smashing "SexyBack" is trumped by the classic-Timbaland "My Love," where bells introduce what will become an abstractly twisty beat and a T.I. cameo is only a fillip some of the up-tempo stuff flirts with mechanical muscle-flexing. Except for the Rick Rubin-produced finale, "(Another Song) All Over Again," the ballads could make you wish the "love sounds" of the title were gasps and squeals. And the well-meaning anti-crack song is a clueless embarrassment.

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