But after a decade in which Atlanta cemented itself as the hip-hop capital, a new generation of rappers revitalized the sound of LA rap, and ascendant Detroit and Flint artists made Michigan a teeming hotbed of talent, LLA‘s cherry-picking of sounds and slang feels less like a harbinger of doom for regional scenes in hip hop and more like the first glimpse of Rocky’s enduring desire to be an opaque, spongelike artiste - which, to be fair, probably emboldened Travis Scott, Drake and other opportunists of the past decade. Clearly, Rocky and Yams had a deep knowledge of rap history and knew what they did and didn’t want to associate with. “I don’t even like New York rappers,” he told the Times prior to the tape’s release.
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“Don’t remember me as a wannabe New Orleans n**** / Slash lean sipping, Tennessee n****, nah / Influenced by Houston, hear it in my music / A trill n**** to the truest, show you how to do this,” Rocky raps on LLA opener “Palace,” getting out ahead of critics in an effort to contextualize his music, but muddying the waters even further. The regionless nature of Rocky’s music, which Yams alluded to in his facetious Tumblr posts, was flaunted more obviously than it ever had been in hip-hop.
Hell, a McGill University student even wrote a thesis on “post-regionalism” in hip hop last year.
Longtime hip-hop journalist Shawn Setaro penned an essay for Observer suggesting that “The rapidity of global communication has turned the idea of regional styles on its head.” “What all of this mixture shows is that mainstream rap is now, rather than a collection of folk musics,” he wrote, “a big, primarily Southern stew,” citing the influence of Memphis, Houston, and Atlanta on Rocky and others like Drake, Jay Z, and Kanye West. In his review, The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica called LLA “placeless and universal, an album that sounds as if it has ingested the last 20 years of hip-hop’s travels and would be comfortable anywhere.” As the decade progressed, Rocky’s tape became the powderkeg for proclamations about a new, “post-regional” era in hip hop. “It didn’t sound like anything that was coming from New York,” said Polo Grounds president and fellow Harlem native Bryan Leach soon after signing Rocky. Amid pre-Migos triplet flows on $AP, he gloats about being the “only Harlem n**** on his Bone shit,” mentions syrup and the color purple at a Big Moe rate, and name-checks Southern classics like Master P’s “Bout It, Bout It” and Lil Keke’s “Chunk Up The Deuce.” Labels, critics, and listeners alike had no idea how to reckon with a native of the hip-hop mecca - who was literally named after the God MC (Rocky was born Rakim Mayers his sister Erika was named after Eric B.) - seemingly ignoring his surroundings and burrowing into internet-based fandom of smoked-out Southern rap. Now, that’s a pretty arbitrary genre descriptor, but it was blatantly obvious that Rocky’s biggest influences were artists from the South and Midwest. But there was one facet of Rocky’s whole package that people couldn’t wrap their heads around at the time: His music didn’t sound like New York hip-hop. Rocky had a star quality the city hadn’t seen since 50 Cent (just look at that perfectly executed French inhale on the mixtape cover!). French Montana had amassed a mixtape empire but wouldn’t release his first major label single until 2012 Action Bronson was still the former chef who sounded like Ghostface Roc Marciano had only just begun amassing his cult following guys like Fred The Godson and Vado were too orthodox to blow up outside of the Five Boroughs. Everything else around them was too niche. He and the rest of A$AP Mob were tapped as the Next Big Thing that New York had been unsuccessfully searching for since the mid 2000s. By the time $AP was released 10 years ago this Halloween, Rocky had graduated from internet hype. New York institutions like Hot 97 and Dipset, who brought Rocky onstage at a September 2011 show, got on board. “Peso,” teased in chopped-and-screwed form within the “Purple Swag” video, shortly followed, as did news of Rocky inking a lucrative deal with RCA/Polo Grounds.
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