In 2011, Fat Tony had just put out his first album. With the success of Texas artists like Beyoncé, Travis Scott, and Megan Thee Stallion, chopped and screwed as a genre and production technique is now everywhere and respected in the broader pop landscape. The most iconic example of this technique comes from the song “June 27th,” which takes the 1996 Kris Kross song “Da Streets Ain’t Right” and turns it into this. In the early ’90s, the Houston DJ popularized a production technique called “chopped and screwed,” in which you’d slow down the tempo of a record until everything from the vocals to the production sounded like it was being hauled through molasses. The pitched-down vocals that became Rocky’s early calling card were directly influenced by Robert Earl Davis Jr., better known as DJ Screw. That second era, the Screw era, informs the spiritual core of $AP. According to Tony, Houston rap can be divided into three distinct waves: the first with ’80s and ’90s Rap-A-Lot and other artists like Devin the Dude and the Convicts, the second with DJ Screw and his stylistic innovations, and the third with Swishahouse, Mike Jones, Paul Wall, and others. As an up-and-coming rapper, he’s acutely aware of the ways his hometown was perceived by the rest of the country at the beginning of the 2010s. Fat Tony hails from Houston’s Third Ward.
Like Rocky, Fat Tony was among a new generation of rappers experiencing how much the internet was changing everything through social media and a seemingly infinite number of blogs. To understand $AP, you have to understand Houston, and to understand the allure of Houston on the East Coast in the early 2010s, there’s no one better to talk to than Fat Tony. And A$AP Rocky, like a sentient blog, took French braids, grills, Houston slang, high fashion, and a variety of microgenres and smashed them together with enough force to have hipsters across America lose their minds. In many ways, $AP was a right-place, right-time project that distilled an era when the internet and the music that came out of tinny laptop speakers were unrefined, unregulated, and unrelenting. And this tape played no small role in that. But in the past 10 years, that’s changed. A decade ago, New York was still seen as hip-hop’s mecca, and Nas’s dense storytelling and Jay-Z’s cold and precise flow were still seen as creative heights to aspire to. Never mind that Ja Rule and 50 Cent realized that melody, even if it was coming from two imperfect voices, was the quickest way to chart dominance. Even in 2011, the concept of the New York rapper was a misguided ideal that bordered on a cliché. For example, Drake, a former teen soap-opera star from Toronto, was making odes to Houston like “November 18th.” Tyler, the Creator, a kid from Ladera Heights, California, had his biggest moment thus far lampooning New York rap on his hit single “Yonkers.”Īnd then there was A$AP Rocky, who would become a lightning rod for all of this and more. The idea that coming from a certain locale meant you were beholden to the aesthetics of that region meant less in this new landscape. But most importantly, rap regionalism was becoming less dogmatic. Subgenres like “cloud rap” were popping up. Rigid ideas of authenticity had been collapsing. But upon its release on October 31, 2011, Rocky’s 16-song mixtape felt like a culmination of a certain era of hip-hop.
It’s a low-budget love letter to Tumblr culture that went viral at a time when internet virality in the music industry was still novel. Today, “Purple Swag” and the video that launched it into the stratosphere seem quaint.
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