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“I be that pretty motherfucker. Harlem’s what I’m reppin’.”And with those words, A$AP Rocky pretty much lays it all out on the line. Now, I’m sure he didn’t actually mean to define his entire being in the span of eight words, but goddamn it if he didn’t do a more admirable job of it than any of the countless music writers scratching their heads and wondering why the fuck RCA just handed the 24 year-old Harlem rapper a three million dollar check along with Clams Casino’s email address and Drake’s BBM code. But it’s all there, in that one line: he’s that pretty motherfucker, and Harlem’s what he’s repping.Allow me to explain. A$AP Rocky is significant because he represents the absolute apothesis of Tumblr culture. He himself is an empty vessel. His genius is combining the obsession with male beauty and general weirdness of Lil B, the faux-cultishness of Odd Future, production styles endemic of towns like Houston, TX and Huntsville, AL, with the hip-hop world’s obsession with having some sort of ascendant New York rapper on top of the hip-hop world. That, and he’s good-looking as shit. He’s that pretty motherfucker. Harlem’s what he’s repping.But what does this mean in a wider cultural context? Well, if you sat down a room full of aspiring rappers and gave them a seminar on what they needed to do in order to become popular, they would all probably end up shooting for something akin to what A$AP Rocky’s got going on. Which, of course, leads to accusations that the kid is an industry construct, but those accusations distract from the fact that on some level, every artist’s success—except in freak cases like Lil B’s, where an artist more or less makes himself—is at some point along the line bolstered by some dude in a suit sitting in some tall tower that belongs to one of the four major record labels operating in this country, and that type of shit ultimately doesn’t really matter, because at the end of the day people are going to dig your music or they’re not, and it’s really a matter of making people pay attention to you, regardless of who may or may not be in your corner.Oh yeah, back to Rocky. As a rapper, he’s sort of this human manifestation of our generation’s finely honed curatorial instincts. He’s not a good rapper per se. He flows well, but more often than not he has nothing to actually say. If you read his lyrics, they tend to be little more than overly aggressive puffs of air. As a human Tumblr, though, he’s impeccable. He swims through the flotsam and jetsam that is hip-hop’s ephemera so you don’t have to, coming up for air bearing a Spaceghosttpurp here, a Big Moe tribute there. But here’s the thing. With A$AP Rocky, everything he does seems like empty posturing, curation simply for the virtue of aesthetics. In all likelihood, A$AP Rocky does not understand why he and all of his friends tend to take the letters “V” and “X” and throw them in place of vowels, and to be honest with you, I’m not sure I do either, but I’m fairly certain that it has to do with Satan and maybe the V’s have something to do with the points of the pentagram? Whatever. It doesn’t matter. A$AP Rocky effectively reblogged this concept, presenting it to the public with minimal commentary. But since it fits in with the vague template that A$AP Rocky has established for his career, it becomes something that is quintessentially him, even though he has no idea where it comes from, or what its significance might be. This is what he does with everything, always. One last time. He’s that pretty motherfucker, and Harlem’s what he’s repping. Understand now?Contrast this with Lana Del Rey, who in her own way exhibits her own Human Tumblr-ness. Free of context, Lana Del Rey is about as interesting as the Starbucks where her CD’s will eventually get sold. She makes kinda boring, Cat Power-y singer-songwriter songs, with a playing-up of the whole Gender Roles Thing, with some vague hip-hop signifiers tacked on as pieces of flair. Also, she may or may not have had some work done. And that’s it. That’s her thing. However, her public image is inexorably tied to the notion that her identity is completely fabricated, and that nearly everyone in the music press hates her for no discernable reason.Think about this for a second. How can someone’s public image be that their public image is fake? Such an idea is so postmodern, so a product of Internet Culture, that it needs severe unpacking. See, while A$AP Rocky might be a one-man reblog machine, Lana Del Rey is a blank canvas onto which people project themselves—or better yet, a human being who keeps getting reblogged again and again, repurposed and reinterpreted, recontextualized each time.The media’s treatment of Del Rey has been particularly revealing. Pitchfork, the ever-faithful indie watchdogs, damn near interrogated her. GQ, the mens magazine to end them all, sat her down in a restaurant booth and proceeded to hit on her. Hipster Runoff, gleefully called everyone (including Lana herself) out on their bullshit, in ‘only the way they know how 2,’ aka by using ‘quote humor and superfluous #’s.’ Only L.A. Weekly seemed interested in investigating Lana Del Rey the performer and human being, beginning their article with a quote from someone saying that they hoped Del Rey would succeed. But its inclusion in the article served a greater truth: lots of people want Lana Del Rey to fail, and at this point, nobody has any idea why, and enough people want Lana Del Rey to fail to the degree that you have to remind people that someone out there wants her to succeed. We’ve reblogged her so much we’ve forgotten why we started paying attention to her in the first place. No wonder she seems in over her head at her shows. She’s lost control of her own sense of self, given it away to our curatorial culture.At the end of the day, it’s always been like this. People filter content so others don’t have to, and there will always be people who serve as springboards for other people’s ideas. In 2011, A$AP Rocky and Lana Del Rey are the type of entertainers we need—maybe even deserve. A$AP Rocky is the Tumblr constantly repackaging hip-hop’s ephemera, and Lana Del Rey is that post with 50,000 notes, represented and represented ad infinitum, to the point where her original context is moot. Let’s just hope they don’t do a song together. It might just make the universe explode. By Drew Millard

“I be that pretty motherfucker. Harlem’s what I’m reppin’.”
And with those words, A$AP Rocky pretty much lays it all out on the line. Now, I’m sure he didn’t actually mean to define his entire being in the span of eight words, but goddamn it if he didn’t do a more admirable job of it than any of the countless music writers scratching their heads and wondering why the fuck RCA just handed the 24 year-old Harlem rapper a three million dollar check along with Clams Casino’s email address and Drake’s BBM code. But it’s all there, in that one line: he’s that pretty motherfucker, and Harlem’s what he’s repping.
Allow me to explain. A$AP Rocky is significant because he represents the absolute apothesis of Tumblr culture. He himself is an empty vessel. His genius is combining the obsession with male beauty and general weirdness of Lil B, the faux-cultishness of Odd Future, production styles endemic of towns like Houston, TX and Huntsville, AL, with the hip-hop world’s obsession with having some sort of ascendant New York rapper on top of the hip-hop world. That, and he’s good-looking as shit.

He’s that pretty motherfucker. Harlem’s what he’s repping.
But what does this mean in a wider cultural context? Well, if you sat down a room full of aspiring rappers and gave them a seminar on what they needed to do in order to become popular, they would all probably end up shooting for something akin to what A$AP Rocky’s got going on. Which, of course, leads to accusations that the kid is an industry construct, but those accusations distract from the fact that on some level, every artist’s success—except in freak cases like Lil B’s, where an artist more or less makes himself—is at some point along the line bolstered by some dude in a suit sitting in some tall tower that belongs to one of the four major record labels operating in this country, and that type of shit ultimately doesn’t really matter, because at the end of the day people are going to dig your music or they’re not, and it’s really a matter of making people pay attention to you, regardless of who may or may not be in your corner.
Oh yeah, back to Rocky. As a rapper, he’s sort of this human manifestation of our generation’s finely honed curatorial instincts. He’s not a good rapper per se. He flows well, but more often than not he has nothing to actually say. If you read his lyrics, they tend to be little more than overly aggressive puffs of air. As a human Tumblr, though, he’s impeccable. He swims through the flotsam and jetsam that is hip-hop’s ephemera so you don’t have to, coming up for air bearing a Spaceghosttpurp here, a Big Moe tribute there. But here’s the thing. With A$AP Rocky, everything he does seems like empty posturing, curation simply for the virtue of aesthetics. In all likelihood, A$AP Rocky does not understand why he and all of his friends tend to take the letters “V” and “X” and throw them in place of vowels, and to be honest with you, I’m not sure I do either, but I’m fairly certain that it has to do with Satan and maybe the V’s have something to do with the points of the pentagram? Whatever. It doesn’t matter. A$AP Rocky effectively reblogged this concept, presenting it to the public with minimal commentary. But since it fits in with the vague template that A$AP Rocky has established for his career, it becomes something that is quintessentially him, even though he has no idea where it comes from, or what its significance might be. This is what he does with everything, always.

One last time. He’s that pretty motherfucker, and Harlem’s what he’s repping. Understand now?
Contrast this with Lana Del Rey, who in her own way exhibits her own Human Tumblr-ness. Free of context, Lana Del Rey is about as interesting as the Starbucks where her CD’s will eventually get sold. She makes kinda boring, Cat Power-y singer-songwriter songs, with a playing-up of the whole Gender Roles Thing, with some vague hip-hop signifiers tacked on as pieces of flair. Also, she may or may not have had some work done. And that’s it. That’s her thing. However, her public image is inexorably tied to the notion that her identity is completely fabricated, and that nearly everyone in the music press hates her for no discernable reason.
Think about this for a second. How can someone’s public image be that their public image is fake? Such an idea is so postmodern, so a product of Internet Culture, that it needs severe unpacking. See, while A$AP Rocky might be a one-man reblog machine, Lana Del Rey is a blank canvas onto which people project themselves—or better yet, a human being who keeps getting reblogged again and again, repurposed and reinterpreted, recontextualized each time.
The media’s treatment of Del Rey has been particularly revealing. Pitchfork, the ever-faithful indie watchdogs, damn near interrogated her. GQ, the mens magazine to end them all, sat her down in a restaurant booth and proceeded to hit on her. Hipster Runoff, gleefully called everyone (including Lana herself) out on their bullshit, in ‘only the way they know how 2,’ aka by using ‘quote humor and superfluous #’s.’ Only L.A. Weekly seemed interested in investigating Lana Del Rey the performer and human being, beginning their article with a quote from someone saying that they hoped Del Rey would succeed. But its inclusion in the article served a greater truth: lots of people want Lana Del Rey to fail, and at this point, nobody has any idea why, and enough people want Lana Del Rey to fail to the degree that you have to remind people that someone out there wants her to succeed. We’ve reblogged her so much we’ve forgotten why we started paying attention to her in the first place. No wonder she seems in over her head at her shows. She’s lost control of her own sense of self, given it away to our curatorial culture.
At the end of the day, it’s always been like this. People filter content so others don’t have to, and there will always be people who serve as springboards for other people’s ideas. In 2011, A$AP Rocky and Lana Del Rey are the type of entertainers we need—maybe even deserve. A$AP Rocky is the Tumblr constantly repackaging hip-hop’s ephemera, and Lana Del Rey is that post with 50,000 notes, represented and represented ad infinitum, to the point where her original context is moot. Let’s just hope they don’t do a song together. It might just make the universe explode.

By Drew Millard

1.1.2012 73 notes.

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