This quality might make Testing the first post–Playboi Carti, A-list major-label rap album. “My biggest distraction is that I get distracted,” he says in “Changes.” Rocky’s raps always attempted a risky balance of style and substance, but these songs dip in and out of profundity like someone testing steaming bathwater for temperature but never taking the plunge. “All my mama want from me was grades.” Instead of resolving the story, he disappears again. “Back in my younger days all I want was braids,” Rocky raps in the third verse, after spending the first two just pinballing cocky insult lines. People on hallucinogens fixate on colors and patterns to a point where they can describe the sights of a trip in lurid detail for days afterward.) The best songs, like the Smooky Margielaa and Playboi Carti tag team “Buck Shots,” warp the sound of the human voice, sometimes at the cost of trailing off in the middle of what sound like good verses. Often, Testing’s vocals feel like enticing fabric swatches rather than centralized narrative lines. Rocky’s been talking about acid since 2015, when he lead his sophomore album At Long Last A$AP with the psych-rap nugget “L$D,” but Testing is the first A$AP record that actually sounds designed by, and for, people who are tripping. LSD is clearly the guiding light, where the inspirations for the great early A$AP records were southern rap, promethazine syrup, and the dearly departed A$AP Yams’s exquisite taste. Testing is a drug album, but to paraphrase Chance the Rapper, they’re not doing the same drugs anymore. It’s playing a different game than your average 2018 hip-hop album most of the time, one you notice 30 seconds into the album opener “Distorted Records,” when a flatulent bass line cleaves the silence, and the rapper picks up rhyming over a beat whose textures and intricacies slowly divide and expand like bacteria. Testing gets off to a rowdy, promising start, but as the album unfolds, Rocky’s interest in the act of rapping dwindles, as he gets to work cultivating an intriguing sensory experience. It’s told in a cadence that resembles a nursery rhyme, but unlike, say, Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” which uses its cautionary kiddie-tale conceit to lay out stakes and consequences for its ill-fated stickup kid protagonist, “Beeper” is relieved to get through the bad parts so it can lounge around in the fact the guy’s rich now. Elsewhere, “OG Beeper,” offers a rags-to-riches story where a young Rocky craves cash and notoriety, then present-day Rocky relishes the fact that he finally found it. “Tony Tone” opens up saluting Rocky’s parents and wondering why other people go to the trouble of siring children they appear to have no intention of raising.
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There are moments when the new A$AP Rocky album, Testing, gestures at this desire to be understood and appreciated, to look back at the young entrepreneur’s road to riches in amused disbelief at how a young man makes it out of homeless shelters and onto magazine covers and movie screens.
If you’re a dreamer, that puts a chip on your shoulder, and you live to show the world what you’re capable of. Everyone means well, but what they’re really doing is socializing us into a sense of creative scope that’s smaller than our actual sphere of possibilities. You can see it in certain folks’ pleasant surprise to see kids grow up with different plans than city work or career college, in their tendency to size up muscular boys and telegraph what kind of sporting career they’re angling at, and in the nagging habit of genteel older white folks to adopt a light, outdated AAVE and say things like “my man” to you because they learned some jive in the ’70s. People don’t expect boys from Harlem to have that range. He raps, produces, models, designs, directs, acts, fronts a rap crew, and steers whatever AWGE is. What does A$AP Rocky really want? Sometimes I think it’s just for everyone to know he’s well-rounded.
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