Darold Ferguson Jr.-- best known as A$AP Ferg, a member of A$AP Rocky’s A$AP Mob-- brings a tantalizing skillset to the table, a startling versatility and an electricity that not even his more famous friend can touch. He sings (see his star-making debut on Rocky’s “Kissin’ Pink”), he can write (take his bendy, gleeful “Shabba”), and he’s weird-- when he’s feeling purple, he channels his inner Fergenstein, a lewder, more hedonistic persona. He also talks big: “I wanna be as known as Jesus,” he told me earlier this year, later mentioning his affinity for artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Warhol. (Sounds like he’d enjoy Jay-Z’s bathroom). He’s funny, he’s got a peculiar style, and he’s got, for a lack of a better word, a sizeable amount of swag. Like Rocky, he's a uniter of rap audiences and regional sounds, the only other performer in the A$AP crew who’s exhibited that star-like sheen so far. If he were to deliver on that promise with a debut that properly channeled all the potential... next stop, stratosphere.
Trap Lord, Ferg’s debut mixtape turned debut album, probably isn’t that record, though it has quite a few bright spots. While it begins with a fierce, feverish bundle of tracks-- the hulking, patois-smeared “Let It Go”, the infectious knocker “Shabba”, the emotional, mythologizing “Hood Pope”-- it’s also listless in spots, too reliant on underdeveloped ideas. Some of that can be chalked up to the nature of the record's existence-- like Flockaveli, it was originally conceptualized as a mixtape and only later was transformed into a major label debut. But a fair chunk of Trap Lord finds Ferg trying to figure himself out in real-time-- a natural shape shifter, he never stays in the same form for long, switching personalities and flows at the drop of a hat. Where it’s effective on songs like “Hood Pope” and the thundering opener “Let It Go”, it’s less so on scatterbrained songs like “Fergivicous” and “Make a Scene”. For an artist drawing effortlessly from what seems to be a wellspring of creativity and thoughtful tribute, Trap Lord can, at times, feel underdeveloped and skeletal.
But, that’s not to suggest that Trap Lord doesn’t sound great-- A$AP Mob still has the best ears in town. The production is leering and paranoid but rippled with muscle. It’s a dark-tinted record, to be sure, sonically and lyrically. The VERYRVRE-produced “Hood Pope” chronicles the loss of a young child; “Murder Something” uses a Kirk Franklin analogy to underscore a particular, graphic ass-kicking; the closing, experimental “Cocaine Castle” uses a crack house as the setting, a location where the protagonist sees “doctors in their suits”, babies, his mom. It’s heavy shit, reinforced by thick, tense production from under-the radar producers like Frankie P, P on the Boards, Snugsworth and HighDefRazjah. The stormy sonic texture is the backbone that the album aligns itself along, a logical combination of Cleveland smoke (Bone Thugs-N-Harmony incidentally show up on "Lord"), Death Row menace, and classic New York rap radio that's perfectly tailored to A$AP Ferg's reverential package.
When Trap Lord flashes-- Ferg’s speed-it-up-slow-it-down verse on “Work” is pure thrill-- it’s brilliant. But despite its status as his commercial debut, it's easiest to approach it as a low-stakes introduction to Ferg, an artist who, like Rocky and other newcomers like Travi$ Scott, has the ability to push the boundaries of the genre toward more experimental sounds and ideas. Though Trap Lord's vision is refracted through split personalities-- for better or for worse-- A$AP Ferg still sounds like a star in the making.
