Via Interview:

A$AP Rocky’s ferociously energetic mix tape Live.Love.A$AP quickly caught fire with hip-hop heads, music bloggers, and nominal tastemakers when he unleashed it on the world via the Internet last fall. In fact, the furor was so great that large numbers of those most standoffish of record-industry gatekeepers—A&R people—soon found themselves frothed up and in a tizzy over the 23-year-old Harlem-bred rapper’s peculiar blend of influences, which include Southern regional hip-hop styles (like the slowed-down, doped-out beats of the Houston subgenre of screw music) and the world of high fashion (who was the last rapper to name-check Rick Owens?).

Born Rakim Mayers, Rocky endured the kind of troubled childhood that most kids don’t escape: his father went to jail in connection with selling drugs, his older brother was killed, and Rocky wound up shuffling through shelters with his mother and sister for a time. But Rocky’s single-minded confidence enabled him to not only survive, but thrive with good-humored ease and few hints of bitterness about his past. He is part of a large uptown crew, all of whom use the first name of A$AP, which stands for Always Strive and Prosper. Until recently, he himself was dealing drugs in order to pay his bills, but he just signed a record deal with Polo Grounds Music, a label under the Sony-RCA banner, for a reported $3 million—which, for an artist whose music is rife with the steadfast ambition to uplift and transform reality, should allow him, on some level, to do just that.

Despite the grimy, smoky braggadocio of songs like “Purple Swag” and “Peso,” Rocky exudes an infectious positivity. When we sat down to do this interview at a photo studio in a cavernous industrial building in the South Bronx, he was wearing a more traditional hip-hop uniform: black shirt, black jeans, black boots, and a black wool hat accented by gold fronts on his lower teeth. The only hint that he knows his Rei Kawakubo from his Yohji Yamamoto was the logo stitched on the front of his cap: COMMES des FUCKDOWN.