On a Thursday night in November thirteen years ago, I met a guy who insisted I download a mixtape called LIVE LOVE A$AP. I had gone as my sister's plus one to a pre-Thanksgiving gathering at a loft in Soho. The two of us ended up in a lively and winding conversation, mostly about rap music, with a guy who, I think, had some business in the music industry. I couldn't really tell.
"Is it actually called Live… Love… ASAP?" I remember asking.
Because almost everyone in this loft seemed like they received special dispatches about the next cool thing in culture, I took the guy's advice. When I got home that night, I found the tape on DatPiff and added it to my iTunes library. (What a time!) A few days later, I started telling my friends who might care about this rapper ASAP Rocky and the mixtape he made that they needed to hear.
Released in 2011, LIVE LOVE A$AP played at that time like the culmination of one thing and the start of something new. In about an hour of music, Rocky helped end rap's increasingly obsolete commitment to regionalism. In the years following hip hop's east coast/west coast rivalry, southern rap, owing to its versatility and innovation, emerged as the genre's artistic center. The region so successfully dominated culture that when ASAP Rocky, a Harlem native, set out to make music, he treated southern rap as part of his rightful cultural inheritance.
He rapped over chopped and screwed beats like a Houstonian, quoted New Orleans's rapping CEO Master P in lyrics, and infused some songs with a dark, gothic sound courtesy of Memphis.
I didn't and still don't think of these songs as appropriative, as some critics suggested. They strike me instead as a millennial with access to more culture than the generations that came before, simultaneously broadening and narrowing their references to present an accurate and nuanced picture of who they are.
LIVE LOVE A$AP also helped usher in a new phase of hip-hop's relationship with fashion. Rocky, who repeatedly referred to himself as pretty on the mixtape, talked about clothes a lot. But he didn't think of designer fashion as something to aspire to or rap towards. He arrived in the game, already outfitted in high fashion. The designers he wore weren't the usual suspects, making readily identifiable looks. Rocky preferred more sophisticated, conceptual couturiers like Raf Simons, Rick Owens, Isabel Marant, and whoever happened to be leading Maison Martin Margiela at any given point in the late Aughts/early 2010s.
On Father's Day this year, my friend Christina texted me pictures of ASAP Rocky's campaign for the luxury Italian brand Bottega Veneta. The campaign, shot by the artist Carrie Mae Weems, features Rocky and his two young sons, RZA and Riot Rose. In several images, Weems captures the trio at rest and at play in a domestic interior. To this commercial endeavor, Weems brings her uncanny ability to use the camera lens to detect and draw forth the aspect of a person most likely to endear them to viewers. In fact, Weems is so effective in using the camera as a humanizing tool that these pictures made me question if I had judged Rocky too harshly when I decided some years ago to stop seeking out his music.
Called Portraits of Fatherhood, the images show Rocky in a different phase of life from the one where I first encountered him, but his approach to fashion as a way of life rather than a reward has remained intact. In the black-and-white photographs, his Bottega Veneta outfits are muted and obscured by his children, a newspaper, a mirror, a particular pose. He's shown living in the clothes, not modeling them because this isn't an advertisement; it's a statement.
Portraits of Fatherhood counts on viewers of the campaign already knowing three things:
1) what ASAP Rocky looks like in order to identify him as the campaign's protagonist
2) that the woman not pictured in these photographs, RZA and Riot's mom, is the singer turned beauty mogul Rihanna
3) that the woman pictured in one of the photographs is Carrie Mae Weems, the same person responsible for all of these images.
The campaign preselects its consumers by what it doesn't show and what it doesn't share. As the saying goes, if you know, you know, and if you don't, well, too bad.
It isn't uncommon for a brand selling expensive but accessible items to use art as shorthand to signal value. Such a marketing strategy relies on a shared belief that fine art is the highest expression of craft. Therefore, a brand's proximity to fine art elevates the perception of its products.
Any of us willing and able to spend a cute coin can hop on the Bottega Veneta website and order some of the Intrecciatio woven leather goods they're best known for. There's no waitlist, vetting, or ladder purchases to make before you're offered what you want. If you can afford it, you can most likely have it.
However, recognizing Carrie Mae Weems and her work takes a different kind of capital. You need a different sort of savvy to notice Rihanna's presence in her absence. And the buyers who possess that cultural knowledge carry their Jodie bags differently than those who don't.
But back to the image of the father and the photographer. It makes reference to what is likely Weems's best-known body of work, the Kitchen Table Series. Created in 1990 when Weems was in her late 30s, the Kitchen Table Series consists of twenty images and fourteen text panels. In each image, Weems is the central character. We see her fall in and climb out of love, fellowship with her girlfriends, take on a maternal role, struggle and ultimately succeed in finding solace in solitude.
In each image, the camera shows the action taking place at the same end of this table. A light fixture illuminates and frames the lobster dinners, homework, primping, card games, heartbreak, and healing that happen at the table. Throughout the series, the visible portion of the dining area undergoes slight changes: a birdcage appears, disappears, and returns again. Sometimes, a tapestry hangs on the wall behind the head of the table; other times, a floral still life. In one shot, a collection of small images decorates the back wall, including a photograph of Malcolm X and a cover of a John Coltrane album. The changing decorations offering clues about the life unfolding in these still images.
Together, Rocky and Weems recreate a version of the first image in the Kitchen Table Series. In the original, Weems sits in front of a tabletop mirror, with cigarettes and drinks on either side of the table. A man in a hat leans over her. You can’t see his face, but Weems looks directly at the camera with an expression that lets us know she's our focus. The images that follow are about her, not him.
In the Bottega version, Rocky is the one sitting at the table. The mirror is back, and he stares into it. Weems has her arms placed on his shoulders. The overhead light frames them. She's in charge, and under her guidance, the Kitchen Table Series becomes another part of Rocky's cultural inheritance.
The campaign also includes a one-minute video. In it, the whole scene comes to life, and the camera catches two photographs by Weems hanging above a couch. The photographs are from a 2016 series called All The Boys. The series, created as a response to killings of young Black boys and men, features photographs of men in hoodies. The two photographs above the couch are a pair; one shows the subject facing forward, and the other shows him in profile a reference to arrest booking photographs.
All the Boys made its debut a year after Rocky made public statements about his inability to relate to the Black Lives Matter movement (comments he's since walked back, but part of why I stopped checking for him) and three years before he spent several weeks in a Stockholm jail following an arrest for assault. I'm not sure if Rocky and Rihanna own this work or if it was just staged for the campaign, but either way, Weems knows that this, too, is his inheritance.
In the video, as Rocky stands in front of the photographs, holding his son, little Riot Rose, you can hear Weems say, "Make sure he's safe."
The Extras
Title: Back in 2011, I learned that ASAP Rocky was a member of the ASAP Mob, a crew of other rappers, producers, and vibe facilitators. Each member of the mob, which was a little bit Wu-Tang and a little bit Dipset, used the ASAP acronym as a prefix. But in this case ASAP didn't stand for as soon as possible, it means always strive and prosper.
Birthright: My favorite fact about ASAP Rocky is that his birth name is Rakim, and his sister's name is Erica. They are named after the hip-hop golden era duo Eric B & Rakim (there goes more of that cultural inheritance). It’s fitting then that his first born, RZA, is named after the Wu Tang producer.
Billboard: Carrie Mae Weems shared the billboard image she created for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign earlier this month.
Television: The artist Mickalene Thomas appeared on CBS Sunday Morning News to talk about her work and how seeing Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series changed the trajectory of her life.
Thank you for reading all of this!
I was just watching a piece today on CBS Sunday morning in which Carrie Mae Weems was feature in a story about Mickalene Thomas talks about how she was headed to law school until she saw Weems Kicthen table which inspired her to be an artist. Later in the segment Thomas receives the James Baldwin award presented to her by Weems. Both you and Weems have done it again another great See Level read.
This (read) was just what I needed to wind-down on a Sunday night :). Agree with the poster below - I love how everything connected. And now I feel like I need to purchase something from BV totally out of my means cause that video near had me in tears!!