R.I.P. A$AP YAMS

Say what you will about A$AP ROCKY and his fashionable cohort, but that LiveLoveASAP joint changed the game for about three months.  It was like the Doctor Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Sandwich of the Reblog Era.  NYC rappers were still too retrograde, provincial, and stupid to rip off the south; hipster rap was still just a glint in an A&R dweeb's eye.

I guess A$AP YAMS changed all that?  IDK, I only knew him as the dude with the big liver spot on his headpiece until I started getting my necrophiliac death groupie shit on.  But that Jon C NYT profile portrays him as the Malcolm McLaren svengali type behind the A$AP operation, which makes SPACEGHOSTPURRP Glen Matlock (sorry Glen) and Raf Simons Vivienne Westwood.  Dipset are the New York Dolls for obvious reasons.

An' even if u don't fuck heavily with the A$AP schtick, YAMS'S taste was impeccable.  His Complex list is unorthodox and straight from the heart, a map of one man's highly personal hip-hop canon.  No matter what LORD JAMAR tries to tell you (he haunts me Freddy Krueger style in my dreams), the beauty of hip-hop is it ain't a monolithic slab - it's different shit to different peoples from all walks of life.  And yo, the casual enthusiasm behind his choices just shows why so much music writing is wack.  This was a dude just pontificating on his favorite shit, not tryin to write a term paper or parlay his internship at Spin into a position at Pitchfork.  The love is real, even if it was scatterbrained and syrup-addled.  He became a tastemaker cause he had his own taste, and that's hard to come by in this world.