Of course it is absurd to accuse the new A$AP Rocky album of being too much of a moodboard. The A$AP Mob project was meticulously styled from the very beginning: back in the early 2010s, during the golden age of the internet, Yams devised an expansive vision of style, sound and vibe for the crew around the handsome young man from Harlem. Calculation, then, is not the problem. A concept can be executed with real feeling. On Don’t Be Dumb, that feeling only surfaces intermittently.
What you mostly feel instead is the marketing team in the room. Every track seems to arrive with its own target-group analysis embedded in the metadata. A bit of Peso Rocky for the day-ones here, a bit of LSD Rocky for the late adopters there; a dash of Tyler, The Creator for… well, for whom exactly? Some Doechii, some hyper-rap for TikTokers, a splash of Winona Ryder and plenty of Tim Burton for old and new hypebeasts alike. That does not mean everything here is bad. A$AP Rocky is, by default, entertaining, and his charisma still radiates across the project.
Musically, Don’t Be Dumb is at its best when it conjures the ghosts of 2013 (»Whiskey«) or 2015 (»Stop Snitching«). With »Robbery« – built around a fine Thelonious Monk sample and a striking Doechii delivery – one of the experiments also lands successfully. Much of the remainder, however, falls into the category of »wanting too much at once«. The Playboi Carti-style excesses (»Helicopter«, »Air Force«) grate, the rock excursions (»Punk Rocky«, »STFU«) sound faintly ridiculous, while »Order Of Protection« and »Fish N Steak« come off as unmistakably derivative. In the end, the problem with this album is not that it emerged from a moodboard – but that it emerged from too many of them.
