This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.
Will A$AP Rocky ever release another full-length album again? Despite his insistence to the contrary, the odds of that seem longer with every passing day. But while it would be a travesty if the guy who made Live.Love.A$AP and At.Long.Last.A$AP never dropped another project, at least the next phase of Rocky’s stardom is shaping up to be just as compelling as his music career. If there was any doubt about his acting chops, Highest 2 Lowest makes it clear: A$AP Rocky is pretty fucking good at acting.
Our esteemed Cannes correspondent Iana Murray said as much back in May, but now that the movie is out for the masses to see, it’s worth screaming even louder. In an era where Denzel is effortlessly rinsing any given scene partner even more noticeably than before, it’s a thrill to see Rocky not only hold his own, but quite literally go bar for bar with the GOAT in what’s easily Highest’s best scene. In fact, one of the immediate takeaways for me, at least after first watch, is that Lee’s film would probably be better if we saw a bit more of Rocky, and earlier. As it stands, he’s a welcome jolt of energy, intrigue and tension—a villain all too game to lean into being the bad guy and blame “society” for pushing him.
It’d be easy to write the role off as Rocky essentially “playing himself”—easy, and also obtuse. As the so-cringe-it’s-hilarious-ly named Yung Felon, a rapper who matches wits with Denzel’s aging record exec, he embodies Denzel’s character’s (and, by extension, Spike Lee’s) anxieties about what contemporary rap has curdled into: an attention economy populated with crashouts desperate to get on by any means, with music quality as a distant second priority. In effect, Rocky’s tapping into the generation that arose six or seven years after he blew up, the YNs fixated on gatekeepers like Akademiks and SayCheese. The video that catapulted Rocky into stardom, “Purple Swag”—featuring Rocky rapping about lean while a bottom-grilled white girl mouths the lyrics—seems almost quaint, not to mention much more artful, by comparison.
