Rocky and Yams met in 2008 through a mutual friend. Yams was an archetypal New York rap kid for the 21st century: enamored enough by the Dips’ chaos mythos to work for free, street smart enough to see what levers they were pulling to finance the whole thing, yet with enough lingering love for golden-agers and Five Percenters to write raps of his own under a name like Sensei the Golden Child. When he was 16, he dropped out of high school so he could focus on his unpaid internship with Dipset, packaging mixtapes while slipping a few into his backpack to sell on the side. Steven Rodriguez, who would later rechristen himself A$AP Yams, was letting his mind drift-cutting class to hunt for obscure records on Canal St. Meanwhile, also in Harlem, another young man was studying the game from the inside. He was caught with a gun, charged with attempted murder, and spent a couple weeks on Rikers Island before getting off. By the time he was a teenager, Rocky was trafficking a bit as well, though he says he generally kept that to the Bronx. At one point after his father was sentenced to prison on drug charges and his older brother was killed, he and his mother stayed in a shelter.

He lived briefly outside the city, in Pennsylvania, but for the most part grew up in Harlem.

Rocky was born Rakim Mayers in the fall of 1988, and named after the rapper who ruled New York at the time (an older sister is named Erika B. It’s best understood not as a hard break in the genre’s history but as something fleeting, a snapshot distinct and elusive as its airiest Clams Casino beats. But the paradigm shift it seemed to signal never really came. It made Rocky as big a star as anyone could have expected. A decade after the fact, $AP sounds as hazily inspired as ever. While Rocky remains an A-list rapper - it is something of a running joke how frequently he appears atop festival flyers, even between album cycles - he has also always seemed like a relic of that moment, a little talisman of the early 2010s.

Last week, having paid whatever publishing ransom necessary, A$AP Rocky and RCA Records announced that $AP, the Harlem rapper’s debut mixtape, would finally be available on digital streaming platforms in time for the tenth anniversary of its Halloween release.

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