A$AP Rocky Is Living His American Dream

A$AP Rocky sits one leg inside his cherry-red GTC4Lusso, one leg outside it as he tinkers with the sound system. The plan is to play his at-present-unreleased album Don’t Be Dumb for me on the drive from a Brooklyn studio.

But Rocky can’t get his phone to sync with his sports car. He’s determined, though, and while the engine growls at low idle, he tinkers for minutes that feel much longer. But still—no dice. He calls over one of his two bodyguards, both of whom are affable as far as dudes who protect celebrities for a living go. One of the bodyguards pushes a button here and twists a knob there and, bada bing, Rocky’s album at last begins playing on the Ferrari’s speakers. Rocky and I jump inside. The car’s tan leather is taut Hollywood skin, and its instruments look borrowed from the near future. But damn, damn, as soon as Rocky shuts his door, his music cuts off again.

We climb out and, with the patience of a father, Rocky begins the process a second time, going so far as to reset the car’s finicky tech. Which works until he closes the door again.

“Damn,” Rocky says. “I really wanted you to hear the music in the car.”

He concedes to making the drive without the music; however, just a few blocks into it, he announces his idea to listen to the album in the Suburban ahead of us, the one ferrying his security and part of his management team. He flashes his headlights at them, and they pull roadside.

Rocky hands the Ferrari keys to one of his security guards and we climb in the SUV. He hooks his phone to an aux cord and cranks the volume till the speakers verge on tweaking. He raps along to the songs, gesturing, his rings glinting in the truck’s dark cabin. He wears multiple rings, a couple he designed himself, on each hand. One the shape of a sombrero, a cream-colored one with a heart as a centerpiece. A pinkie ring set with a giant red jewel and diamonds around it. Rings with ornate gold embellishments. Rocky’s baubles are a kind of flashy that’s all but an emblem in hip-hop and testify not just to good taste—homie name-checked Raf Simons and Rick Owens way back on his first mixtape and these days proclaims himself a renaissance man—but to the pride of having made it.

We drive across the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the many New York landmarks built by immigrant labor, in this case scores of Irish immigrants who’d fled the famine, the Irish back before they became white. Rocky, whose father is a Caribbean immigrant, keeps the tunes playing as we hit the West Side Highway. Our driver, another one of Rocky’s guards, dodges potholes and weaves between traffic as we follow the Ferrari, a two-car caravan, the cabin fragrant with weed. Rocky raps along to certain verses.

“I’m goin’ to leave my print,” he says. “We in the building, my nigga. Not just a tenant.” Then, a few moments later, says, “When I pull up to your crib, spend it like the rent. Spend it like the time you ain’t spending with your kid,” which is a jab at every half-assed or absentee father and begs, if the designer shoe fits…

Rocky and his woman, Rihanna, are the parents of three children, and he’s been the opposite of absent in their lives. “I wanted to be a dad before I got with my girl,” he says. “I wanted a little baby girl or boy, whatever God gave, and God blessed me with three.” He became a girl dad last September when they welcomed Rocki Irish Mayers into the world. He’s also the father of two boys, Rza Athelaston Mayers (born in May 2022) and Riot Rose Mayers (born in August 2023). While the birth of Rocki, who he says looks just like him, was without doubt the year’s highlight, Rocky’s been having some bang-up recent months on the career front too.

Last May he was chosen alongside Colman Domingo, Pharrell, Lewis Hamilton, and honorary chair LeBron James as a cochair of the Met Gala. That same month saw the Cannes premiere of the Spike Lee–directed Highest 2 Lowest, a film in which Rocky stars with Denzel Washington as an aspiring rapper who kidnaps the son of a music executive. Last October, he starred in the dramedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, playing a motel superintendent who becomes the unlikely friend of a mother on the brink of a mental breakdown. In November, the CFDA awarded Rocky its Style Icon award, one of the highest honors in fashion. And that same month, Chanel named him its newest global ambassador. In January of this year, he dropped Don’t Be Dumb, his fourth studio album, a project he’s been teasing for several years.

What a time. If this is not the peak of Rocky’s career, he is without doubt in the heights. Plus being a new father, thrice over. Someone who’s also attested his intention to be an exceptional partner. Given his background, given that Rocky has been part of a culture—so much of what’s promoted of it, at least—that preaches damn near the antithesis of the values of a family man, his ambition is not without its obstacles.

The dim-lit restaurant is small but nowhere near empty. Judging by the few indoor-sunglass wearers, the precious-metal timepieces and jewels, given the women with heavy makeup and scant clothing, the restaurant is filled with people who either are somebody or want people to believe they are. That crowd includes a quartet of young women who make a show of whispering about Rocky as he swaggers unbothered to the chef’s counter. He glances at the menu before ordering his “usuals”: ravioli and orecchiette, focaccia (carbs strike no fear in Rocky, a slim vegetarian), a salad, and a glass of pinot noir. He stuffs his red-and-white napkin into the collar of his shirt, like an old Italian mob boss—other immigrants who became white. His nails are clipped to what my manicurist calls “free edge,” meaning no white showing, and are buffed to the high shine of a patent-leather shoe.

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