Fashion Killa

Album: LongLiveASAP (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • Rocky gives nods to numerous style icons on this cut, as he describes how his perfect girl dresses herself and in what brands. The sartorially inclined MC explained to Rolling Stone why fashion is so important to him: "Fashion goes with everything in life," he said, " because we're human beings and we have to get dressed. Whether we like it or not, we're institutionalized with fashion. We all have to get dressed one pant leg at a time."
  • Rocky describes his girl as "trippy as Nirvana." The Harlem MC also references Kurt Cobain's suicide on another Long Live A$AP track, "Phoenix." He told The Sun: "Growing up, I was aware of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' and not just the usual stuff you'd expect growing up in Harlem. All that music shaped me and that's why it plays a part on this record."
  • According to NME, 36 different fashion brands are name checked on Long Live A$AP, Rocky's debut album. It went to #1 in America and sold over 2 million copies.
  • A$AP shouts out Rihanna in the song ("Her attitude Rihanna, she get it from her mama"), and she's his co-star in the video, where they canoodle around the Mercer Hotel in Manhattan. Rocky's cohort, A$AP Ferg, also stops by to spit a rhyme.

    At the time, Rocky and Rihanna were just getting to know each other. Her appearance in the video was payback for when he jumped on a remix of her song "Cockiness (Love It)" in 2012.
  • The video was directed by Rocky and Virgil Abloh, who also acted as creative director on Long. Live. ASAP. The rapper told 106 & Park about enlisting Rihanna to play his onscreen love interest. "She's a fashion killa in my eyes," he explained. "I respect her jigginess. I respect her fashion sense so that's why I used her as a female. It's about art, the whole video, we wanted to base it off art."
  • The visual also features a mysterious masked man who follows the pair around town. At the end of the clip, he spray-paints the word "art" on the side of a building. Rocky revealed the identity of the masked graffiti artist to 106 & Park. "It's this famous, well he's infamous, he's a tagger. His name is Kidult," he explained. "We use his art and we use her art for being a fashion killa and made this conceptual video. Fashion is art."
  • Rocky and Rihanna show some convincing chemistry in the video, but they're both actors (you've seen Rihanna in Battleship, haven't you?), so this wasn't surprising. Later in 2013, he joined as an opening act on her Diamonds World Tour, and they stayed friends for the next several years. They became a couple in 2020, and in 2022 they had their first child together, a son named RZA. Their second child, son Riot Rose, arrived in 2023. Seems Rocky manifested this in the song's line, "She save it so our babies will be flyer than their parents."

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