A$AP Rocky’s biggest distractions: “Nothing that’s gonna make me look ugly”
Some years back, during the TriBeca Film Festival, A$AP Rocky sat down for a public conversation about his life and career, and, in front of a listening audience, he admitted to some of the things in life that most distract him. He was still in his 20s at the time, so his answer, maybe, was quite predictable: weed and girls.
Rocky, at one stage during this same conversation, spoke specifically about how to appeal as an artist to a young generation of fans that, in his words, “got ADD”, to which he thinks good visuals are key. “It’s 2015, so our attention span is so short,” he said, “Most of those kids got ADD these days. You get on the internet, and so-and-so dropped a new video, then the next week, it doesn’t matter…That’s the world we live in right now, where we see things so quickly, and we gotta adapt to it and make some visuals. Some creative shit.”
If it sounded like he was being condescending, he was perfectly open and at ease with painting himself as a young person who’s easily distracted, too, and, above all else, he blamed the allure of girls and weed for his lack of focus. He even claimed that he had to give both of them up for a while for the sake of nurturing his creativity.
“I’m 26 years old; I get distracted easily,” he claimed, “You gotta do a bunch of work. I sacrificed pussy and weed for y’all motherfuckers. For months!” He quickly added with a laugh that it really wasn’t difficult to do, and that he was actually enjoying the process of making music, and the feeling left him with work that was difficult to articulate, but listening to it is the only way to find clarity.
Still, while he was adamant about the merits of avoiding sex and weed, he also spoke enthusiastically about one of his other vices: shrooms. “I love psychedelics, man,” he gushed, before somberly claiming, “They say if you obtain psychedelics and if you can endure them, that makes you a creative genius”, before calling out the “squares” who do not partake in drug use as people he would not like to be associated with.
To be fair to him, as excited as he was to talk about the joys of mushrooms, he did caution people against the harder stuff. “It’s the extreme drugs that I don’t condone,” he noted seriously, before casually commenting, “Nothing that’s gonna make me look ugly.”
Not only would that stuff make him ugly, which clearly was a big concern for him at the time, but it wouldn’t exactly have helped with his creativity or attention span. If he couldn’t handle women without losing his drive to create, taking hard drugs was hardly ever going to be helpful for him.