Last week, Harlem-bred ASAP Rocky, 23, who recently signed a record deal with the Sony-RCA subsidiary Polo Grounds worth a reported $3 million, released his mix tape LiveLoveASAP.He’s part of a small but influential roster of New York City hip-hop artists who are pushing boundaries, not only in terms of what they wear and eat but also what influences they let in their music.Since the mid-nineties, a certain strain of hood-glam rap has been perfected in New York: Guys like DJ Premier constructed unflinching beats that made you want to whip through Brooklyn nodding meaningfully to dudes hanging out on corners.Guys like Nas rapped about �Bullet holes left in my peepholes� and made you want to check the front door.This marriage of sound and content worked so well that many local rappers have stuck to it rigorously.The problem is that honoring the way things have always been done has invited a certain uninnovative fundamentalism.On the intro to his 2007 track �Hip-Hop,� Brooklyn’s Joell Ortiz summed up the insular mentality of the city’s rap revanchists: �This is hip-hop,� he spits out.

�This is Carhartt jackets.This is Champion hoodies.Chicken wings and French fries.RIP pieces on the handball courts.� The good news is that not everyone in New York is afraid of change.Rocky's sound is most often linked to Screw music, the Houston microgenre that clicked hip-hop down to super slo-mo (everything souuuunddds liiiiike thiiiiiis) in order to better appeal to dudes tripping face on codeine (yes, he’s a fan).acheter bitcoin a parisAt least in delivery, there are also strands of Odd Future, the maniacal Los Angeles collective that broke from the Internet to the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this year.ethereal island wikiRocky and his crew borrow OF’s incessant yells of �Swag,� as well as their nihilistic, hip-hop-as-punk-rock live-show manners.subway using bitcoin

Rocky carries a traditional New York narrative�kid from the block, conversant with the drug trade, dreaming of riches.What he doesn’t have is the traditional New York fealty to immaculately built verses.One of the most enjoyable rappers working today is Atlanta’s Waka Flocka Flame, who barely bothers to string rhymes together; a popular shtick of his is shouting the first two-thirds of his name over and over.bitcoin core change data directoryRocky’s not as lax, but he is cool with drift, with tracks that feel half-formed.bitcoin jogandoHis lyrics aren’t meant to be studied.bitcoin est il un bon investissementInstead, hearing him rap feels like a pretty good preview for what inviting him over to get blitzed and play Mario Kart might be like.bitcoin waren kaufen

On �Brand New Guy,� he fitfully brags, �Fuck fly, I am fashion / Trying to cop that Benz �wagon / My bitch drive it, my friends crash it.� He recently explained to Pitchfork that �I used to be homophobic, but that’s fucked up.ethereum amd vegaI had to look in the mirror and say, �All the designers I’m wearing are gay.’ � Recently, he and his crew have become vegetarians.instant bitcoin kaufenHe’s comfortable in his own skin, which means he’s comfortable being peculiar.Helping the cause is Clams Casino, one of Rocky’s preferred producers who is known for often dreamy slabs of ambient noise undercut with a hard, crisp drum.Clams was raised and lives near the city, in Nutley, New Jersey, but originally skirted the New York scene altogether.He cracked the industry by working with the Bay Area’s weirdo rapper Lil B (for more, read his self-help-memoir, which elucidates Based, his positivity-focused personal philosophy).

AraabMuzik, a New York�via�Rhode Island producer, broke through by making bombastic beats for the Diplomats, a Harlem crew prominent in the early aughts (YouTube videos, showcasing his preposterous acuity on the MPC drum machine, also helped his name recognition).His own solo instrumentals, though, are much more expansive: They sound almost like electro-shoegaze act M83.Muthafuckin’ eXquire is more locally sourced.He reveres the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and you can hear as much from his unhinged flow.His self-confident broke-dude rhymes (�Drunk driving on a Wednesday� in his Mazda MPV) are reminiscent in part of goofball everyman Redman.But they’re all a product of the stranger, wide-open Internet hip-hop scene: Brooklyn’s Das Racist and Detroit’s troubled Danny Brown both appear on �eXquire’s underground hit, �The Last Huzzah.� And there are more national connections: Rocky is down with Oakland’s Main Attrakionz, a somber, spacey duo, and Spaceghost�purrp, a sex-obsessed Miami M.C.

who is now crashing in New York with Rocky’s crew.Of the assembled, Rocky is best poised to follow Odd Future’s front man Tyler, the Creator, into the mainstream.But the scene’s minor resurgence doesn’t need a star to stay relevant.It just needs New Yorkers, happy not to sound like New Yorkers.Hip-hop listening sessions are usually pretty dull affairs.It's hard to enjoy any hip-hop album when you're trapped in a conference room with a bunch of media professionals.But when executives from The Source, a hip-hop magazine, asked reporters to attend a listening session on Tuesday night, they weren't expecting people to have a good time.''This is a very important evening,'' said David Mays, the magazine's co-founder and chief executive.And then, through some rather feeble speakers, he played a profoundly poor hip-hop track from about a decade ago, maybe longer.The track is by Eminem, and it sounds like a free style, not a song.Like much of his best and best-known work, this rant castigates an untrustworthy ex-girlfriend.

But in this case the ex-girlfriend is black, and the rhymes are full of crude racial taunts.''Black girls only want your money,'' he says more than once.And early on he lays out his conclusions in sweeping (and inept) language:Black girls and white girls just don't mixBecause black girls are dumb and white girls are good chicksWhite girls are good, I like white girlsI like white girls all over the worldWhite girls are fine and they blow my mindAnd that's why I'm here now, telling you this rhyme'Cause black girls, I really don't like.Even before the news conference had begun, Eminem had released a statement acknowledging that the words were his but calling them ''foolishness,'' the sound of a spurned boyfriend venting his ''anger, stupidity and frustration.''But the executives from The Source argued that this newly unearthed recording (provided to them, they say, by three white hip-hop fans from Detroit) is a mountain, not a molehill.Kim Osorio, the magazine's editor in chief, said, ''These are racist remarks by someone who has the ability to influence millions of minds.''

Eminem has spent much of his career earning fans by making enemies, and a casual observer might wonder how this new controversy differs from ones in which the rapper was accused of homophobia and misogyny -- accusations that only helped broaden his fame.The difference is that because he is a white rapper, Eminem has gone out of his way to avoid showing disrespect to African-Americans.He is always reverential to his mentor, Dr. Dre (even when he's joking about killing Dre in a song), and he has been effusive in his praise of 50 Cent, who records for Eminem's label, Shady Records.When listing his favorite rappers, he once ranked himself ninth, behind eight African-American counterparts.When Eminem jokes about race, he is usually joking about his own, and he has made a point of avoiding hip-hop's most popular racial slur.This avoidance even served as the punch line to one of his jokes: in his song ''Criminal,'' he rhymes, ''I drink malt liquor to [mess] you up quicker/ Than you'd wanna [mess] me up for saying the word . . .''

-- and there's an empty space where the epithet would be.But at Tuesday's news conference, in a Millennium Broadway Hotel in Manhattan, the magazine's executives played a shorter snippet of a different, unreleased track on which a rapper they identified as Eminem uses the word while explaining, in passing, which ''girls'' he likes and which he doesn't.These revelations will undoubtedly give Eminem's detractors more reason to dislike him, but they probably won't much bother his hardcore fans.Although much has been made of Eminem's hip-hop credibility, the truth is that for the past few years a number of hip-hop fans -- especially black hip-hop fans -- seem to have been losing interest in the rapper, who never seemed comfortable in any community, not even the hip-hop community.His music still hews closely to hip-hop's beats-and-rhymes blueprint, but his persona comes straight out of rock 'n' roll: the sullen loner, the paranoid rebel.In all of this, the main complicating factor is that The Source is far from a neutral observer.

The dominating presence at the news conference was that of Benzino Scott, a less-than-successful rapper who is listed on the magazine's masthead as ''Co-Founder and Chief Brand Executive.''Scott has been embroiled in a feud with Eminem, and the dispute has spilled into the pages of the magazine.The February 2003 issue included an illustration of Mr.Scott holding Eminem's severed head.The March issue kept up the attack, calling Eminem an ''infiltrator'' who has continued the sad legacy of the much-derided white rapper Vanilla Ice.In a roundtable in the same issue, Mr.Scott blamed MTV: ''I believe MTV was like a male basically takin' hip-hop, havin' sex with her, pushin' her off, pimpin' her and after that havin' the baby by her.We all know who the baby is: Eminem.''Eminemhimself would probably agree with this last criticism.He has admitted in songs and interviews that his race has a lot to do with his huge success.''Do the math, if I was black, I would have sold half,'' he once rhymed.But while he acknowledges the power of racism, he doesn't make apologies for having figured out a way to work the system.In his own verses, Mr.