ASAP Rocky and ASAP Yams fought exactly once.
It was 2009, and the two were far away from the men they were going to become: Rocky the genre-moving rapper who would challenge and remake the sound of New York hip-hop, and Yams the behind-the-scenes maestro who would shape the palate of hip-hop’s Internet generation, steering Rocky to a gold debut album in the process.
Back then they were would-bes, close friends at the beginning of a long journey. Yams was involved with a woman who organized concerts and had invited Rocky to perform at one. The two came downtown from Harlem only to find that there wasn’t time for Rocky to perform after all.
They got into it outside a downtown McDonald’s, Rocky indignant and Yams telling him: “You think you all that! You think you Kanye!”
As happens with close friends, the fight melted into nothing, and both ended up waiting for the train back uptown, Yams without his shirt, which had been lost in the fight. The next day Yams broke things off with the woman, telling Rocky he’d never let anyone get in the way of what they were trying to build.
Rocky was remembering this story last month after Yams’s death on Jan. 18 from an accidental drug overdose.
He was seated upstairs at his SoHo duplex apartment, lights dim. Downstairs, there was art on the walls, a Goyard trunk in the bedroom and a $50,000 Raf Simons x Sterling Ruby paint-splatter coat hanging by the door. At one point Rocky had wanted to give up rapping and focus on other things — modeling, making beats — but Yams persuaded him to stick with it. Now he’s finishing work on his second album, but wanted to focus on the times he shared with the man he called “my truest, bestest friend.”
The two met in 2007. (Yams was born Steven Rodriguez and Rocky was born Rakim Mayers.) Yams had recently been interning with Diplomats Records and was something of a mythological figure among hip-hop-obsessed Harlem teenagers, thanks to his legion of connections. Rocky, then an aspiring rapper, knew about Yams long before they met: “Yams was like a mystery,” he said. “He was like the Great Gatsby.”
Eventually they connected: Rocky rapped for Yams, and they became fast friends. Rocky recalled nights moving through the city, from Harlem and the Bronx down to SoHo and the Lower East Side. “You didn’t know what tomorrow promised,” Rocky said. “It was so free.”
Yams was an ideal partner: a facilitator who didn’t crave the limelight, and was intensely focused on Rocky’s success. An affable and passionate hip-hop encyclopedia who approached his work like a kid sitting in Yankee Stadium bleachers called in to play in the game, Yams helped forge connections with producers and other rappers, and used the Internet to get Rocky’s music to the right ears.
For the last few years, Yams and Rocky had been more or less inseparable, a tag team with a vision for hip-hop’s direction. Together they owned a record label, ASAP Worldwide, and Yams helped shape the sound of Rocky’s breakthrough mixtape, “Live.Love.ASAP.” Yams was also an executive producer of Rocky’s major label debut album, “Long.Live.ASAP” (ASAP Worldwide/Polo Grounds/RCA).
But Yams’s drug use was a continuing problem. “He always had a struggle with drugs,” Rocky said. “That was his thing.”
In some ways Yams was open about taking drugs: He wrote about it on Twitter with wry comedic flair, and he and some friends called themselves Blackout Boyz. He was partial to Xanax and lean, the prescription-strength cough-syrup concoction.
Then, in 2011, Rocky recalled, he confronted Yams about the extent of his use and the damage it was causing. After that, “He went out of his way to hide it,” Rocky said. “I caught him a bunch of times, but he would still hide it. He was kind of private about it. He didn’t want his mom to know, he didn’t want me to know.”
Rocky believes Yams’s death was also caused, partly, by apnea and other sleep-related difficulties. “There would be times that I would catch Yams choking on his own tongue,” he said.
Several close friends and associates had tried to ease Yams away from drugs, but with little success. “Sometimes he would be adamant about stopping,” Rocky said. “He’d go a month, two months.”
Last summer, Yams went to rehab after a plane ride that had gone very poorly. Debilitatingly high, he had to be pushed in a wheelchair when he got off the plane. “He looked like Pac when Pac got shot,” Rocky said, invoking Tupac Shakur’s 1994 shooting at Quad Studios in New York. “I hated to see him like that. That was it, man. It was like, ‘You got to go to rehab.’ ”
The night of Yams’s death, Rocky was one of several friends hanging out in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, apartment Yams shared with ASAP Lou, another member of the crew. At around 3 a.m., Lou pulled him aside and told him something was wrong.
Yams wouldn’t wake up, and there was vomit on the bed. They turned him over. “I just look at his face. I look at Lou. You could just tell. We knew,” Rocky said. “I was scared,” he said. “I was wilding on everybody, like, ‘Who let him do drugs?,’ even though you can’t blame nobody.”
(The office of New York City’s chief medical examiner ruled the death an accident caused by acute mixed drug intoxication, including opiates and benzodiazepine. A spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the specific drugs found in his system.)
They all went to Woodhull Medical Center, where Rocky was met by his ex-girlfriend, the model Chanel Iman. “They were tight,” he said. “She really took it hard, man. She was crying more than me.”
For Rocky, whose brother was killed when Rocky was 13 and whose father died in 2012, the support was notable, and a relief. “You know when you lose somebody, you start to feel alone?” he asked. “I don’t feel like that at all this time.”
He continued: “I don’t feel alone. I just miss him.”
Yams will be credited as an executive producer on Rocky’s forthcoming album. And moving forward, Rocky plans to still seek out his old friend for advice: “I’m going to talk to him and ask him what’s up. And we’re going to see if he’s still got it even from up there.” [New York Times]
