You know there’s a gimmick, you know that everything you see is just sleight of hand designed to obscure the turn, but the prestige… the prestige is always worth it.ĪSAP Rocky may only be putting druggy, distorted spins on the same o’l tricks, but they’re still entertaining and so is he, despite himself. It was a little like being at a magic show.

Bits of it still felt silly, but I also felt like I could relax a little and enjoy the spectacle rather than trying to make it make sense. During the show and the album, a lot of the seams show, and in the patterns of the stitching you can see the remnants of the patterns he worked from, the designers he was inspired by and ultimately, followed maybe a little too closely, i.e., cribbing his flow from Cleveland, his muddy, chopped-and-screwed beats from Houston, and his almost goofy obsession with fashion from Kanye.īut the Injured Generation tour wasn’t completely about the sale, but the experience, like the “being hustled” aspect was just one facet of a larger performance art piece. The Injured Generation live show and Testing share this attribute, but it only really works live. The biggest issue on Testing, and really with most of Rocky’s music, is how clearly he wears his influences on his sleeve. As the AI occasionally interrupted the proceedings to bark out orders - for instance, stopping an exuberant rendition of “ Tony Tone” to prompt Rocky to whip out ten push-ups - the concept of a mad science experiment gone off the rails couldn’t be ignored or overlooked as it could on the album.

In Rocky’s vision, the desired goal is to get people to take more risks, not fewer, a sentiment he conveys in a breathtaking moment where he rhymes “ Gunz N Butter” from atop a car suspended over the stage - it looks wildly unsafe, but the spectacle is worth the implied peril, if for no other reason than the story. The overall message of those Crash Dummies PSAs was to encourage people to use their cars’ safety belts.

The iconography that was plastered all over his album packaging and promotion suddenly made perfect sense to me - in the old commercials, some of the Dummies naturally played the scientists, putting the others through a series of dangerous exams behind the wheels of a range of cars. at #injuredgenerationtour /z0wObnFMRfįor instance, during the show, Rocky made his entrance dressed as a Crash Dummy himself, putting himself in the shoes of a test subject as a computerized AI voice put both him and the crowd through their paces with a series of instructions issued both by the AI and by Rocky’s lab-coated assistants, who were also dressed as Crash Dummies.

Asap rocky testing tour