Skrillex's Wild for the Night is a great honking clown car of a track, decorated with a teeth-gritting screech. Occasionally, the guest appearances come good вЂ“ producer Clams Casino uses Haim's harmonies to provide a gorgeous, reverb-drenched acapella coda to LVL, Santigold sounds fantastic singing the indelible hook of Hell over a slow-moving backdrop of vast, distorted synthesizers вЂ“ but it's hard to see what others are doing here, other than ticking a box on a A&R man's list of target markets. Long Live A$AP's is frequently thrilling, a dense splurge of woozy electronics and samples, packed with lovely production touches вЂ“ the ghostly, childlike voice singing along to the title track's chorus, the glassy sound that carries the hook of Goldie вЂ“ and shifts away from the expected path: there's a fantastic moment on PMW (All I Really Need) where Rocky вЂ“ rapping like a man having difficulty staying upright вЂ“ is replaced by Schoolboy Q, whose rhymes hurtle along. This feels a bit like making a fuss when Cheryl Cole doesn't come onstage dressed as Biffa Bacon and sing Fog on the Tyne, because the result of his sub-genre mixing can be pretty spectacular. In the US hip-hop community, considerable consternation has been generated by the fact that, while A$AP Rocky's given name comes from the legendary Long Island MC Rakim and he hails from Harlem, his sound isn't particularly rooted in the New York hip-hop tradition: its viscous, druggy beats and slowed-down vocals are based in the music of Houston's late DJ Screw, while his penchant for suddenly switching pace from a stoned drawl to rapid-fire triple time is most obviously influenced by Ohio's Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony. Without wishing to further swell the head of a man who once claimed 'the only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror', A$AP Rocky doesn't really need the guests. Whether this is evidence of Rakim's impressively catholic musical tastes, orВ a record company A&R department frantically ticking boxes in an attempt to maximise appeal and protect their investment, is an interesting question. It still contains guest appearances, not merely from a well chosen selection of rappers вЂ“ with the exception of Drake, long-established multi-platinum names are eschewed in favour of interesting ones, including Action Bronson, Kendrick Lamaar and Schoolboy Q вЂ“ but also by Haim, dubstep producer Skrillex and Florence Welch, the latter on a song co-written by Amanda Ghost, the woman at least partly responsible forВ James Blunt's You're Beautiful. AВ duet with Lana del Rey was announced, then removed from the tracklisting. The first single from it came out last April, while the release date was pushed back from September to October to January, a much quieter and less competitive time of year for new releases, thus obliging the rapper to spend last autumn on a tour named after, and promoting, an album that hadn't actually been released yet. Long Live A$AP seems to have been endlessly faffed about with prior to release. Or perhaps it's just hollow bluster to distract attention from a flawed product. Perhaps you get big ideas when you sign a major-label deal for a reported $3m. I'm a people person,' he added, not perhaps the immediate impression you get from his lyrics: 'Leave a motherfucker laying still/ Bang him with the stainless steel.' 'I'm talking about colours, religions, sex, everybody. 'I want to be the first guy to help people accept everybody for who they are,' he recently told a journalist. Even in the world of hip-hop вЂ“ not a genre whose practitioners are much given to promoting their albums by mumbling that they just make music for themselves and if anyone else likes it it's a bonus вЂ“ there's something quiteВ striking about the former Rakim Mayers' objectives for Long Live A$AP, which seem to involve bringing about global unity. I t's hard not to be impressed by the ambition A$AP Rocky has for his debut album.

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