Onstage at Barclays, when he repeatedly directs the kids on the floor to open up the mosh pit, they happily oblige-and crash right back together when Metro Boomin drops the next track. Inspired, Rocky says, by fans who have gotten hurt at previous shows, the Injured Generation is no cautionary tale it’s an instruction manual for how to party through the pain. So while the Harlem rapper hasn’t fully embraced Lil Uzi’s Hot Topic anti-fashion or the hardcore intensity of Lil Pump’s sound, his first tour in three years has a distinct emo flavor: it’s dubbed the “Injured Generation” tour.
Rocky’s tour hews to the post-Soundcloud trend that has seen rappers incorporate elements of punk rock into their sound, style, and performance.
The homecoming was a showcase not just for his wrestling moves but what he does best: shake up a tightly-packed club, theater, or even arena until it explodes. Yams Day fell right in the middle of A$AP Rocky’s headlining tour behind Testing, the Harlem MC’s fourth album. (According to Idol, the move was not pre-planned.)
That is, until A$AP Rocky, wearing Jordan 1s, fluorescent pink Needles x AWGE track pants, and a long white VLone tee materializes right next to Idol-and drops him with a Stone Cold stunner. Finally, as Skye lies prostrate on his back in the center of the ring’s massive smiley face-emblazoned mat, the ref raises Idol’s chiseled arm in victory. Various Soundcloud rappers dripping in iced-out chains hang near the ropes, egging them on. In front of a sold-out crowd of 19,000, as underground Chicago producer-turned-rapper Icytwat bobs and weaves around them to a trap beat, Idol and Skye trade facebusters and chokeslams. But A$AP Yams was a devoted WWE fan, so the in the center of the Barclays floor there’s a wrestling ring, and as the fans stream in an undercard fight between semi-pro wrestlers Bryan Idol and Gabriel Skye gets underway. They are there to see the night’s headliner, A$AP Rocky, and whichever “special guests” the A$AP Mob organizers promised would materialize throughout the event. Sure, the crowd is primarily of sub-drinking age, and almost universally dressed in the logos so intimately associated with contemporary rap fandom: Off-White, VLone, Supreme, Yeezy, and The North Face. At certain points during last week’s Yams Day-the fourth iteration of a concert that pays tribute to late A$AP Mob co-founder A$AP Yams-the scene at the Barclays Center more closely resembles a professional wrestling match than a star-studded hip-hop show.
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