After eight years without releasing a complete album, rapper A$AP Rocky dropped his fifth record, “DON’T BE DUMB,” on Jan. 16, 2025. The album spans 17 songs and 59 minutes.
Even though it’s been years since his last independent album, Rocky has remained relevant through singles and collaborations with other artists. Rocky’s songs “I Smoked Away My Brain,” “Fashion Killa” and “Praise The Lord” dominated TikTok despite being released in 2023, 2013 and 2018, respectively.
The three songs still sit in his top five songs on Spotify, each with hundreds of millions of streams. But Rocky’s new album is creeping up in the rankings, with four songs in the top ten spots just over a week after the album’s release date.
The driving force behind “DON’T BE DUMB” is Rocky’s desire to be relevant again. Pretty much every track touches on the fact that Rocky hasn’t put out an album in years, which gets repetitive after a few songs.
By the sixth track, “PLAYA,” it gets easy to skip through songs because they start to sound the same. There are a few motifs that songs share, but they all fall under the same messy production style that Rocky is known for.
Speaking of that production style, Rocky doesn’t want to clean it up. In the third track, “ I N T E R R O G A T I O N (SKIT),” Rocky addresses the audience face-on and tells them, “I ain’t gon’ put out no crystal clear garbage / I’ll put out staticky good sh**.”
Rocky has no intention of cleaning up his style just to fit the standards of the music industry. But Rocky is following the industry on one track. For “STOLE YA FLOW,” he jumps on the Drake diss-track bandwagon.
In the fourth song off “DON’T BE DUMB,” Rocky accuses the Canadian rapper of stealing his flow, so he stole Drake’s girl. Rihanna, who has been married to A$AP Rocky since 2021 and gets another callout on track five, “STAY HERE 4 LIFE,” had a public off-and-on relationship with Drake back in the 2010s.
Rocky hopes Drake is offended. At the end of the song, he calls out his copycats for sitting back and waiting while Rocky does all the work. He also doesn’t want to explain himself, which is another recur- ring theme on the album.
Rocky doesn’t want to spell it out for his listeners, other artists or the general public. He’s very adamant that he doesn’t owe us, the listeners, anything.
Later on track 10, “PUNK ROCKY,” the production switches to a dreamier-sounding instrumental, similar to Rocky’s 2018 single “Sundress.” The song is either a reflection on a past relationship, or the relationship between Rocky and Rihanna isn’t going as well as the public thinks.
But as he says multiple times across “DON’T BE DUMB,” Rocky doesn’t owe us any explanation. While there are a few different production motifs that keep all of the songs from sounding the same, “DON’T BE DUMB” didn’t need to be 17 songs long.
A few features sprinkled in from artists like Doechii and Brent Faiyaz add some much-needed texture, but when the theme of the album stays pretty much the same over every song, it gets a bit old.
