Artist Provocateur

"Rapping is a skill that I'm constantly working at as far as lyrics and subjects and art frees me from anything else in an abstract way which gives me the purest thought of mind and designing is another abstract side to myself,” expresses Ferguson. “So it's all kinda different approaches. Rapping is a more aggressive form as I'm trying to fit that to reflect the music that themes the surroundings of how I grew up, kinda.”

One part of the hip hop creative Always Strive And Prosper (A$AP) Mob, which features the notable A$AP Rocky and a slew of rappers, producers, creators and designers, Ferguson slots in nicely to his high school group as they conquer their slice of hip hop's history. Before their coming together Ferguson was known as a hustler, a so-called trap lord establishing a fashion label bequeathed to him by his late father, a shirt designer for many of hip hop's illustrious including P. Diddy and Bad Boy, Heavy D and Bell Biv Devoe. Ferguson declares that if not for being a recording artist he would have been known as A$AP Ferg, a part of hip hop one way or another.

“I would be an artist of some description no matter what,” insists Ferguson. “I would probably be known for painting right now and then later become a rapper. Like, I would have ended up doing fashion and creating visions one way or another. But it's all art and I envision myself expressing my creativity in different avenues such as through clothes and music. Then, I would have made friends with Rocky and I would have become A$AP anyway,” he laughs.

Highlighting how hard he goes in the paint, Ferguson is about expressing himself through various art and finds himself following the style wars of fashion luminaries Alexander Wang, Jeremy Scott to most recently clothes shopping in the company of Ralph Lauren, to even painting the walls of his home with Ralph Lauren suede effect. But the art for which he is most admired is in his debut LP Trap Lord, released last August featuring Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Onyx and B-Real of Cypress Hill. Trap Lord paints his Harlem, New York roots as illustrated on the closer, Cocaine Castle where Ferguson draws from the darker surroundings to his childhood, imagery reminiscent of New Jack City's The Carter building set in Harlem's Graham Court. Then just as Trap Lord climbs to an ascension it is pinched off, teasing listeners for more.

“That's exactly what I wanted to do. When I created Trap Lord, I wanted to take the music to a new plateau sonically. Like, I started off on hard songs like Let It Go and Shabba with trap-hard beats to play on the radio, and then it flows into this more artistic kind of freestyle sound that I was trying to create. And it's like the 'to be continued' of what I'm trying to create overall on this project,” explains Ferguson who, on the height of the album invites Queens, New York natives Onyx, A$ton Matthews and West coast toker B-Real to bring out the album's crescendo on Fuck Out My Face.

“I look at myself as the new Onyx,” proclaims Ferguson. “And, I look at Matthews as the new B-Real. Cypress Hill and I kinda bridged the gap between old school and the new school.”

Also throwing down on Trap Lord is Waka Flocka Flame who comes from the same recording house (1017 Brick Squad) as Gucci Mane. As Ferguson describes, adding him to Murda Something was a militant move given that there were words exchanged over the album's title after Gucci came out with his mixtape Trap God recently. “Waka Flocka's a really good friend of mine. But I felt that was kinda clever because at that time Gucci Mane was tryin' to beef with me on Twitter and I wanted to salt his game a lil'. So that was like a spit in the face of Gucci to have Flocka on my joint. So for me, that was some clever shit I did to get at him in this situation.”

Arriving in April, Ferguson strives to further establish his Trap Lord hustle in Australia for the second time before his new album L.O.R.D. is released. “It's a lot of surprises on that one,” hints Ferguson on the follow-up to Trap Lord. “There's already like two new songs that's crazy, like with a bunch of great people I've bagged in the studio. Not just to get great people on the album! It's all happened organically and we've let the music happen. So it's all built off great energy and it's going to blow up.”