A$AP Rocky on Weed Crimes, Lana Del Rey and the Virtues of Being Weird

A$AP Rocky performs at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago.

A few hours after his rain-soaked performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago on Friday, A$AP Rocky still can't come to grips with what went down midway through his set: a few minutes after he stagedove into the poncho-clad crowd, he implored them to give him some of whatever they were smoking. Then he was handed some disappointing product.

"Somebody threw regular weed," the 23-year-old Harlem MC tells Rolling Stone, still exacerbated by the horror. "You cannot throw regular weed to the lords. Chicago don't do it like that. That's disrespectful. That's a sin. Forgive whoever did that. Forgive him. Forgive his soul."

The beauty of A$AP Rocky – one of the biggest names to emerge in hip-hop over the past year – is that whether he's actually upset about the earlier weed situation or not, the man who asserts in his mixtape cut "Wassup" that "the only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror" seems to believe everything coming out of his mouth. And it keeps coming. The next topic? His motivation for starring in fellow blog-fueled newcomer Lana Del Rey's music video for "National Anthem," a serious acting turn in which Rocky plays JFK to Del Rey's Jackie O. "I had a crush on her before I met her," he explains. "I wanted to fuck her and shit. When I met her and really found out what type of person she was, she became more of a friend. And I loved the character that she was [in the video] and the artist that she is, to the point where I don't wanna fuck her no more."

At this, Rocky's 10-deep crew, the A$AP Mob, breaks into laughter. Rocky gets upset. "Why the fuck ya'll niggas laughing? Everybody in this room would fuck her."

Things quiet down. Rocky gets to talking about the benefits of fame; on the strength of mixtapes alone (his official full-length debut, LongLiveA$AP, is due on September 11th) he signed a deal with Sony/RCA for a rumored $3 million. He's had some time now to process his rapid ascent. "It feels good,” he says of his newfound celebrity. "I ain't gonna lie to you. It's pussy all over the place, a lot of money to be made." Rocky says he's also become something of an expert at reading others. "You meet somebody for the first time and if it's genuine you know it," he says. "But when you meet a motherfucker and you can tell he's suckin' dick and he just coming around 'cause you got this shit going on and everything is looking good – especially the motherfucker that never spoke to you back in the days – those motherfuckers, you be like, 'Suck a dick.'"

Rocky leans back in his chair. "Nowadays, everybody wanna be weird," he says. "We know how to manifest being weird. We know we some weird-ass looking motherfuckers, and we know we do some weird shit." He pauses. "But at the same time, we some geniuses."

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A$AP Rocky on Weed Crimes, Lana Del Rey and the Virtues of Being Weird

A$AP Rocky performs at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago.

A few hours after his rain-soaked performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago on Friday, A$AP Rocky still can't come to grips with what went down midway through his set: a few minutes after he stagedove into the poncho-clad crowd, he implored them to give him some of whatever they were smoking. Then he was handed some disappointing product.

"Somebody threw regular weed," the 23-year-old Harlem MC tells Rolling Stone, still exacerbated by the horror. "You cannot throw regular weed to the lords. Chicago don't do it like that. That's disrespectful. That's a sin. Forgive whoever did that. Forgive him. Forgive his soul."

The beauty of A$AP Rocky – one of the biggest names to emerge in hip-hop over the past year – is that whether he's actually upset about the earlier weed situation or not, the man who asserts in his mixtape cut "Wassup" that "the only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror" seems to believe everything coming out of his mouth. And it keeps coming. The next topic? His motivation for starring in fellow blog-fueled newcomer Lana Del Rey's music video for "National Anthem," a serious acting turn in which Rocky plays JFK to Del Rey's Jackie O. "I had a crush on her before I met her," he explains. "I wanted to fuck her and shit. When I met her and really found out what type of person she was, she became more of a friend. And I loved the character that she was [in the video] and the artist that she is, to the point where I don't wanna fuck her no more."

At this, Rocky's 10-deep crew, the A$AP Mob, breaks into laughter. Rocky gets upset. "Why the fuck ya'll niggas laughing? Everybody in this room would fuck her."

Things quiet down. Rocky gets to talking about the benefits of fame; on the strength of mixtapes alone (his official full-length debut, LongLiveA$AP, is due on September 11th) he signed a deal with Sony/RCA for a rumored $3 million. He's had some time now to process his rapid ascent. "It feels good,” he says of his newfound celebrity. "I ain't gonna lie to you. It's pussy all over the place, a lot of money to be made." Rocky says he's also become something of an expert at reading others. "You meet somebody for the first time and if it's genuine you know it," he says. "But when you meet a motherfucker and you can tell he's suckin' dick and he just coming around 'cause you got this shit going on and everything is looking good – especially the motherfucker that never spoke to you back in the days – those motherfuckers, you be like, 'Suck a dick.'"

Rocky leans back in his chair. "Nowadays, everybody wanna be weird," he says. "We know how to manifest being weird. We know we some weird-ass looking motherfuckers, and we know we do some weird shit." He pauses. "But at the same time, we some geniuses."

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'Weird Al' Yankovic Sues Sony Over Royalties

'Weird Al' Yankovic sues Sony over royalties.Alyse Gilbert/Young Hollywood/Getty Images

"Weird Al" Yankovic is suing Sony Music Entertainment for $5 million over royalty disputes, Billboard reports. The music parodist alleges that Sony took improper and duplicate recoupments resulting in underpayment of his royalties, has not paid him his fair share of revenue from his YouTube hits and the label has not shared money from settlements with Napster and Kazaa. Yankovic is also seeking a 50 percent cut of net receipts from digital downloads of his music, as his deal classifies that as a license rather than a traditional sale, which has a much lower royalty rate.

Yankovic's company, Ear Booker Enterprises, filed the lawsuit in Federal court in the Southern District of New York. The musician's suit is likely to hold up in court, as a case last year on behalf of Eminem established a legal precedent that downloads count as a license, meaning that many artists signed to major labels before the early 2000s are entitled to 50 percent of net receipts on those sales. 

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'Weird Al' Yankovic Sues Sony Over Royalties

'Weird Al' Yankovic sues Sony over royalties.Alyse Gilbert/Young Hollywood/Getty Images

"Weird Al" Yankovic is suing Sony Music Entertainment for $5 million over royalty disputes, Billboard reports. The music parodist alleges that Sony took improper and duplicate recoupments resulting in underpayment of his royalties, has not paid him his fair share of revenue from his YouTube hits and the label has not shared money from settlements with Napster and Kazaa. Yankovic is also seeking a 50 percent cut of net receipts from digital downloads of his music, as his deal classifies that as a license rather than a traditional sale, which has a much lower royalty rate.

Yankovic's company, Ear Booker Enterprises, filed the lawsuit in Federal court in the Southern District of New York. The musician's suit is likely to hold up in court, as a case last year on behalf of Eminem established a legal precedent that downloads count as a license, meaning that many artists signed to major labels before the early 2000s are entitled to 50 percent of net receipts on those sales. 

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Norah Jones, Danger Mouse Craft Moody, 'Weird' LP

Norah Jones and Brian 'Danger Mouse' Burton

Back in 2009, Norah Jones and Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton got together in the Gnarls Barkley producer's Los Angeles studio to begin work on a top-secret project. "Nobody from my label or management knew we were doing it," says the singer. "Brian said, 'I'd rather actually collaborate, and not just be a producer – let's go into the studio and see what happens.'"

The pair spent five days together in June 2009, working on what would eventually become Jones' fifth solo album, Little Broken Hearts (due May 1st). "I'd never gone in with nothing and wrote songs from scratch, and I'd never played bass before on a record," she says. "I was out of my comfort zone – but I was comfortable because we're friends."

Adds Burton, "The best thing was having just the two of us on those first sessions, not a whole band. Norah had as many, if not more, great ideas than I did."

The sessions were fruitful, but Jones and Burton weren't quite satisfied. They spent the next two years working separately on other projects: Jones completed and released her fourth solo disc, The Fall, and made an album with her alt-country band, the Little Willies; Burton started Broken Bells with the Shins' James Mercer, logged studio time with U2 and produced the Black Keys' El Camino.

Last summer, the duo finally reconvened at Burton's studio to finish up Little Broken Hearts. Jones arrived with a handful of raw, emotionally charged new tunes she penned in the wake of a harsh breakup with her fiction-writer boyfriend. "I always heard the old stories about how you write better songs when you go through some shit," she says with a laugh. "That sucks, but it's true!"

The album's sound ranges from experimental chamber serenades to stark, electronic-embellished confessions. "It's obviously very different than anything Norah's ever done," Burton says. "I don't know what people will think – I hope they like it, and she doesn't lose a bunch of fans."

One of the boldest departures is "Take It Back," which features fuzzed-out guitars and spooky, distorted vocals. "I never knew how to get weird sounds," Jones says. "It was all about finding a balance between those effects and making sure my voice was clear and sounded like me."

She gets even darker on "Happy Pills," singing, "Time to throw this away/Wanna make sure that you never waste my time again," over hooky pop-rock chug. "It sounds happy," she says, "but the lyrics are evil and fucked up, which grounded it a little." On "4 Broken Hearts," she belts like a defiant Dusty Springfield while confronting a mutual infidelity: "We tried to be faithful but didn't get far."

In its own quiet way, Little Broken Hearts hews closer to heartbreak classics like Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear than to anything in Jones' back catalog. "This time, I've been way less concerned with self-editing," Jones says. "I'm not sad, but there's a lot of hurt in there. And it felt great to say what I felt and put it down on tape. Doing that made me so happy! This album is all about saying things that needed to be said."

This story is from the March 15th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

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Norah Jones, Danger Mouse Craft Moody, 'Weird' LP

Norah Jones and Brian 'Danger Mouse' Burton

Back in 2009, Norah Jones and Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton got together in the Gnarls Barkley producer's Los Angeles studio to begin work on a top-secret project. "Nobody from my label or management knew we were doing it," says the singer. "Brian said, 'I'd rather actually collaborate, and not just be a producer – let's go into the studio and see what happens.'"

The pair spent five days together in June 2009, working on what would eventually become Jones' fifth solo album, Little Broken Hearts (due May 1st). "I'd never gone in with nothing and wrote songs from scratch, and I'd never played bass before on a record," she says. "I was out of my comfort zone – but I was comfortable because we're friends."

Adds Burton, "The best thing was having just the two of us on those first sessions, not a whole band. Norah had as many, if not more, great ideas than I did."

The sessions were fruitful, but Jones and Burton weren't quite satisfied. They spent the next two years working separately on other projects: Jones completed and released her fourth solo disc, The Fall, and made an album with her alt-country band, the Little Willies; Burton started Broken Bells with the Shins' James Mercer, logged studio time with U2 and produced the Black Keys' El Camino.

Last summer, the duo finally reconvened at Burton's studio to finish up Little Broken Hearts. Jones arrived with a handful of raw, emotionally charged new tunes she penned in the wake of a harsh breakup with her fiction-writer boyfriend. "I always heard the old stories about how you write better songs when you go through some shit," she says with a laugh. "That sucks, but it's true!"

The album's sound ranges from experimental chamber serenades to stark, electronic-embellished confessions. "It's obviously very different than anything Norah's ever done," Burton says. "I don't know what people will think – I hope they like it, and she doesn't lose a bunch of fans."

One of the boldest departures is "Take It Back," which features fuzzed-out guitars and spooky, distorted vocals. "I never knew how to get weird sounds," Jones says. "It was all about finding a balance between those effects and making sure my voice was clear and sounded like me."

She gets even darker on "Happy Pills," singing, "Time to throw this away/Wanna make sure that you never waste my time again," over hooky pop-rock chug. "It sounds happy," she says, "but the lyrics are evil and fucked up, which grounded it a little." On "4 Broken Hearts," she belts like a defiant Dusty Springfield while confronting a mutual infidelity: "We tried to be faithful but didn't get far."

In its own quiet way, Little Broken Hearts hews closer to heartbreak classics like Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear than to anything in Jones' back catalog. "This time, I've been way less concerned with self-editing," Jones says. "I'm not sad, but there's a lot of hurt in there. And it felt great to say what I felt and put it down on tape. Doing that made me so happy! This album is all about saying things that needed to be said."

This story is from the March 15th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

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Gotye’s Weird Pop Science Blows Up

Gotye performs at Wilton's Music Hall in London.

After his second album made him one of Australia's biggest stars in 2006, Gotye holed up in a barn on his parents' 13-acre farm outside of Melbourne and spent the next two and a half years recording alone with a laptop. "Cars would drive past at 100 kilometers per hour, crows would land on the roof and scratch, and temperatures were up and down with no heat," says the indie-pop singer, 31. "In the dead of winter, I'd be jogging in between takes to keep warm."

Gotye's time in the wild paid off: His U.S. debut LP, Making Mirrors, has been lodged in the Billboard Top 40 for seven weeks, and lead single "Somebody That I Used to Know," a supercatchy, xylophone-powered kiss-off, has been getting heavy airplay and racked up more than 85 million YouTube views. "As soon as we saw how many hits the video was getting, we put it on," says Dennis Constantine, programming director at San Francisco's KFOG. "The response was phenomenal – we couldn't play it enough."

Born Wouter De Backer in Belgium, Gotye – it's pronounced like "Gaultier," the French version of ?his first name – moved to Australia with his family at age two. He grew up obsessed with Sting, Depeche Mode and Peter Gabriel, his most obvious influence. Around 2002, while drumming for an indie-rock band in Melbourne, he began teaching himself how to build tracks out of sampled world-music fragments and his own field recordings. "Anything that allows you to not approach a particular instrument or software like you have before," he says, "that's usually what I'm trying to do."

Gotye crafted the driving bass line of "Eyes Wide Open" by messing around with the Winton Musical Fence, a playable art installation in the outback. "I was like a kid in a playground, running around hitting things and recording them on my sampler," he says. The stoned dub groove of "State of the Art," meanwhile, came together on a vintage Lowrey Cotillion organ his parents bought him at a thrift store for Christmas. Adds Gotye, "I like to see what happens when you collide certain things together."

Gotye will hit the U.S. for a short tour this month, including a stop at Coachella, and he's planning a more ambitious tour for later in the year. "I want to keep developing new ideas," he says. "'Somebody That I Used to Know' has changed what I thought was possible."

This story is from the March 15, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

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Gotye’s Weird Pop Science Blows Up

Gotye performs at Wilton's Music Hall in London.

After his second album made him one of Australia's biggest stars in 2006, Gotye holed up in a barn on his parents' 13-acre farm outside of Melbourne and spent the next two and a half years recording alone with a laptop. "Cars would drive past at 100 kilometers per hour, crows would land on the roof and scratch, and temperatures were up and down with no heat," says the indie-pop singer, 31. "In the dead of winter, I'd be jogging in between takes to keep warm."

Gotye's time in the wild paid off: His U.S. debut LP, Making Mirrors, has been lodged in the Billboard Top 40 for seven weeks, and lead single "Somebody That I Used to Know," a supercatchy, xylophone-powered kiss-off, has been getting heavy airplay and racked up more than 85 million YouTube views. "As soon as we saw how many hits the video was getting, we put it on," says Dennis Constantine, programming director at San Francisco's KFOG. "The response was phenomenal – we couldn't play it enough."

Born Wouter De Backer in Belgium, Gotye – it's pronounced like "Gaultier," the French version of ?his first name – moved to Australia with his family at age two. He grew up obsessed with Sting, Depeche Mode and Peter Gabriel, his most obvious influence. Around 2002, while drumming for an indie-rock band in Melbourne, he began teaching himself how to build tracks out of sampled world-music fragments and his own field recordings. "Anything that allows you to not approach a particular instrument or software like you have before," he says, "that's usually what I'm trying to do."

Gotye crafted the driving bass line of "Eyes Wide Open" by messing around with the Winton Musical Fence, a playable art installation in the outback. "I was like a kid in a playground, running around hitting things and recording them on my sampler," he says. The stoned dub groove of "State of the Art," meanwhile, came together on a vintage Lowrey Cotillion organ his parents bought him at a thrift store for Christmas. Adds Gotye, "I like to see what happens when you collide certain things together."

Gotye will hit the U.S. for a short tour this month, including a stop at Coachella, and he's planning a more ambitious tour for later in the year. "I want to keep developing new ideas," he says. "'Somebody That I Used to Know' has changed what I thought was possible."

This story is from the March 15, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

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Weekend Rock Question: What Is the Best 'Weird Al' Yankovic Song?

Weird Al Yankovic at the Young Hollywood Studio in Los Angeles.Alyse Gilbert/Young Hollywood/Getty Images

Jimmy Fallon's new "Tebowie" sketch, in which he performs a version of "Space Oddity" as a hybrid of David Bowie and Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, is proof that the Late Night host has mastered the art of the song parody. Still, no one can match the prowess of "Weird Al" Yankovic, the unrivaled king of pop parody for over 30 years. Our question for you this week is: What is the best "Weird Al" Yankovic song of all time?

Random Notes

You can vote here in the comments, on facebook.com/rollingstone, or on Twitter using the #weekendrock hashtag.

Last weekend, we asked you to tell us what 2012 tour you were most excited to see, and we compiled the results in this video gallery.

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