W
hen he logged into our Zoom call earlier this week, Ferg was sure to offer a view from his sunny Miami hotel room. He was in town for Art Basel, where he was celebrating his burgeoning art career as well as the release of his 7th studio album Flip Phone Shorty, which dropped on Black Friday. “The reception is going crazy,” Ferg says of the album. “It’s liberating because my last album was so heavy. It was so personal that it just felt fun to just have fun again with music.”
On last year’s Darold, named after his late father, Ferg went deep on introspection, excavating his own emotions and traumas to uncover a clearer picture of himself. Sonically, the album leaned into gospel chords and orchestral arrangements, landing on a register that was decidedly more serious. So much so that Ferg initially wrestled with the decision to go lighter after releasing such weighty material. “I’m like, ‘Is it okay for me to just do some fun trap shit?’” He says. “And I just stopped being in my head about it, and I just went with my gut.”
It didn’t hurt that legendary trap producer Lex Luger had been sending Ferg beats the whole time he was working on Darold. By the time Ferg was ready to start on his next project, he had a wellspring of material to work with. “He was sending me beats for, I feel like a year, two years, just straight sending me beats,” Ferg recalls. “I thank him for doing that, too. He sent me so many. It was so many good ones, and it just made me excited.” By Ferg’s estimate, Luger produced about 95 percent of his new album. He compares the producer’s tenacity to DJ Mustard’s famous approach with Kendrick Lamar—sending beats daily, whether he got a response or not. “That’s kind of how Lex Luger was. He was just sending me mad beats.”
Ferg recalls being at a show in Detroit for the raucous experimental crew HiTech and seeing the DJ open with classic Jeezy records produced by Lex Luger. “The crowd was going nuts,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Yo, we need to bring these type of beats and this energy back.’ That shit was jumping.” That experience sent him digging through the archive of beats Lex sent him. He approached the producer with a question: “What was the mentality or the mindset you was in when you created ‘Ham,’ or when you did ‘BMF’ for Rick Ross, all of these anthems and all those Waka Flocka beats?” Together, they built a sonic world that honors that era while pushing it forward.
Which brings us to the album’s title. Flip Phone Shorty, of course, hearkens to those devices of yesteryear that defined the Y2k aesthetic, which has recently been all the rage. For Ferg, he was careful not to simply mine nostalgia, but to create something that felt true to him. The titular Flip Phone Shorty is a version of Ferg’s younger self, who came of age in the aughts. “This person is really the 16-year-old me,” he explains. “14, 16-year-old me that was wearing the Girbaud jeans, the Pelle Pelle jackets, size eight fitteds. I’m just basically taking a trip down memory lane.”
He points to his current styling choices — the oversized tees are designer pieces from Yohji Yamamoto or Telfar, modified with functional elements — as a metaphor for how he reimagined the past for the present day. “It’s like putting a 5X T-shirt on a wall in a Gagosian,” he says. “That’s what I did with Flip Phone Shorty the album.” While the foundation is classic Lex Luger trap, co-producer Taavi added what Ferg calls “Left of center sounds”—electronic textures that update the familiar sound without abandoning it. “It’s some super trap shit that you remember and love, but at the same time, you hear new sounds.”
The album’s guest list includes Gucci Mane — who Ferg famously had an online spat with in 2013 over the title of his mixtape Trap Lord — and Lil B, whom Ferg credits as “one of the leaders of our school.” For Ferg, Lil B represented something crucial during the blog era that launched both of their careers: the fusion of disparate worlds. “He was fucking with the hipsters and the gangsters, and that spoke to me. Because it was art.” That era remains foundational to how Ferg sees himself. “That whole time was special because it was a big boom of creativity.”
As Ferg has matured, he’s expanded beyond music into visual art, drawing on his formal training in school and taking inspiration from his father, the late Darold Ferguson Sr., who ran a boutique called Ferg Apparel on 145th Street in Harlem, designing logos for everyone from Diddy to Andre Harrell. “I watched my dad do art my whole life,” Ferg says. “For me, it’s just really standing on the shoulders of a giant.”
Ferg has, in recent years, taken to painting, famously creating the artwork for his last two album covers and hosting his first solo show, CHOSEN, in New York this past spring. He also partnered with UGG earlier this year to transform a three-story Manhattan building into a free, interactive pop-up for a week, incorporating his own artwork. He describes how lately he’s been meeting architects, agency owners, and collectors as his creative community expands beyond music. “When I did my first art show, I had families coming to my art show, and I never had families coming to my rap show. So to see a stroller and a baby at my art show, or see people from Harlem Studio Museum pull up—it hits different,” he says. He even sold a few pieces in Miami, as the city was crawling with art collectors. “I sold a painting last night, literally,” he says. “I’m dropping paintings off to people’s cribs. The conversation is different.”
Looking back on nearly 15 years since A$AP Mob first emerged, Ferg expresses wonder at his career’s many twists and turns. “When I look back on it, I’m like, I worked with more than half the industry, older and younger. I think that’s the accomplishment because I never even knew that I would be a rapper.” He clarifies: “I didn’t know I would be doing it as a profession. I always rapped and I am a rapper just being a rapper because I just loved the sport.”
Still, there was a moment, he admits, when he considered walking away. “I was ready to be like, ‘Man, I’m done with this shit.’” But then came a realization: “God is putting something in me that people can’t get anywhere else. People can’t get Ferg energy anywhere else. I’m the only me.” He says he wants to bring back the club energy of the 2000s, to remind people what it feels like to move. “We ain’t been in the clubbing in a long time,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Yo, where’s the turn up?’ It’s an energy that I wasn’t getting in music that I want to bring back.”
