A$AP Ferg Champions ‘Honesty’ About Past Trauma On His New Album ‘Darold’

A$AP Ferg got vulnerable on his latest album Darold. He recently talked to New York Radio station Power 105’s The Breakfast Club morning show about his creative expansion, and his desire to show aspiring artists that candor is key. “In your music, you have to be honest,” he told the crew. “Because if you’re not saying some honest shit, I’m just gonna look at this dude’s [Instagram] Story and [be] like, he’s not even rapping but this is more interesting,” he says. 

He then delved into the creation of “Pool,” a song that he says took him over eight years to write. On the Acyde, Daoud and Rodaidh McDonald-produced track, he delves into his personal qualms, rhyming, “Every day is like climbing mountains, feeling like it’s hell / T see I ain’t right, and my girl could tell.” He was also candid with The Breakfast Club about the song’s second verse, that explores sexual trauma he faced as a child. 

On the track he rhymed, “At ten I was drowned and touched when I was in the pool / All the breath left my body where I couldn’t move / Violated, hand on my private by a bigger dude / Seconds felt like forever, really wasn’t cool.”

He told The Breakfast Club, “it was an incident that happened in a pool when I was a young kid and everybody’s around and everything like that. For me, it was weird and it was one second, but I was like, why?” He says he felt compelled to “dive in it and go crazy” by devoting an entire verse to what happened.

From Rolling Stone US.