Jon Stojan
Photo Credit: Drea Rodriguez
What are the hallmarks of great rapping in 2024? Lyrical imagination and complexity, sure — those are always on the list. But they’re increasingly sharing space with things like texture, emotion, versatility, experimentation and confidence. Rap has always made room for innovation, eccentricity and dialect, but the range has never been wider.
Arguments about what makes great rapping fail to grasp the beauty of the argument itself: there are so many options to choose from. Today’s great rappers don’t sound much like the ones they grew up on. Or sometimes they sound like everyone they grew up on, and then some.
Meet ROCWORTHY, stylistic admixture supreme. A Congolese native with an expansive ear, he’s becoming one of hip-hop’s brightest new stars by interpreting the Internet-fueled melding of tastes and influences that’s a given of modern life. And he’s a peacock, doing it with flair and authority. He isn’t an answer to old debates so much as a renunciation of them.
So while some choices on “Fashionably Late, Angels, Dead Zone, his past singles, feel familiar, it’s more as if they’re reflected in a fun-house mirror. There are modern rap elements that may seem familiar to the Atlanta rap scene, but there is also Paris, Kinshasa, Miami and Los Angeles. There is 2023, but also 1994 and 1985 and 2008.
Throughout, ROCWORTHY is charismatic, full of sly wit and curiosity, a tweaker of orthodoxy while upholding it at the same time. “Slide by the countryside come see me, I’m tryna stay lowkey baby I don’t like when they see me,” he raps on “Angels,” his debut single, and one of the highlights of his 2022 releases.
ROCWORTHY has released many videos that fans grew to love and support as he began to spread his wings as a rising act. Some of these songs and visuals include tracks such as “Dead Zone”, “Fashionably Late”, and “Angels.” As of now ROCWORTHY has pulled in over a million streams after his last run of releases, and definitely doesn’t show signs of slowing down. This year will undoubtedly be big for ROCWORTHY, as he prepares his newest single “Free Love” which is set for release on Valentine’s Day.
Emphatic in his style, ROCWORTHY is an experimenter who doesn’t operate at the margins. He has the attitude of a longtime music star and uses that currency to buy himself a large amount of wiggle room. In his upcoming single, we get something very different from the artist.
ROCWORTHY is able to combine Afrobeats, Pop and Hip-Hop into this next release and frankly, he does it in a beautiful way that keeps the listener wanting more. With his influences being drawn from music legends such as Papa Wemba, Fally Ipupa, Fela kuti, and many more African Godfathers, this single “Free Love” showcases a little bit of everyone of those influences.
The artist will be hosting a release party for the anticipated single “Free Love” in Los Angeles on February 13th.The party will feature DJ sets from Tomi Tribe, David Stevera, Giselle Peppers, and Hu Dat. This event is a special one given it will be the first artists event that is taking place in Los Angeles and a chance for ROCWORTHY fans to share this moment with the artist.
There has been an idea of ROCWORTHY that fans have stuck to after his quick rise in the music industry; one that so far has been defined by his superstar presence. Despite the authority and confidence the artist displays, there is a weight of other people’s expectations that he bears. To be that “superhuman” machine as he calls it, he needs more time away from the spotlight: days in the studio, in the gym, back in his homeland, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or simply messing around at his computer, and trying to be ahead of the next fashion trend. The problem then is that between his origin story, his touring days with the migos, quite frankly, the serious face in all his photos, there’s a danger he has already been typecast in real life. He is the mysterious, Boujee and arrogant well dressed international kid with a little sexy french accent, seemingly sent here to drive teenagers and their algorithms wild.