A$AP Mob founder A$AP Yams has passed away at age 26. Several members of the New York City collective confirmed the death on Twitter and Instagram, but no further details about his death have been made public.
A$AP Yams, whose given name was Steven Rodriguez, interned with Diplomats Records as a teenager. In 2007, at 17-years old, Yams helped form the A$AP Mob collective alongside A$AP Bari and A$AP Illz. Yams’ long-running and frequently-updated Tumblr account drew widespread attention for its curation of music, fashion and art.
In 2013, the New York Times profiled Yams and painted him as an executive in the vain of Puff Daddy, Damon Dash and Irv Gotti.
“Much of what you hear in Rocky—a fully assimilated take on Hip Hop styles from across the country and from across time periods—can be traced back to Yams, who spent his formative years studying the genre, then learning how to transmit his taste to others,” the paper’s Jon Caramanica wrote. “Hip Hop has long been obsessed with fealty to a specific place and time, and Yams’s vision of the genre as an open house, not a fortress, qualifies as a radical one.”
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A$AP Rocky, A$AP Ferg and the official A$AP Mob account paid tribute to their fallen founder with a series of Instagram posts. Drake and Mac Miller also took to Twitter to share their condolences.
A$AP Yams’ final Tumblr post came at 4:14 am on Friday (January 16) in which he shared a picture of himself alongside Mr. MFN Exquire and Da$h.
For additional A$AP Mob coverage, watch the following DX Daily:
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