A$AP Rocky Says Denzel Washington Listens To Rappers From This Southern City The Most
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways
In a revelation that surprised even the most diehard Hip-Hop fans, A$AP Rocky has shared that legendary actor Denzel Washington has a deep appreciation for contemporary Memphis rap — and not just in passing.
According to the Harlem rapper, the Oscar-winning actor regularly bumps artists like Pooh Shiesty, Moneybagg Yo, and NLE Choppa on set.
Speaking on The Run-Through with Vogue podcast, Rocky opened up about his experience working alongside Washington on their upcoming film Highest 2 Lowest, a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 crime thriller High and Low.
A$AP Rocky attends The 2023 Met Gala Celebrating 'Karl Lagerfeld: A Line Of Beauty' at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 01, 2023 in New York City.
While the collaboration itself was a dream come true for Rocky, what really caught him off guard was Washington's music taste.
'Denzel would pull up to the movie set playing Pooh Shiesty and Moneybagg Yo, swear to God,' Rocky said during the interview. 'Can't make this up.'
He continued, 'He likes to listen to Memphis rappers, but modern Memphis rappers.' Rocky went on to describe a surreal moment when Washington began quoting lyrics from NLE Choppa.
Denzel Washington attends 'The Equalizer 3' photocall on October 19, 2022 in Atrani, Amalfi, Italy.
'Then he started quoting NLE Choppa. I'm like, 'You know NLE Choppa?!' He like, 'I don't do drive-bys now, walk 'em down.' I'm like, 'Yo, Denzel, chill!' It was crazy, he's really tapped in, man.'
Directed by Spike Lee, Highest 2 Lowest is set to premiere later this month at the Cannes Film Festival, with a theatrical release date of Aug 22. The film will also be available for streaming on Apple TV+ starting Sept 5.
A$AP Rocky attends Rihanna's 5th Annual Diamond Ball at Cipriani Wall Street on September 12, 2019 in New York City.
The project marks a unique moment in both Washington and Rocky's careers — one bridging the worlds of classic cinema and contemporary street culture.
Though Denzel's Hip-Hop bonafides aren't worn on his chest, Rocky, who's known for his own syrupy sound, seems to have found an unexpected kindred spirit in the 70-year-old actor.
Watch the Highest 2 Lowest trailer below.
More from VIBE.com
Sign up for Vibe's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Wall Street Journal
an hour ago
- Wall Street Journal
$3 Million Watches and Caviar for the Cat: How Becca Bloom Became the Queen of RichTok
BECCA BLOOM smiles at the camera and tells her followers she's going to serve a breakfast prepared by her private chef. She holds up a lime-green porcelain Versace platter patterned with an explosion of gold leaves and flowers. 'Oscar and I are eating from matching chargers this morning,' she says brightly. As she assembles the food, she lists each ingredient in a soft, soothing voice: sushi-grade salmon sashimi, tuna bone broth, soft-boiled quail eggs, salmon roe caviar, freeze-dried codfish, edible flower garnishes—and a single blueberry. 'So he can play around with it after he's done,' she explains. After all, the spread isn't for the influencer, whose real name is Rebecca Ma, but her cat. The video cuts to Oscar (a Scottish fold, which Ma chose because Taylor Swift has two of them), contentedly licking away at the salmon from a plate sitting atop the decorative Versace dish. His caviar remains untouched.
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Leonardo DiCaprio, 50, mocked after revealing he feels like he's 32
Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't know about you, but he's feeling 32. The Oscar-winning "Titanic" star, who turned 50 last year, drew mockery on social media after revealing in an Aug. 13 Esquire interview that he feels like he's 32. The quote came out of a discussion between DiCaprio and his "One Battle After Another" director, Paul Thomas Anderson. Addressing DiCaprio, the filmmaker said, "I'm going to ask you a question, and you're going to answer as quickly as you can. If you didn't know how old you are, how old are you right now?" DiCaprio responded, "32." Anderson suggested that DiCaprio should "investigate what happened when you were 32," which would reveal why this is his answer. Later, the "Boogie Nights" director asked the actor a question that Esquire had prepared for him: "You turned 50 last year. Does it feel like a natural time for reflection?" But DiCaprio rephrased this as, "You turned emotionally 35 last year." DiCaprio's quote quickly drew ridicule on social media, with some fans reading it as an effort to justify the fact that he is known to date women much younger than himself. The film star has most recently been romantically linked to supermodel Vittoria Ceretti, 27. The couple attended the Met Gala together in May, when Ceretti was 26. "More like it's the only way he could try and justify chasing after girls under the age of 25," one X user said, while another joked, "He has a problematic age gap with himself." Leonardo DiCaprio, 50, attends Met Gala with girlfriend Vittoria Ceretti, 26: See photo "Straight man is emotionally immature. Groundbreaking stuff," comedian Julia Claire also quipped. But some came to DiCaprio's defense and said they could relate to the sentiment. "People will make fun of this because of his lifestyle and dating roster, but honestly most people who are close to 50 will tell you the same exact thing," X user Danny Manus posted. "(I'm) almost 45 and I feel emotionally 30. Who the hell wants to feel their age?" Anderson also seemed to relate to the idea. After posing the age question to DiCaprio, the 55-year-old filmmaker noted, "By the way, my answer was 27." Leonardo DiCaprio praises 'my dear friend' Kate Winslet in touching reunion Striking a more serious tone, DiCaprio also opened up during the Esquire chat about turning 50, which he said creates a desire to "be more honest and not waste" time. "I can only imagine how the next few decades are going to progress," he reflected. "I look at my mother, for example, and she just says exactly what she thinks and wastes no time. She spends no time trying to fake it." DiCaprio continued, "Being more upfront and risking having things fall apart or risk the disagreements or risk going your separate ways from any type of relationship in life — the personal, professional — it's that you just don't want to waste your time anymore. You have to just be much more upfront. It's almost a responsibility because much more of your life is behind you than it is ahead of you."
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Rosalía Reflects on Her Next Album, Creative Breakups, and 'Euphoria'
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." One Wednesday morning in June, Rosalía decided to start her day with a pensive walk in the woods. She ambled up the steep trail at the Carretera de les Aigües—Barcelona's answer to Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills—and peered out into the distance toward Sant Esteve Sesrovires, the Catalan town where she grew up. She slipped on a pair of headphones and listened to The Smiths' compilation album, Louder Than Bombs. As she recalls the scene to me now, she mimics Morrissey's yearning croons, in the supple vibrato of her own voice. Lifting her manicured hand, exulting in the melodrama of it all, she sings, 'Please, please, please let me get what I want…this time.' This is how we start our conversation inside Pècora, a chic, minimalist coffee shop in the seaside neighborhood of Poblenou that has opened just for us. Rosalía is sitting with her back to the windows—so that potential customers would squint at the Closed sign and overlook the country's most game-changing pop star on the other side of the glass. She's wearing a floor-length Gimaguas dress in baby blue plaid, revealing Dior biker boots when she crosses her legs. Her long curls cascade around her shoulders when she leans in to talk. 'The rhythm of everything is so fast, so frenetic,' says Rosalía, who turns 33 in September. 'And I think, 'My God, it's been eight years since I released my first work.' That's insane to me.' When we meet, it seems as though Rosalía is pushing her way through a creative impasse. Her forthcoming album, the follow-up to 2022's Grammy-winning Motomami, is yet to be completed. 'What is time?' she says, laughing. 'That's so relative! So there's always a deadline and, well, the deadline can always change.' Although she won't divulge what her new record sounds like just yet—she's quite elusive about the whole thing, really—she's shared videos of herself writing and producing tracks as part of a creative campaign for Instagram, as if to prove to fans that she is, indeed, at work. In fact, she's scheduled time at a local studio immediately after our chat to fine-tune her new material. 'I'm in the process,' she says. Of course, there's no shortage of distractions to be had this summer. She wedged our conversation between visits with her family and a detour to Barcelona's famed Primavera Sound festival with her sister, Pili. Soon she'll return to Los Angeles to film the remaining scenes for her guest-starring role in HBO's Euphoria. She's also been seen in Los Angeles, Munich, and Barcelona with her rumored love interest, the German actor-singer Emilio Sakraya. Regarding her dating life, she only says, with a wide, playful grin: 'I spend many hours in the studio. I'm in seclusion.' Her closest relationship right now may be with her piano. The global anticipation for new music is understandable. In her major label debut under Universal Music Spain, 2017's Los Ángeles, she introduced newcomers to the brooding Spanish flamenco standards that she studied at the prestigious Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya. Rosalía then entered the Latin pop stratosphere with her 2018 sophomore album, El Mal Querer—which also served as her baccalaureate thesis, using the 13th-century novela Flamenca as source material to illustrate the workings of an abusive relationship. El Mal Querer would go on to win the Latin Grammy for Album of the Year, then the Grammy for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album. In 2022, she dropped Motomami, a bold work of avant-pop daredeviltry, inspired by music from the Caribbean and fortified with the dauntless, feminist spirit of her mother, who took young Rosalía out for rides on the back of her Harley-Davidson. Motomami won her the same two prestigious Grammy categories as the previous album—a feat that catapulted Rosalía to global stardom, yet inevitably raised the bar for future projects. The pressure to answer to industry demands, she says, is increasingly at odds with her freedom-seeking spirit. 'The rhythm [of the music industry] is so fast,' Rosalía tells me. 'And the sacrifice, the price to pay, is so high.' The only way she can continue without burning out is if her motives feel true. 'The driving force that leads you to continue making music, to continue creating, has to come from a place of purity,' she says. 'Motives like money, pleasure, power…I don't feel that they are fertile. Nothing will come out of there that I'm really interested in. Those are subjects that don't inspire me.' To begin her next chapter, Rosalía sought space far from Spain, in the quiet of Mount Washington, a hilly enclave in northeast Los Angeles. There, she worked from a private music studio, recording songs she'd written almost entirely from bed in a nearby Hollywood apartment. She broke up her days with films by Martin Scorsese and Joachim Trier, and read the novel I Love Dick, a feminist inquiry of desire by Chris Kraus. ('I love this woman! I love how she thinks,' she says of Kraus.) In L.A. last summer, paparazzi caught Rosalía outside Charli XCX's 32nd birthday party wielding a bouquet of black calla lilies filled with cigarettes, sparking a microtrend. ('If my friend likes Parliaments, I'll bring her a bouquet with Parliaments,' Rosalía says. 'You can do a bouquet of anything that you know that person loves!') She also made frequent stops at the local farmers market, where she says she tapped into her primordial gatherer spirit. 'Many times, the more masculine way of making music is about the hero: the me, what I've accomplished, what I have…blah blah blah,' she says. 'A more feminine way of writing, in my opinion, is like foraging. I'm aware of the stories that have come before me, the stories that are happening around me. I pick it up, I'm able to share it; I don't put myself at the center, right?' It is a method she cultivated as an academic, which directly informs her approach to composition. Like works of found-object art, her songs are assemblages of sounds with seemingly disparate DNA, brought together by her gymnastically limber voice. In her 2018 single 'Baghdad,' she interpolated an R&B melody made famous by Justin Timberlake; in her 2022 smash 'Saoko,' she rapped over jazz drum fills and pianos with sludgy reggaeton beats. The visual culture of Rosalía's work is executed with similarly heady intentions, inspired by TikTok videos and the fractured nature of her own presence on the internet. A staple of her Motomami world tour was the cameraman and drones that trailed her and her dancers across the stage. One of my most lasting memories from her shows was just the internal frenzy of deciding whether my eyes would follow Rosalía, the real live person on stage, or Rosalía, the image replicated and multiplied on the screens behind and around above her. 'In a cubist painting, which part do you choose?' says Rosalía of her concept. 'Everything is happening at the same time, right? So you just choose what makes sense for you, where you want to put the eye and where you want to focus your energy.' She's gone mostly offline since her last project. 'Björk says that in order to create, you need periods of privacy—for a seed [to] grow, it needs darkness,' she says. She has also shed some previous collaborators, including Canary Islander El Guincho, the edgy artist-producer who was her main creative copilot in El Mal Querer and Motomami. She says there is no bad blood, though 'we haven't seen each other [in] years. I honestly love working with people long-term. But sometimes people grow apart. He's on a journey now, he's done his [own] projects all these years. And yes, sometimes that can happen where people, you know, they grow to do whatever their journey is. Right now, I'm working by myself.' Going it alone poses a new challenge for Rosalía, who, in true Libran fashion, derives inspiration from the synergy she experiences with others. She has famously collaborated with past romantic partners, like Spanish rapper C. Tangana, who was a co-songwriter on El Mal Querer. In 2023, she released RR, a joint EP with Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro, to whom she was engaged until later that year. She does not speak ill of her exes, if at all, but simply says, 'I feel grateful to each person with whom life has made me find myself.' Rosalía was also linked to Euphoria star Hunter Schafer, who, in a 2024 GQ story, confirmed their five-month relationship back in 2019, and described the singer as 'family, no matter what.' When I ask Rosalía if the experience put pressure on her to publicly define her sexuality, queer or otherwise, she shakes her head. 'No, I do not pressure myself,' she says. 'I think of freedom. That's what guides me.' The two remain friends and, more recently, costars: Earlier this year, Rosalía began shooting scenes for the long-awaited third season of Euphoria. She appreciates the controversial, controlled chaos engendered by the show's writer, director, and producer, Sam Levinson. Equally a fan of the singer, Levinson tells ELLE that he gave her almost free rein to shape her part. 'I love unleashing her on a scene,' he says. 'I let her play with the words, the emotions, in English and Spanish. I never want to tell her what to do first, because her natural instincts are so fascinating, charismatic, and funny. Every scene we shoot, I'm behind the camera smiling.' Rosalía, who first developed her acting chops through the immensely theatrical art of flamenco, says that she likes to put herself 'in service of the emotion, in service of an idea, in service of something that is much grander than me.' Although she can't share much about her role while the season is in production, she says she's enjoyed running into Schafer on set, and developing rapport with costars Zendaya and Alexa Demie. 'I have good friends there. It feels really nice to be able to find each other.' Rosalía's first foray into professional acting was in Pain and Glory, the 2019 film by the great Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Before filming, Almodóvar invited the singer out to lunch with her fellow countrywoman and costar Penélope Cruz. They would play laundresses singing together as they washed clothes in the river. 'I was terrified to have to sing with her,' Cruz recalls. 'She was nervous about acting, and I was nervous about singing—and it was funny to be sharing that nervousness.' Cruz and Rosalia would become great friends—two Spanish icons who have brought their country's culture to a global audience. But between the two divas, there existed no air of gravitas—only genuine, hours-long talks and banter built on mutual admiration. 'I've always been mesmerized by her voice,' Cruz says, 'and her talent also as a composer, as a writer, as an interpreter. The way she performs and what she can transmit is something really special.' She notes that Rosalía's artistry has had a ripple effect in Spain, sparking a wave of experimentation. It's a legacy that Rosalía helped accelerate, but she declines to take credit for it. She's more inclined to cite her forefathers in flamenco, Camarón de la Isla and Enrique Morente, as well as Björk and Kate Bush, who she says are part of the same matriarchal lineage in pop. '[If] Kate Bush exists, and then Björk exists, then another way of making pop exists,' Rosalía says. 'I couldn't make the music I make if there wasn't a tradition behind it, which I could learn from and drink from. I hope that in the same way, what I do can make sense for other artists.' But when it comes to matters of fashion, Rosalía is much more protective of her own steeze, an ultrafemme, Venus-like biker chic she's spent her life cultivating. 'Girl,' she says, motioning at her own body, 'I am a moodboard in flesh! I feel that as an artist, I cannot only express myself through music. You can be creative in your life 24-7. It's just about allowing yourself to be in that state. For me, style is an elongation, an extension of the expression.' Yet before we leave, she stresses that—whether she releases one more album in her life, or 20—music will be the compass that orients her for the rest of her days. 'It's funny when people say I quit music,' Rosalía says. 'That's impossible! If you are a musician, you can't quit. Music is not something you can abandon. 'Sometimes it takes a second for you to be able to process what you've done,' she adds. 'It's a blessing in an artistic career to process things, or rewrite how it should have been done before—in your life or in anything. The immediacy of today's rhythms is not the rhythm of the soul. And to create in an honest way, you have to know what rhythm you're going with.' Hair by Evanie Frausto for Pravana; makeup by Raisa Flowers for Dior Beauty; manicure by Sonya Meesh for Essie; set design by Lauren Nikrooz at 11th House Agency; produced by John Nadhazi and Michael Gleeson at VLM Now You Might Also Like The 15 Best Organic And Clean Shampoos For Any And All Hair Types 100 Gifts That Are $50 Or Under (And Look Way More Expensive Than They Actually Are) Solve the daily Crossword
