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Pierre Lapointe, Grand Duke Of Broken Souls

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A$AP Rocky Teams Up With Jessica Pratt for Genre-Spanning Single ‘Highjack’

A$AP Rocky Teams Up With Jessica Pratt for Genre-Spanning Single ‘Highjack’
Emily Zemler
By Emily ZemlerAug 02, 2024
Emily Zemler
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A$AP Rocky has dropped a new single, “Highjack,” featuring Los Angeles folk-pop musician Jessica Pratt. The track was produced by Greg Kurstin, Hitkidd, Jordan Patrick, and Zach Fogarty, and has background vocals from Creed B Good and Jon Batiste. The song will appear on the rapper’s forthcoming LP, Don’t Be Dumb.

In an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, A$AP Rocky spoke about working with Pratt and Batiste on the song. “I just love alternative,” the rapper told Lowe. “I love just different sounds and whatnot. [Pratt] kind of gave me this kind of Portishead meets Stevie Nicks vibe a little bit. Right. So I always fucked with her as a artist, and so I figured it was necessary to get her, Jon Batiste on this one, and kind of make it feel soulful to bring it on home in the outro.”

The rapper explained of the song’s theme, “I feel like the real is back man, and it’s just like, this shit is for the taking. It’s a hijack. Not only that, it’s just we coming with a whole new aesthetic on everything, especially with German expressionism and the whole ghetto futurism grim thing. So that’s just what the sound sounds like and whatnot. The sonics of it.”

He added, “I’ve been working on this stuff, this material for a while now, tweaking it and fixing it and whatnot. So this was just one of the ones that we decided to, it was the summer and here we are. Shot a visual and yeah, this is part of the new saga.”

A$AP Rocky has been teasing Don’t Be Dumb, due Aug. 30, for a few months. He premiered several untitled tracks from the LP during Paris Fashion Week, when he debuted his first AWGE collection, American Sabotage. Last year, he told Dazed he felt the new music was his “best work yet.” He added, “I want to leave expectations wide and open. I don’t want to tell you what to expect. I just want people to experience it how they do naturally.”

Pratt released her latest album, Here in the Pitch, in May. It marked Pratt’s fourth album, following a five-year hiatus after 2019’s Quiet Signs. “I never wanted it to take this long,” she said of the wait. “I’m just a real perfectionist. I was just trying to get the right feeling, and it takes a long time to do that.”  

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Pierre Lapointe, Grand duke of broken souls

Cotton two-piece by Marni, SSENSE.com / Shirt from personal collection

Photographer Guillaume Boucher / Stylist Florence O. Durand / HMUA: Raphaël Gagnon / Producers: Malik Hinds & Billy Eff / Studio: Allô Studio

Pierre Lapointe, Grand duke of broken souls

Many years ago, while studying theatrical performance at Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe, Pierre Lapointe was given a peculiar exercise by his teacher. The students were asked to walk from one end of the classroom to the other while observing their peers. Based solely on their gait, posture, and gaze, they had to assign each other certain qualities, a character, or even a profession.

Lapointe remembers being told that there was something princely about him. That was not exactly the term that this young, queer student, freshly emancipated from the Outaouais region and marked by a childhood tinged with near-chronic sadness, would have instinctively chosen for himself. Though he had been unaware of his own regal qualities, he has spent more than 20 years trying to shed this image, one he admits he may have subtly cultivated in his early days.

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