Via Billboard:
On Saturday (Jan. 24) the third day of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the Harlem rapper attended the premiere of Dope, the buzzed-about coming-of-age film in which he makes his big-screen acting debut, with a supporting role playing a drug dealer in Inglewood, Calif.
Hours later, Rocky was spitting onstage, outside at Park City’s central intersection on Main Street and Heber Ave., to set off the premiere’s after-party. But he only performed two songs before abruptly leaving the stage — he dedicated the final song to his fallen crewmate Steven “A$AP Yams” Rodriguez, the co-founder/mastermind behind A$AP Mob who passed away just six days earlier, on Jan. 18, of still-undisclosed causes.
An hour later, in a small room behind the after-party, which had moved inside to the hotel Main & Sky, Rocky explained to Billboard why his set was so short: he’s in mourning. In fact, he revealed, later that night he would be hopping on a plane, presumably back to New York, to attend Yams’ burial.
“That performance — that was just going to stop me from crying,” Rocky said, speaking for the first time in detail about Yams’ death. “I had to address it, because the whole time I was rapping and I wasn’t into it, which is sad, but I just gotta keep it real. I can’t front. It’s even harder knowing that I gotta fly out in less than an hour just to go bury him. That’s the part that eats at me.”
On Jan. 20 an NYPD spokesperson told The Fader that Yams’ cause of death was unknown, but that hasn’t stop many from speculating that a drug overdose was to blame. A$AP Ant recently denounced those rumors, and Rocky backed him up.
“People were saying that Yams overdosed on drugs — he didn’t overdose on any drugs,” Rocky said, though he declined to discuss the real cause of Yams’ passing. “I feel like people feel that way because that’s all he’s in pictures doing. When you see A$AP Yams you see Hennessey or purple drink, you see some type of controlled substance or illegal narcotic.”
Wearing all-black, with his hair pulled back in his signature braids, Rocky justifiably looked and sounded worn-out. “I’ll be back in my zone in a bit,” he said. “I just got it get it together. This all happened and the timing is so wrong, with me doing Sundance and Mens Fashion Week in Paris.”
But Rocky insisted he’s doing all right, and that he would recover from his friend’s sudden death. “I’m a happy spirit, man, and I feel like time heals,” he said. “It’s all about good people with good energy, and the universe keeps producing them to me. I’ll be fine. God is good and I keep all hope and faith.”
