Smoke, Time, Time Beach.

Got to go see the right.

Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, your sympathetic spangali of music news and cultural in-betweenness, I'm your host Ben Ratliff.

Perk drink, I still sip, purple trees we still lit, real temper, real trick,ks wag that trill

some kind of cause I'm coming down that paint drip I still tip that hip is

jim pan the blood I pick up I still hit that swaggy.

Everything is purple.

Today we're gonna talk about two people who died in the past week, one born in 1939, one born in 1988. They were

not quite artists, not quite producers in the traditional sense. They were participants in rock and roll and hip-hop.

One was A-Sap Yams and one was Kim Fally. And we came in hearing Purple Swag by A-Sap Rocky, well which bears the imprints in some ways of A-Sap Yams.

John Caramonica is here with us. John, you followed A-Sap Yams, he spent some time with him. You wrote about him when he was on the rise and you wrote a piece about him just recently after he passed.

Yeah. I want you to describe his role.

Okay, well the first piece I wrote about Yams, which came out January 2013, so two years ago,

was just before A Zabrocki put out his debut album.

He put out a mix tape previously, but it not put out his debut album. He put out a mix

previously, but did not put out the album yet.

Yams was someone who I became familiar with off of the internet.

Yams used to run a tumbler that was like a rap tumbler he had basically perfect taste and I don't say

that lightly he had exquisite taste and then he sort of revealed himself as

someone who was working with this guy Rocky and what was

interesting about Rocky in early Rocky and this purple swag is is one of the sort of

breakthrough early Rocky songs how worldly they were you, New York Rab is like the worst thing ever.

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