A$AP Rocky

Rocky was eleven when "Sippin' On Some Syrup" hit the radio. "I used to go crazy when that song came on!" he told Vibe in 2011. "I didn't know they were talking about that lean. I thought they were talking about pancake syrup." The joke gives away how young the obsession started, and it never really ended — in 2014 he built "Multiply" around a sample of the group's "Stay Fly," bringing Juicy J himself back to rap his own hook, and in 2018 he was one of the rappers who freestyled over "Who Run It" when the 1999 track went viral all over again.

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2005

Stay FlyThree 6 Mafia

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2014

MultiplyA$AP Rocky

listen forLine up Three 6 Mafia's "Stay Fly" against "Multiply" and the debt is stated outright: Rocky and the A$AP Mob rap straight over the same sung hook, and Juicy J shows up to deliver his own original lines inside Rocky's track rather than a reworked cameo. Underneath, listen for the same punishing low end and pitched vocal snatches that made Memphis's sound exportable — the atmosphere Rocky chased since he was eleven, now built with the original architects in the room.

Rocky doesn't leave this one to interviewers. On "Palace," the opening track of his 2011 mixtape Live. Love. A$AP, he states it plainly: "Influenced by Houston / you can hear it in my music." He'd already named UGK to Vibe as part of the Southern half of his listening — No Limit, Cash Money, UGK, Bone Thugs N Harmony — the counterweight to the Harlem records that raised him. Wikipedia's account of the mixtape backs the claim up in the production itself: the grooves "generally stay on the DJ Screw side of the BPMs," the slowed, syrupy sound UGK's Pimp C helped make Houston's signature export.

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2007

Int'l Players Anthem (I Choose You)UGK

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2012

GoldieA$AP Rocky

listen forUGK and OutKast's "Int'l Players Anthem" rides a slow, warped Willie Hutch sample — the unhurried, sun-drenched Houston pace that Rocky chased on his own records. "Goldie," his 2012 lead single, pushes the same idea further: producer Hit-Boy pitched Rocky's vocals down into what a Line of Best Fit review called "screwed choruses" over "low-end thump," the same chopped-and-screwed vocal treatment DJ Screw pioneered and UGK rode to national attention. Listen for how both tracks let the tempo sag rather than push — the tell of the Houston sound Rocky spent his career importing north.

Before Rocky ever blended his sound with the South, he had a New York education, and Mobb Deep sat near the top of the reading list. "I've been influenced by everything," he told Vibe in 2011, naming the duo in the same breath as Dipset and Wu-Tang Clan; TheGrio's 2025 profile lists them again among the artists whose records he grew up on before he ever considered rapping for a living. It's that dense, paranoid, bass-heavy New York foundation — not the Southern half of his sound — that Mobb Deep supplied, and it's the half critics say he never abandoned even as he chased other regions.

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1995

Shook Ones, Pt. IIMobb Deep

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2011

PesoA$AP Rocky

listen for"Shook Ones, Pt. II" set the template for a specific kind of New York dread: a queasy piano loop, drums mixed low and close, a rapper's voice pushed right up against the mic. "Peso," the leaked single that first put Rocky's name on blogs, works the same room — doom-laden bass, hazy atmosphere, and a vocal delivery that stays unhurried no matter how ominous the beat gets underneath him. It's a family resemblance in mood and space rather than a direct lift, the New York constant running under all his Southern detours.