A$AP Rocky Covers June/July Issue of GQ Magazine

When A$AP Rocky was in a Swedish jail, the sun never really set. It was July 2019, and Rocky was being held in pretrial detention on an assault charge stemming from a street fight in Stockholm with a few young men who had been following and harassing him and his crew. For a month, he was, he says, confined to a single-person cell for 23 and a half hours a day. He found it hard to sleep. During the high summer in Stockholm, the sun is out for about 18 hours a day. For the other six, dusk melts into dawn. At night, as this eerie twilight spilled through his cell window, Rocky kept the TV on; the background noise of Swedish-language news helped lull him to sleep. But about a week before he expected to get out, a sound on the TV jolted Rocky awake.

“Even though it was in Swedish, I heard ‘President Donald Trump’ and ‘A$AP Rocky,’ and I woke up out of my sleep,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, fuck!’ ”

That’s how Rocky learned that the president had become the most prominent supporter of the #FreeRocky cause. The news was reporting that Trump tweeted that he had spoken with Kanye West about Rocky’s incarceration and that he would be calling the Swedish prime minister about the situation. The following day, the president tweeted that he would personally vouch for Rocky’s bail. On the list of Trump’s priorities, freeing Rocky seemed to be somewhere up there with building the wall and complaining about CNN.

Continue reading on GQ Magazine.