A$AP Rocky is getting real about the pain that shaped one of hip-hop’s most distinctive personas.
In a recent sit-down with Jason Lee on The Jason Lee Show, the Harlem native opened up about the murder of his older brother Ricky and how that loss pushed him away from the streets and toward the stylish, creative identity the world now knows as Pretty Flacko.
“My brother got shot down the block, on our block,” Rocky said. “I was born down the block on 116th and Morningside… he just got shot on the block and died on the block he was born on and raised on, ironically.
“And when that happened, I think I was 13, and it was kind of hard for me to process, but I did know that the valuable lesson that I learned was that I didn’t want to be like my brother. He showed me not to be like him.”
“He was in the streets. He was Big Blood. He was a four-star general. Teardrops, all that. Everybody know who Brazy Ricky was. Everybody know Joker Ricky.”
“Anybody could tell you nah, he’s nothing like his brother. My brother was tough. I never was tough. I was always on some like get-fly pretty boy.”
“When he died is when I turned into Pretty Flacko, you know? Before that I wanted to be just like him. So I had a point to prove, like I’m tough, I could hang. That never really was me.”
Rocky continued, reflecting on the void left behind. With his father incarcerated, an uncle deported, and other men in the family gone or locked up, he said he found himself looking toward the arts instead of the block.
“I really didn’t have much people to look up to. So I started just glorifying people of the arts, and I knew that I didn’t want that kind of road, that kind of story, to be my destiny. He crawled so I could run.”
The story isn’t entirely new for longtime fans. Rocky has referenced his brother’s death in past interviews and even a 2017 Mercedes-Benz campaign, consistently framing it as the moment he chose a different path. Ricky, who was about seven years older, had taught young Rakim Mayers how to rap and inspired his signature braids. In a 2013 MTV visit back to the same Harlem corner, Rocky recalled the day he learned of the shooting while heading to school and the family’s rush to the hospital.
That trauma ultimately redirected him. While he briefly sold drugs as a teenager, Rocky has said the loss softened him and made music the real way out. The “Pretty Flacko” moniker — first popularized on his 2012 track of the same name — became the public face of that shift: a Harlem kid who kept the edge but leaned fully into fashion, creativity, and a different kind of swagger.
Years later, with a string of hit albums, a fashion empire, and a growing acting résumé under his belt, Rocky is still circling back to the block that made him. The latest conversation with Jason Lee stands as one of his most detailed reflections yet on how personal tragedy helped birth the persona that launched a career.
