Regardless, Clams Casino's presence has far from diminished, especially in Rocky's case: his production credit appeared on two, admittedly minor LongLiveA$AP songs-'LVL' and the Santigold-featuring 'Hell'-which appear in instrumental form on Volpe's third instrumental mixtape in three years, released for free on Twitter just before 2013 came to a close. The lifespan of new sounds in hip-hop is incongruous and more often than not brutally curt towards its creators, but bemoaning it is a waste of time. Like Lex Luger and many others before him, Volpe came, saw, innovated, permeated, and was appropriated until his and the genre's sonic DNA were more or less one. Some may interpret this development as bigger producers ripping off one of the decade's most fascinating sonic developments in underground hip-hop, but the truth is more straightforward. The 'big songs' from that album still possessed the same slightly woozy, off-center charm that Volpe had previously lent Rocky's music, but the credits behind those sounds-Hit-Boy, Skrillex, Shebib-weren't Volpe's. So even though his alignment with Volpe's star was well-timed, it was unsurprising to see the Harlem rapper set his eyes on bigger prizes for last year's major label debut LongLiveA$AP.

An artist who's expressed ambition despite possessing particularly unshowy skills as a rapper, Rocky has proven himself adept at capturing the zeitgeist with the eager eyes of a child trapping lightning bugs in a jar. Volpe first gained recognition producing tracks for impressionistic rapper-turned-Tony Robbins-type Lil B, but the artist that's most closely aligned himself with the Clams Casino sound is A$AP Rocky, who drenched himself in Volpe's sticky fog for his star-making 2011 mixtape LIVELOVEA$AP. (The wave of Clams Casino imitators was once at such a high tide that an entire genre was formed out of the lazily drawn, tab-tripping micro-phenomenon that followed-'cloud rap'-but like so many cultural fads in the internet age, its prevalence was mercifully brief.) UK producer Evian Christ, first heard as the latest in a legion of bedroom producers to ride Volpe's coattails, was one of the many cooks in the kitchen that brewed Kanye West's energizing latest LP Yeezus, where the fuzzy belches and moaning yawps associated with the strongest Clams Casino material ripped the sky open on the sex-drenched, electric 'I'm In It'. You can hear the ghostly, amniotic thrum of Clams Casino's style in the strongest work by Drake and Noah '40' Shebib, two artists who made one of the only albums to sell more than a million copies in the U.S.

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