Asher Roth
Morrisville, PA
By Jason Newman
Photography by Matthew Furman
Let’s just forego the clever lead and lay out all the elephants in the room right now.
Asher Roth is: a) 23-years-old, b) white, c) from the suburbs of Morrisville, PA and d) getting love from seemingly everyone in the game and earning “Next Big Thing” status
If you think those four statements are incongruous, you haven’t heard The Greenhouse Effect, Roth’s coming out and the first melanin-challenged artist to put out a Gangsta Grillz mixtape from the format’s kings: DJ Drama and Don Cannon. Unlike his Grillz peers though, the rapper’s roots are strictly (and proudly) suburbs, yet his sinewy flow, guy-next-door charm and clever punch lines have already started to connect the frat house with the street.
“My parents will tell you I’ve had rap Tourette’s since I was 12-years-old,” says Roth. “It was just staying true to what I wanted to say… A lot of people will give you that, ‘Well, I could’ve done that,’ and it’s like, ‘Well, why don’t you?’”
The product of a Dire Straits-loving dad and Earth, Wind and Fire-listening mom, Roth wasn’t the cat bumping Nation of Millions and Death Certificate since the womb. Like so many other white, suburban kids, artists like Public Enemy and Ice Cube were rebellious, but distant and not relatable.
“I was always from the outside looking in,” says Roth. “Hip-hop has always been very influential in the ‘burbs, [but] it’s just a matter of where we could relate to it. You find a lot of kids that are really confused. You look at them and they’re dressed out of character. They don’t look right. I figured out, I don’t have to dress this way, but you can still love hip-hop.”
An eventual student of the game, Roth started with Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life” and worked backwards from there. In high school, tracks were written and recorded in a friend’s basement and sold at the school (“I sold 250 copies in two days,” he says proudly). During college Roth posted a few verses on Myspace and earned the notice of now-manager Scooter Braun. Braun, a long-time friend of DJ Drama and Ludacris’s manager Chaka Zulu, brought Roth to Zulu, who viewed him initially as the skinny, blond-haired emcee.
“He wasn’t even looking at me, man. He was looking at his Blackberry,” recalls Roth with a
laugh. “I think that’s the telltale sign. If you can get an executive to look up from their Blackberry, you’re on to something. I rapped for him and he put it down.”
Having currently put college on hold, the emcee is slowly working his way past the inevitable stigmas and has gotten love from everyone from Jay-Z to Ludacris to Andre 3000. After a heated bidding war, Roth went with SRC, the company founded by industry legend Steve Rifkind, whom will release his debut album next February.
In the meantime, there’s the The Greenhouse Effect, introducing the world to both the fun (“Rub on Your Titties”) and introspective (“The Lounge”) sides of the rapper.
“I think I’m always gonna have that stigma of ‘corny, white boy’ no matter what I do. People ask me, ‘Are you exploiting white people in hip-hop? Are you exploiting being from the ‘burbs?’ People are gonna think whatever they want, especially if they don’t know me. But at the end of the day, you see me on the video [for “Roth Boys”]; it’s all smiles and good times. That’s for real.”
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