In an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, ASAP Rocky shared the story of when he met Rihanna for the first time.
Rocky, who shares three children with Rihanna, has been romantically involved with Rih-Rih since at least 2020, but they have known each other for a long time before they ever got together. At the top of the interview, which can be seen in full above, he spoke about welcoming his third child with Rihanna last year and said that it feels “amazing,” and that he feels like “a new man again.”
Asked how he first met Rihanna, he said it was outside of a nightclub in New York City, but it was before he was a famous rapper.
“I wasn’t famous at the time, she was obviously Rihanna,” he laughed. “And I couldn’t get in. The bouncers didn’t want to let me in. And I was with my friend, the late, great Virgil Abloh, and Matthew Williams. We kind of was getting into it with the bouncers, and she came out and we locked eyes right away. I was just like, in a daze. And, you know, I was a little embarrassed that she caught me bickering with the guard and stuff like that.”
Asked if Rihanna helped him get into the nightclub, he laughed, “No.”
Elsewhere in the interview, he spoke about how he got Tim Burton to do the artwork for Don’t Be Dumb.
“So, I had to basically stalk and harass him for a few years,” he laughed. “I hit him up, and I was just like, ‘Yo, man, I’ll be delighted to, like, kick it with you, play you some vibes and stuff.’ So, I went out to Malibu to kick it with him when he had a break, and he was just… He was into it. I played him the album, the early rendition of [it], and he was rocking with it. So I was just like, ‘Yo, you think maybe you could do the illustration for it? And he was keen to it.”
While Burton expressed interest in doing the artwork, the director was incredibly busy immediately after their meeting, working on the Wednesday series and the Beetlejuice sequel. Rocky feared the collaboration wouldn’t come together, but they managed to make it happen, and Burton also appeared in the music video for “Whiskey / Black DeMarco.”