College Boy

My interview on 4/20 with Asher Roth, backstage at Bam Margera's The Note in West Chester before Roth went on stage at exactly 4:20 to celebrate the release of his Asleep In The Bread Aisle debut, is here. That's Inky photographer Ed Hille's shot of Roth holding forth. The "I Love College" video is below. "Pass out at 3, wake up at 10, go out to eat, do it again." It's comforting to know that some things don't change. But don't fret, concerned parents: along with rhyming "I am champion at beer pong" with "Allen Iverson" and "Hakeem Olajuwon," Roth, who dropped out of West Chester to chase his hip-hop dreams, does at least pay lip service to going to class, "for a while," anyway.

The "Roth Boys" video, Roth's take on Jay-Z's "Roc Boys," from The Greenhouse Effect mixtape is below the "College" clip. And here's the animated video for "Lark On My Go-Kart" in which the Morrisville rapper boasts that "Ash can get nasty, like a blond Bob Saget." Roth hangs with Beanie Sigel in Vegas, and raps with the Philadelphia emcee on "The Perfectionist." Plus, a couple of Lala streams of Asleep In The Bread Aisle tunes, both of which sound like to me like soon to be pop hits that'll make Roth's point that there's more to him than the smirking frat boy that meets the eye.

"His Dream" is the one that's about Asher's father David, who bequeathed his writer's genes to his son, and who told me he did his best to school the nascent rapper on the spoken and sung storytelling tradition from the Beat poets to Springsteen's Nebraska. It's the accessible-to-adults track that could do for Roth what "Stan" did for Eminem.  "Fallin'" is the breezy autobiographical cut that would fit in nicely alongside DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince's "Summertime," in which the "straight from the Philly 'burbs" rapper remembers "then came high school, started pickin' up a mic, thought I was cool/My friend said, 'Homie, you know that you're white, dude?'"

Roth is at the World Cafe Live tonight, at Rutgers Camden tomorrow, and the Roots Picnic on June 6.