Vince Staples Is Playing Himself

Long Beach rapper Vince Staples is otherworldly talented at his best. So, why does it feel like he is not putting his best foot forward to effect listeners?

In December, six months before Cry Baby, his new and sixth studio album came out, Vince Staples went viral for an interview once again, this time with the comedian Ziwe. In a salmon-painted room, with white accessories in a large, vaguely girlish space, he sat down with Ziwe, a woman often doing an ineffective dance with guest on their lack of understanding about race. She met her match with Staples. If Ziwe is a millennial in nature, earnest and jockeying for a subject to understand the weight of American culture, then Staples entered into the rap game the same way as Ziwe did: a young millennial, interested in holding white Americans accountable. Staples, though, confronted America with a stern tone, more strict than Ziwe’s bubbly yet angry comedy. Staples was, as usual, flipping an interviewer’s question into a funny punchline. After a question about January 6, Staples quipped. “I want us to do that. We would do better because they were just ugly. The problem with revolution is that it will be photographed. So sloppy, loose t-shirts, nobody got a pump, it’s just not beautiful. And so you’re fighting the government and you look like shit”, Staples says, barely breaking a sweat during this bold bit. “We’d be looking, Met Gala. Walls Bonner everywhere.”

It was funny, for certain, a startling take on Chris Rock jokes circa 1996 and 1999 about white people being less cool than Black people even when both are doing disagreeable things. Staples is good at interviews, especially for someone who isn’t remotely media trained. Remember when Dakota Johnson went on The Ellen Degeneres show and kind of spoke about Ellen as if she might be a little more evil than she lets on for her soccer mom crowd? Staples interviews are quietly deadly like that. For his relatively low fame, Staples’s words do seem to rattle people’s polite views on the topics he rants about. In an interview with Joe Budden, he responded to Jay-Z’s claims that the streets are done because George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s killer, is still alive and XXXTentacion isn’t. “As long as niggas are broke and have dead homies, the streets ain’t done”, Staples responded, to Jay-Z’s claims. That’s part of what makes Staples fun to listen to: he’s someone unafraid to say things that are unpopular, disagreeing with Jay-Z in order to do it. Much of him is based on being contrarian, so when he is asked about Drake and Kendrick beefing, he responds about it being a distraction to the larger issue of rappers being denied their publishing rights, which should be a basic right for all. For all of Staples’s acclaim as a rapper, he does not join in on industry politics, nor does he seem to fraternize much with other rappers. Who is Staples’s peer in the rap game? In a way, this makes Staples a lonely figure, an artist who is not part of any single scene nor genre, but is rather a rapper without a tree or a country. He’s made some strong music at points in his career, yet he’s a notorious enigma that has now.

Ever since he dropped Summertime 06 and decided to pivot to an alternative hip-hop, almost none of Vince Staples’s most discussed moments come from his music. Whenever he does an interview on the state of music industry, some of his words hit with more of a punch than they do on some of his recent records. It’s a paradox. At his most focused, Staples is a talented rapper, a sophisticate of acrobatic flows that can be so tricky that you can hear it five times and still don’t know where it’s going to end up at. “Norf Norf”, on Summertime 06, is much like that. The third verse is a masterclass, with Staples packing Boyz n the Hood plots with Long Beach lore with the precision of a Brady out route by finish every stanza with “wet”, “fact-check”, and “clap yet.” The chaos of the flow, the words, the way he describes the intricacies of a popular hood classic is startling. So was his topics. Staples is a gangster rapper who has spoken about the anxieties of having white fans in a Black medium. On “Lift Me Up”, the intro track to Summertime 06 and one of its standout songs, he raps “All these white folks chanting when I ask them where my niggas at/Crazy, got me going crazy I can’t get with that/Wonder if they know I know they won’t go where we kick it at.”

It’s easy to see where Staples is getting at. Gangster rap music is always on the risk of being a minstrel show for the wickedest of white people because they don’t actually come from these neighborhoods, so some of them, or honestly probably most of them, are listening to this music without context, using the genre to scratch the itch they have for art that depicts American violence in a cool way as opposed what it actually is: mundane and devastating. In a way, Staples rapping about that is very intelligent in an industry that has now made billions on rappers and their violent lore. Think about the lore of 50 Cent, how he survived a very traumatic shooting in Jamaica, Queens that gave way to his reputation as a one-man wrecking ball out to get justice. That’s what sold in 2003 as much as his jaw-slurred hooks and sharp-edged lyrics. It was a sense that 50 was a superhero or supervillain representing American culture and its violence, it being 2003 when Bush sending troops to Iraq, with Dick Cheney helping him lie about their weapons of mass destruction. 50 was a stand in for the bloodthirsty and shivering hunger of the American man, lusting for revenge after bin Laden sent his underlings on a suicide mission in Lower Manhattan. Staples, who went into gang life in eighth grade, makes music that truly doesn’t glorify any of his life. Even on 2022’s Ramona Park Broke My Heart, he’s written from the eyes of a veteran of the war of the streets. It’s an emotionally acute record but not a harsh one: the subject matter needed more nerve. He is more Cormac McCarthy than he is 2Pac. He’s right to jap at white fans in a Black medium. He came up in the Vice era, where white men in glasses would go to neighborhoods and voyeuristically check out where rappers are from. It made for good YouTube videos, biographical details of a person’s life that let viewers understand the weight of the lyrics these rappers spout, but now we’re in the era of DJ Vlad, No Jumper, and N3ON, men with opinions and interviews on street life that they are infiltrating for their own gain. (I say this as someone who as spoken to Adam22 on Zoom and had a phase when I was younger where I consumed some of his content). Staples is trying to limit the hype of his music because it is about gang life in America, and there is a lane where that stuff becomes cartoonish. You could imagine fans treating him like a piece of meat to be picked at like D’Angelo.

Yet, because of this otherwise very smart contrarianism about his career and his music, he has become more famous for the stuff he says in interviews than he has for his music. There is a difference between critiquing the lust white people have for the violent details of hip-hop and trying to lessen your music out of fear those white people will become your fans. So many of his interviews are becoming clicks that filter onto timelines, clips for people to hilariously laugh at; so much of his music now feels cripplingly niche. He’s good at circumventing leading questions, flipping them to answer with tangents that are born out of the brain of a smoker’s fifth spliff. Staples’s face is confidently blank, his teeth not showing like he just listened to Ice Cube’s Death Certificate, his words blurting out the tantalizing danger that is in his mind, leading a viewer’s toes to be perked, awaiting what crazed opinion, what witty sentence he will say. In the space between a journalist asking a standard question and an artist giving a proper answer to said question, Staples becomes an uncontrollable truth-teller, as if having decisive and smart things to say is part of a kind of Tourette’s Syndrome. It’s impossible to know whether to laugh at him or laugh with him.

I’m laughing with him at times because I know what he is getting at — that people expect rappers to be violent, crazed individuals and Staples is just a regular guy making his art, trying to figure out how to be an artist without selling himself in a way that only benefits bad faith fans and consumers. I’m also laughing at him because of his career, which scans as disappointing once you erase Summertime 06. Staples is consumed by a niche amount of people, an amount that feels small compared to what he could be. Staples could be a huge star: his best music is so confrontational and acidic, anti-establishment music with vocals that drill like Snoop Pearson’s nail gun. Imagine if Earl Sweatshirt and How to Rob-era 50 Cent had a baby — that’s what Staples was when he first came out, threatening President Obama and monotonously and almost depressingly confessing that “they never taught him how to be a man, only how to be a shooter.”

In fairness to Staples, Earl Sweatshirt has also retreated from his fame in a compelling way. However, where Earl has progressed as a rapper, abandoning ultra-technical assonance and zeroing in on the intricate but casual details of his delivery and lyrics, Staples seems removed from rap scenes. Sweatshirt is now taking from smaller scenes like MIKE’s independent “muffle rap” scene and investing in them, where Staples is less involved with picking up new tricks from other rappers. Where Earl lives in the lane of honest absurdity, being scared of failing at his currently calm life because of the alcoholic darkness that lives right next to his raw wisdom, Staples is less knowable, using new album Cry Baby to critique America but interpersonally, as if he is an omnipresent viewer from the sky. By focusing on who is consuming his music, Staples has denied himself the right for his music to travel to a wide amount of people. He’s overthinking his output, making muted or rap rock music that feels so modest that he may as well drop it under a pen name. His fourth album, Vince Staples, for example, has some of his best verses, songs like “LAW OF AVERAGES” bounce with references from boxers like Muhammad Ali and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter to rap heroes like Lil Wayne, but it also is an example of Staples’s reluctance. Without breaking a sweat, he’s nimble, but he’s also wasting lyrics on songs that die in the hot air whenever I thought they would be steamy and vigorous.

On Cry Baby, he might be going for what Kanye West did on certain Yeezus songs, but it gets closer to the inertia of Lil Yachty on Let’s Stay Here. West used Yeezus’s musty and cosmopolitan sonics as a canvas for his complicated musings on what it means to be a famous Black man in Paris and beyond. By bringing Chief Keef and King Louie to Paris fashion houses, he was showing the imperial ego of the Black man and the zenith of their creativity, being able to unpack his sexual appetites on “I’m In It” or his desire for the spouses of the white power structure, playing with racist tropes and flipping them for his own gain. That is the epitome of great Black art. Staples’s art is easy listening compared to that. His mention of Obama and Kamala on “Blackberry Marmalade” by interpolating Jay-Z’s flow on “The Story of OJ”, or the post-High Maintenance credit music of “Go! Go! Gorilla” is well-made but doesn’t pierce anyone’s skin, instead becoming music that seems to fade. There’s lyrics about capitalism and record label owners on “Cotton”, your worldly pleasures hindering you from having a livelihood in a country that keeps being more unaffordable on “The Running Man.” Yet, the music feels perpetually stuck in the cocoon of prestige. Where are the freak bass lines of Bootsy or the post-Radiohead meets static, television on the fritz sounds of TV on the Radio if Staples wants to make a rock album? Some of the music makes for a calm day in the park as opposed to being the canvass for Staples’s frustrations.

Yet, because he is talented, critics aren’t panning his music, they are mostly giving it good scores for its writing and steady production and coherent vision. I get it: Staples can rap and he’s one of the few rappers that is comfortable in adulthood, dropping records whenever he says they will drop with little drama and excessive egotism. It reminds me of Mac Miller’s output in the 2010’s. Miller was a friend to the media, so people were scared of disrespecting the work that Miller did. In a less glaring manner, Staples has benefitted from the same political acumen. He’s given the media hilarious quotes and hits on YouTube, so it has protected him for the mediocrity of his output. It makes me respect his career less, given him adoration that he hasn’t earned. Is the lack of nerve in some of his albums because he wanted to leave the deal he had with Def Jam? Still, if that is the case, I wish we had gotten some great music about that conundrum. He seems to be scared of his own electricity, scared of what it means to be a daring rapper, what it means to rap so well and rap so aggressively that people are shook of you. Summertime 06 is an album that should have had Kendrick Lamar hearing whispers because it has the storytelling of good kid m.A.A.d. City without the indebted-to-the-golden-age skits that take away from the album’s flow. Now, Lamar is probably wondering who Staples is, especially after their average collaboration “Yeah Right” didn’t move the needle. Lamar vs Staples should have been a West Coast debate for the last ten years. Instead, Cry Baby is almost offensively boring, switching genres but not at all polarizing anybody. What happened to the Staples that I liked on “Norf Norf” and “Señorita?” He’s become a darling of the magazine critic.

Some of his career scans as light cowardice, stemming from a fear of what his greatness would be: As a rapper, aren’t you in the rap game to be the best rapper alive? Don’t you want to be a rapper whose music is a trampoline for young rappers listening to you? It seems to me that to deny yourself a chance of being a certified West Coast rap legend just because white people are annoying about hip-hop that they like is to play yourself beyond belief. You will have a ton of white fans regardless; you might as well have more Black fans by dropping some heat that everyone can be astounded by. There is nothing that will make Staples more interesting than rapping at a level so impressive that the whole world takes notice, which is something that he is capable of doing but seems actively stopping himself from doing. Maybe he wants to show mystery, leave us with something more, but instead, he’s left us with strong scores from Pitchfork and Vulture that mute any reverberations that ought to repel.