Vince Staples, the rapper, is this terse and traumatized figure whose music suggests a memorial service.
Vince Staples, the celebrity, is this fun-loving provocateur whose interviews suggest a comedy roast. These social performances raised his profile within top-tier media, but also sent mixed signals about his music. On Twitter, he’d stan the city of Atlanta, he’d eviscerate Chipotle, and he’d even tease the indomitable hater (and fellow rave-rap enthusiast) Azealia Banks. He gave great quotes to magazines and radio shows. In contrast, Staples-even in his hip-house mode-voiced a perpetual wariness.ĭuring his first couple of years in the limelight, Staples cultivated a peculiar reputation for his media savvy. The critic Jayson Greene, reviewing Summertime ’06 for Pitchfork, once described Staples as “Chance the Rapper drained of hope.” Chance fell out of fashion circa 2019 with The Big Day in large part due to the relentless optimism and terminal cutesiness in his music. That’s the subtext to so much of his music: It is what it is. He’s a ruthless survivor with friends to memorialize, traumas to dissolve, sins to atone, threats to renew, and stories to tell. “I started gangbanging because I wanted to kill people,” Staples once told The Guardian. There’s gallows humor in his verses, but even that’s rather muted on most of his albums. He’s not quite gangsta but he’s not quite “conscious” in fact, he seems to resent these archetypes. There’s no romance, no menace, no bullshit in his styling. It’s often easier to talk about him in terms of what he’s not. He always seems to know, in any given release year, exactly what he’s doing, why, and for whom. But he has a remarkably steady hand for a rapper with such a fractured catalog. Musically, spiritually, professionally-he’s been all over the place. It’s the sound of an angry and paranoid rapper somehow finding himself in a good place. His latest project, Ramona Park Broke My Heart, out last Friday, is a relatively mellow album. His second album, Big Fish Theory-his strongest to date, I’d argue-is a rave-rap bombshell. But in his music, time and again, he’s taken some unconventional turns. This wasn’t quite a breakout album-even “Norf Norf” and “Señorita” were a bit too screwy and dark for the Hot 100 of the mid-2010s-but Summertime ’06 was one of the most interesting hip-hop debuts of the past decade.īefore Def Jam signed him to his earliest record deal, Staples came up alongside the blog stars of the early 2010s: Odd Future, Kendrick Lamar, Ty Dolla $ign, A$AP Rocky, and the late Mac Miller. Seven years ago, Vince Staples released his debut album, Summertime ’06, the buggy, bleary masterpiece that earned the good-natured once-gangbanger from Long Beach a great deal of mainstream acclaim.