Vince Staples is the master of sharp left turns. His go-to move is to set you up with a line that leads in one particular direction only to deviate quickly into unexpected terrain, as he does with lines like “I need to fight the power but man I need that new Ferrari,” or, “My momma was a Christian, Crip walkin’ on blue waters.” In addition to this knack for startling juxtapositions, his delivery is dirty and deliberate and deadpan, painting distinctive pictures while leaving you unsure as to just how serious he is at any given time. In the lead-up to his last release, Big Fish Theory, he said of the album to LA Weekly, “It’s Afro-futurism. This is my Afro-futurism. There’s no other kind.” He followed that up with an interview with Trevor Noah of The Daily Show in which he completely blew that comment off, stating, “I like saying stuff about black people to white people.” When Noah persisted, asking, “So that doesn’t mean anything?”, Vince responded, “Of course not.”
This is emblematic of his entire approach to music. He is deadly serious about his content, even as he undercuts his message from every conceivable angle to keep listeners off balance. Or maybe it’s just to keep certain listeners off balance. Because while he has most certainly “crossed over” to a more mainstream audience than he had during his Shyne Coldchain mixtape days, he is clearly still ambivalent about the composition of this audience. In a particularly telling moment on his double album stunner Summertime ’06, he waxes poetic about the disparity between his own milieu growing up and that of his new audiences:
“All the white folks chanting when I asked ‘em ‘where my n*ggas at’
Goin’ crazy, got me goin’ crazy, I can’t get with that
Wonder if they know I know they won’t go where we kick it at”
It’s reminiscent of a line from another top-shelf rapper of his generation, Kendrick Lamar, who calls out those who pretend to be from his neighborhood with the line, “Next time they hit the 10 freeway we need receipts,” effectively questioning the legitimacy of anyone claiming to represent the place he calls home.
It’s a tricky question. My initial impulse is to frame it within the context of hip hop and its listenership, but the history of all black music and white audiences in the good old US of A is applicable here as well. Hip hop has just been more explicit than most about its roots, perhaps in an effort to avoid the historical erasure that tends to follow the cultural theft of African American traditions, but the result is that the accumulation of white listeners is both the holy grail and the poisoned apple of rappers in our current age. Mainstream success is predicated on some sort of cross-cultural appeal, but it is a double-edged sword, bringing in its wake issues surrounding race, identity, and cultural ownership.
This is the line Vince Staples treads so well, where standard notions of “street” authenticity and hip hop success meet and do battle within the context of rap music. More importantly, though, he just makes dope-ass music. His production has ranged from gutter trap drums to avant-garde electronic sounds, but his rhymes are the gravity that tethers the musical backdrop to the earth. Long Beach is ever-present here as in all his discography, and FM! seems particularly concerned with establishing itself as a street conscious album. The sounds are much more minor-key and traditionally hip hop than those of Big Fish Theory, and Vince’s raps are back to basics in the best possible way.
The “album” – which I’m calling it because it feels like one, despite its 22 minute run time – kicks off with “Feels Like Summer,” which introduces the conceit of the classic LA radio program “Big Boy’s Neighborhood” which serves as a narrative guidepost throughout the rest of the release. Vince is the master at establishing a mood and then promptly undercutting it with a change of direction, as he does here when he juxtaposes the light and the dark with lines like, “We gon’ party till the sun or the guns come out.” Similar contrasts abound throughout, as during the chorus, with chants of, “Right side – who bout that life? Night time – who bout to die?”
The rest of the album passes in similarly bleak fashion. “Don’t Get Chipped” finds Vince reflecting mournfully, “Everybody say it’s lonely at the top; I want my homies at the top.” The second verse of “Relay” tells the dark story of a well educated woman who has a relationship and a baby with a man who ends up in prison facing serious time. The opening lines (“Baby went to Howard, got a B.A. / Had her baby shower in the PJ’s”) set up the dichotomy of the two sides of her life, and things just get more complicated from there as a fellow criminal threatens to snitch and put the baby’s father in prison for the long haul. Vince sums up the long-term effects of incarceration perfunctorily:
“If he fuck around and take the stand on her dude
He gon’ have to raise his child from the visiting room”
This sort of terse story telling is part and parcel of Vince’s artistry. There are countless examples of similarly jarring lines placed back to back. “Run the Bands” finds him ruminating:
“Brand new shrink, had a breakthrough
Brand new mink for the great room
Don’t bring knives to the gun fight
We bring knives to the day room”
On “FUN!” he boasts, “My black is beautiful, but I’ll still shoot at you” before his flex about eating “fried catfish at the Ritz in Japan.” The album closes out on perhaps its bleakest note, as Vince ponders the spiritual goals of his upbringing alongside the more worldly outcomes he has lived:
“Had me up in church at a young age
Should’ve had the n*gga at the gun range
Would’ve been a lot more useful, shit
Who up in the pulpit, truthful shit
Rich or poor people gon’ use the shit
Might as well go and get used to it
Tryna get rich, get everybody fed
But everybody dead”
For a release that is shorter than an episode of Family Guy, it is awfully dense and tough to get through in terms of content. Luckily, the music is much more easily digestible than the electronic impulses of Big Fish Theory, and the fact that it hews closer to standard gangster rap fare in terms of beats makes for a smoother listen. Themes of good guys, criminals, snitches, and innocent bystanders flow throughout, and in expert storyteller fashion, Vince blurs the lines between them until you aren’t sure which of them is the real victim. The fact that they all are is probably the point.
There isn’t a bad album in Vince Staple’s entire output, and FM!, despite its short run time, fits in readily as another stellar release. You could easily play his entire catalogue, from his first Shyne Coldchain mixtape through Hell Can Wait and Prima Donna, and see a clear through line, all the way to FM!, with Vince’s clear-eyed depiction of his surroundings as the constant guiding you through the madness. While the music has bounced around from So-Cal gangster to 2000s electro-chic and back again, the emotional center of the music resides in Vince himself and he never disappoints. I’m happy to report that FM! carries on the best of this tradition and leaves us all eagerly anticipating the next oeuvre in this young MC’s already stellar catalog. There are few artists whose work I will buy sight unseen, but any new release from Vince is a given for me and anyone else with two brain cells to rub together. I can only pray to the gods of rap and the LBC that we don’t have to wait long for the next one.
