Today in “news guaranteed to make rap fans salivate,” Vince Staples revealed that he and Earl Sweatshirt recorded a joint project with The Alchemist, leading to the Long Beach native putting “30 verses on 30 beats.” Unfortunately, Vince jokes that “Alchemist moves at a very cryptic pace — he’s hella slow,” leading to him recording his new album Vince Staples with Kenny Beats. He further reveals that there are anywhere from 12 to 22 leftovers from that project after picking the initial eight songs that worked for the self-titled album.
Vince Staples reveals he recorded “30 verses on 30 beats” while working on a collab project with Alchemist and Earl Sweatshirt. pic.twitter.com/ROYEKsvsPA
So to recap, there are up to 50 Vince Staples songs out there that haven’t been heard by anyone but him, his producers, and Earl Sweatshirt. Obviously, this news has fans in a tizzy, wondering when — or indeed, if — these songs will ever come out. Since it’s 2021 and social media exists, they will undoubtedly be insufferable about it until they find out.
There’s really a whole ass Earl, Vince and Alchemist double album out there and Earl just keeps hitting us with these albums with this yo ho ho and a bottle of rum ass production https://t.co/qLDkgSmgXU
— America Is Musty: Mustiest Olympics Ever (@DragonflyJonez) July 29, 2021
The early ’90s might have been hip-hop’s golden era but thirty years later it’s apparent we’re entering a pretty special time for the genre. As much fuss as algorithmically generated tracklists have caused over the past couple of years, the current hip-hop landscape has been more diverse, creative, and boundless than that early time when the genre was seemingly recreated with every new release.
In 2021 especially, rappers have gotten out of their comfort zones, leaving behind familiar styles and sounds to forge new paths based not on what might sell or what the cool kids are doing, but on their own whims, fantasies, and newfound levels of access. Rappers like IDK, Tyler The Creator, and Vince Staples have always worked on the side of the field just left of center, but this year, they’ve all put out music that sounds effortlessly innovative, leaving behind the bombastic sounds that made them critical darlings to take creative risks — risks that have paid off, delivering some of their best output to date.
For IDK, that innovation came on his second album, USee4Yourself, in which he again takes a microscope to a single subject, examining it from multiple angles and drilling down to determine how he really feels about it. Whereas on his breakout mixtape IWASVERYBAD that subject was the institutionalization of Black men (especially himself) and on his debut album IsHeReal? he pondered the existence of a higher power and mourned the loss of his mom, on USee4Yourself he turns the lens to relationships and romance, filtered through his recent status as a rap star.
And while he includes frequent collaborator Rico Nasty and reaches out to the mainstream with features from Offset and Young Thug, he also burrows into his own hip-hop fandom, putting Jay Electronica and MF DOOM together on “Red.” That song also features Westside Gunn, one of rap’s modern avatar’s of bars-first hip-hop, while the production, on the whole, seems to take inspiration from Gunn’s Griselda collective rather than the brash sounds that defined IDK’s earlier projects. If anything, USee4Yourself sounds like if Yeezus was actually made by a Kanye who actually cared instead of just projecting the appearance of caring (IDK vocally sounds so much like him here, I made the personal decision to swap out all the Kanye songs on all my playlists with songs from this album).
Tyler The Creator, meanwhile, takes a different — but no less effective — tack on his new album Call Me If You Get Lost. While the production combines all of Tyler’s best eras — the soulful reinvention of Igor, the reflective pop of Cherry Bomb and Flower Boy, the abrasive rap on Goblin — the subject matter finds Tyler settling into his role as a recent Grammy winner and multimillionaire, embracing rap’s classic braggadocio in place of his former rebellious shock-rap provocations. Inviting DJ Drama onto the tape to provide hyped-up ad-libs, Ty positions the album as his own entry into the Gangsta Grillz canon.
On several tracks, including the lead single “Lumberjack,” Ty points to his Rolls-Royce, finding ever more elaborate ways to both flex and juxtapose the signifier of wealth with his social status, a la The Throne’s “N****s In Paris.” In a recent interview, Tyler cited BET as the resource that taught him everything he knows; on Call Me, he finally wears that influence on his immaculately tailored sleeve, embracing the bombast of the 2000s crunk era’s fascination with garish jewelry and unfiltered gasconade. He also gets really real about feeling rejected by Black people as much as white people on the autobiographical “Massa,” challenging the expectations against him directly rather than subverting them or simply acting out as he had in the past.
Challenging expectations and sharing the grim realities of his biography were never problems Vince Staples had. Instead, he found that his unflinching confrontation of the traumas that defined his upbringing was being swallowed up by his caustic production choices. It’s no surprise that the EDM-influenced, demented, post-apocalyptic pinball machine beats on Big Fish Theory kept people from tuning all the way into what he was saying or that the alarming screech of the “Blue Suede” instrumental washed out the track’s harrowing narratives of life in gang-divided North Long Beach.
So instead, Vince challenged himself — and frequent collaborator Kenny Beats — to make something more palatable on his self-titled latest. The beats are awash in something like nostalgia — if the word “nostalgia” could ever imply the paranoia creeping through tracks like “Are You With That?” and “Sundown Town.” The placid beats and laid-back delivery are exactly what it seems like Vince would have been doing all along were commercial considerations never a factor (one senses his prior resistance to playlist-friendly material was his own form of rebellion at the thought of being a “star”). Getting away from the crazed, frenetic production that anchored his previous projects let Vince’s voice shine through.
Even Dave East, that eternally maligned avatar of millennial New York City tribalism, has found his groove working alongside soulful producer Harry Fraud on the singles from the upcoming Hoffa. East has struggled in the past, trying to wrangle mainstream expectations with his own taste, to the point where some fans on Twitter have wondered at his inability to connect with a wider audience while artists like those on Griselda seemed to garner more support by avoiding doing the same. Employing the smooth production of Harry Fraud, Dave has never sounded more comfortable than he does on “Diamonds,” “Uncle Ric,” and “Chapo.” This is what he should have been making all along, maybe.
And that seems to be the end result of all this experimentation. Although I said rappers got out of their comfort zones, perhaps the title should read they found and got into their comfort zones. Each of the above-named artists sounds more relaxed, assertive, confident, and clear-headed than they ever have, with nothing to prove and no one to impress but themselves. In trading in their trademark production or shaking loose lyrical crutches, by embracing the tactics and beliefs they once held at arm’s length, they have tapped into a new vein of creativity. The result is a gold rush of unique, engaging, progressive hip-hop that the culture could certainly use much more of — and that fans should reward with their ears.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Back in 2013, Vince Staples and Mac Miller released a collaborative mixtape called Stolen Youth, which was entirely produced by Miller under the pseudonym Larry Fisherman. Now, Staples has revealed a touching anecdote about the late rapper, who died in 2018, saying that he refused to accept royalties from the project.
In an interview on N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN’s Drink Champs podcast, Staples said that Miller had creatively inspired him when the two were initially introduced by Earl Sweatshirt. “I wasn’t really making music at that time,” Staples said. “Earl had came back and I was just you know moving around with him making sure you know he was straight and shit. And I introduced myself to [Mac] and he was like, ‘I know who you are why don’t you make beats or whatever, why don’t you make music,’ and I say, ‘I don’t got no beats and he’s like, ‘Aight, I’m making some beats come over here on Friday,’ and then that’s how we ended up making music and being cool.”
Staples continued, talking about going on tour with Miller and how “he didn’t want no publishing.”
“He said, ‘If you make a million dollars buy me a S-Class Benz or something like that,’ the whole project [Stolen Youth] he gave me ownership of it. He just said, if you if you make a gang of money, just give me like a S-Class — and then took me on the road and paid for my room and board and still paid me. So yeah, you know that was the homie.”
Watch Staples’ interview above.
Mac Miller is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Vince Staples has always been open about his struggles and hardships from his younger days. He sang about it on Vince Staples, but which had a more mainstream song than his previous work. The change led to a project that was well-received by both new and older fans of the rapper. He stopped by N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN’s Drink Champs podcast to talk about the album and about personal aspects of his life, including why he never did drugs or alcohol.
“I saw my pops go from being up and being the man to having all the cars to being whopped,” he said during the episode. “It’s just not cool. You don’t want to be the motherf*cker who’s up, and then at one point, it all just goes away. I couldn’t let that happen to myself.” Vince gave another reason for avoiding drugs and alcohol. “I ain’t never want to get caught,” he said after speaking about his desire to always be aware of his surroundings in his childhood neighborhood which was laced with racial tension and gang violence. He added, “My sister got shot seven or eight times when I was a kid. And you ain’t really safe nowhere.”
Vince Staples may have received a polarized response from fans and critics, but Vince Staples himself remains undeterred in promoting his latest project, maintaining his usual cavalier air in a mellow NPR Tiny Desk Concert performance backed by Kenny Beats and featuring Foushée. The Long Beach rapper performs songs from his self-titled third studio album in the Hollywood Hills, where he jokes he’d “never live,” reminiscing with his manager Corey Smyth (who, as always, remains offscreen) about times he was arrested in the affluent area.
While some fans found the relaxed production on Vince Staples to be off-putting, it turns out to be perfect for a Tiny Desk performance. Vince, as laid-back as ever, coasts through album standouts “Law Of Averages,” “Sundown Town,” “The Shining,” and “Take Me Home,” with Foushée joining him on the last song and Kenny Beats playing bass throughout. Fellow South LA rapper 03 Greedo gets a shout-out, while Vince reflects on the release of his first album Summertime 06 and dedicates his performance to “all the bad b*tches worldwide… whether you have two legs or no legs.”
Watch Vince Staples’ Tiny Desk Concert above.
Vince Staples is out now on Blacksmyth Recordings/Motown Records. You can get it here
Tyler The Creator is a longtime fan of Converse and has collaborated with the brand on a number of fascinating releases, including his Golf Le Fleur line. It’s likely his love of the brand stems from his roots as a skater in LA, where the kicks are a symbol of multiple different subcultures — and often, a connector of those cultures, bringing together punks, skaters, and gangbangers over their shared love of the Chuck Taylor All Star shoe.
When the brand tapped Tyler to create a short film (a commercial, really) highlighting this connection, they say they had no idea what they were going to get. Knowing Tyler, though, they were sure it’d be a reflection of his off-the-wall sense of humor and unique worldview and it’s probably safe to say they weren’t disappointed in the result, a minute-long spot titled “The Really Cool Converse Club.”
The hilarious ad depicts a group meeting of various subcultures tied to the shoe full of members of Tyler’s own wildly diverse friend group and Converse’s longtime brand partners like NBA legends Bill Walton and Marques Johnson, stand-up comic Josh Johnson, actor Tim Meadows, rapper Vince Staples, punk icon Henry Rollins, and Odd Future member Jasper. Converse skaters Milton Martinez and Louie Lopez and actors Errol Chatham, Arsenio Castellanos, and Jackson Randall also make appearances.
Tyler explained his vision in a press release: “I instantly thought about the many pockets of people that wear Chucks – like skateboarders, soccer moms, kids down the street, guys in the neighborhood I grew up with – and I wanted to put them in one place, that was important to me. Everyone wears Chucks…including pirates.” I won’t spoil it for you here but I will say The Really Cool Converse Club has some pretty strict rules.
Watch Converse’s Tyler The Creator-directed “The Really Cool Converse Club” ad here.
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
In the week leading up to the release of his latest, self-titled album, Vince Staples, Long Beach native Vince Staples appeared on Apple Music’s Radio 1 show to premiere the single “Are You With That?” for host Zane Lowe. In describing the record’s new, more mainstream-friendly sound, Vince said this: “I was just having a lot of conversations with a lot of people around me… and people always say, ‘Oh, you used to always say these stories and this and that, and I don’t notice much about these specific things. Why don’t you put it into the music?’ And it’ll be stuff that has been in songs for years. And then I realized the backdrop wasn’t right for certain things I was saying or vice versa.”
To translate: Civilians missed the pungent reality of Vince’s detailed storytelling and trenchant, hard-won observations because they couldn’t get past the admittedly sometimes bonkers beats he shared them over. Now, Vince Staples is way too good of a rapper with way too much authenticity behind his rhymes to be getting overlooked this way — a flag I’ve been waving since first hearing him tearing up Common’s “Kingdom” back in 2014 — so it was one of those problems that needed correction, despite being a much better problem to have than the ones he describes in his music.
Vince is currently at a place in his career where this approach makes all the sense in the world. I’ve had conversations about his music similar to the ones he described to Apple Music, where fans of all ages and affiliations would argue that they just couldn’t get past those alarming beats — even those who were inclined to see past his galling comments about the ‘90s being overrated or his profuse praise for Millennial whipping boys like Bow Wow and Ray J. Rap, for all the noise its greatest proponents make about the importance of lyrical innovation, is prefaced by the beats that rappers choose to rhyme on, making the production every bit as important as the bars themselves.
To that end, he’s recruited longtime friend and frequent collaborator Kenny Beats to recalibrate the abrasive soundscapes that scared away potential listeners who warily approached his music after finding that they loved his incorrigible online personality. Rather than the bombast of a “Blue Suede” or the mid-apocalyptic futurism of his work on Big Fish Theory, listeners are now confronted with the easygoing haze of “Are You With That?” The subject matter is no less harrowing but now, the spoonful of honey helps mask the flavor of the bitter medicine with which Vince laces each of his stony-eyed recollections — which even he sometimes seems to feel ambivalent about.
We saw a little bit of this with FM!, the bouncy collection of summery bangers from 2019 that saw Vince leaning a bit toward the territory of radio friendliness, but here, he finally wholeheartedly embraces the role of an artist — something he always claimed he wasn’t. Now that he sees value in sharing the sometimes grim stories that have made up his oeuvre in a more accessible fashion, Kenny’s beats make his responsibilities a much lighter lift. It’s easier to sink into the fatalism of “Sundown Town” when the song sounds almost like a PBR&B standard made for lounging on a lazy summer day.
Likewise, “Take Me Home” would be right at home on a YouTube lo-fi station, even with its sobering depiction of gangbanging activities and their deleterious effect on his relationships. And the mellow mood of the top-down cruising anthem “Taking Trips,” camouflages the paranoid tension sizzling just below the surface without undercutting it. Instead, chill-inducing lines like “Can’t even hit the beach without my heat, it’s in my trunks” hit harder because of the relaxed atmosphere — just like an outbreak of gunshots on a warm summer day, right when you least expect it.
Clocking in at a truly breezy 22 minutes and with two interludes among its 10 tracks, it’s an even quicker listen than FM! — yet, due to its comforting sonic palette, it feels more cozy than disappointing, prompting repeat playthroughs to try and catch the witty wordplay and cushy vibes of Kenny Beats’ production. Vince Staples is just one of two planned projects this year, marking an uptick in productivity for the young rapper and as functions as something of a checkpoint delineating the break between Vince Staples, the defiant upstart, and Vince Staples, the potential star.
Vince Staples is out now via Blacksmith Recordings/Motown Records. Get it here.
In the first half of the clip, Vince is portrayed under glaring spotlight in a number of mundane situations, doubling down on the unsettling nature of surveillance, and the way Black people are scrutinized in a specific way, especially those who grew up in neighborhoods like Vince did. In the second half, Vince portrays the process of burying and holding vigils for his friends in an even more explicit way, showing himself deeper and deeper in a grave each scene. Vince Staples came out last Friday, but it’s only one of several projects Vince is working on lately. He’s also previewed his graphic novel Limbo Beach and teased yet another new musical project, Ramona Park Broke My Heart to follow up this record. Check out the new video above and stream his new record here.
On Friday, Vince Staples ended the nearly three-year-long stretch that he went without releasing a full-length project to fans. The Long Beach native shared his official third album, Vince Staples, and it arrived following weeks of frequent headline-making comments and interviews from the rapper.
Vince continues that streak with a recent sit-down with The Independent where he shared his thoughts on the current landscape of the music industry and how some rapper use gang affiliation to boost their rise and appeal in hip-hop.
“This is a business where we monetize people’s struggles, pain, death and murder,” he said. “If you’re a kid from a situation, and you feel the only way that you will get out of the situation where there’s immense poverty or bad home life or low self-esteem is by doing this thing that everyone is selling, you’re going to try to sell that thing.”
He added, “We’ve seen people market and distribute death and destruction within our communities for decades; they do these things because it gets attention. What do we really expect when we give people millions of dollars to say they’re tough? They’re gonna say they’re tough. It’s common sense.”
The rapper also pointed out that rather than focus on the individuals doing good, the media instead choose to pay attention to those who fit a “bad boy” image.
“These people who do the wrong thing are always brought up [by the media], but no one who’s done the right things has been mentioned,” he said.
Vince Staples is out now via Blacksmith Recordings/Motown Records. Pre-order it here.
ATTHEW (@whothheckismatt) July 29, 2021
America Is Musty: Mustiest Olympics Ever
