There’s a divide in how people consume rap music. In one corner, there are the masses, the listeners who simply go wherever their ears lead them. And in the other, there’s the much smaller but decidedly more vocal subset of hip-hop obsessives who hold the genre to a rigorous ideological standard. Harder to win over, they’re the ones who view hip-hop as a tradition that must be defended, the ones who wax about the genre’s golden age and post online about the artistic integrity of standard bearers like Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole. As the sharp tongue behind one of the smartest, most substantial rap albums of 2015, Vince Staples is exactly the kind of prestige act that these message-board rap fans would love to claim as their own. Unfortunately for them, however, Staples wants nothing to do with them.
In interview after interview, the wily 22-year-old Long Beach rapper has made it clear that he doesn’t share old-guard rap fans’ worship of the ’90s, and without fail, he always manages to offend some of them with his glib dismals of the genre’s sacred works. “The ’90s get a lot of credit—I don’t really know why,” he said in a video for TIME last fall, his face giving itself over to a wide grin as he begins explaining how he much prefers the early ’00s. “The first song I remember listening to was Lil Bow Wow’s ‘Bounce With Me,’” he smirked. “Lil Bow Wow is one of my favorite rappers ever. You can never take that away from me.”
Some of this is deliberate provocation, of course. Staples came up alongside Odd Future, and while he never fully subscribed to the “subversion for subversion’s sake” mindset of that collective’s early years, he does share a similarly mischievous sense of humor. Why not troll ’90s hip-hop fans, especially when they’re such a ripe target? But mostly his disinterest in the era reflects a real generational division. Staples was far too young to care about Illmatic and Ready to Die when those albums were released, and as much as it pains rap purists to hear it, he doesn’t care about them now, either.
Speaking via phone late last month during a rare break in his busy touring schedule—he now spends so much time on the road that being back for too long feels weird, he says—Staples dismisses the blowback to his ’90s comments as an empty Internet controversy.
“It’s not real,” he says. “Like, if I turned off my phone and went outside, nobody is walking down the streets coming up to me saying, ‘You should respect ’90s rap.’ I don’t hear that at my shows. There’s nobody outside actually saying those things. That’s not real life.
“At the end of the day,” he continues, “with all the shit we’ve got going on, with everyone trying their best to make it through this hard life that we have to live, who really gives a fuck about someone staying true to that?”
That no-nonsense perspective comes across in his music. Staples addresses a litany of serious concerns on his Def Jam full-length debut Summertime ’06—the pull of gangs, drugs and violence in the inner city; the difficulty of maintaining healthy relationships after a troubled upbringing—but hip-hop’s inside-baseball conversations with itself are never among them. And the album is that much stronger for never getting lost in those weeds.
Staples has been working on new music since releasing Summertime—he mentions that he knocked out five songs in the studio the other day—but he’s mum as to what shape his next project might take, or when he might release it. He’s certainly not in a rush. Where some artists feel pressure to pump out a steady supply of new music to stay relevant, Staples prefers to work at his own pace.
“We live in a time and place where a lot of the music is fly-by-night,” he says. “Artists want to put out the most material they can to keep their name out there, but I don’t worry about that. I feel like I make a different kind of music. My music is angled at meaning a certain kind of thing; there’s a certain quality to the music. I’m not saying it’s better, it’s just different, so that kind of pace wouldn’t work for what I do. So we’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing, and when it’s time to release something new, we’ll know.”
Vince Staples brings his Circa ’06 Tour Part II to the Rave on Tuesday, March 8 at 7:30 p.m.
