A Rap Fatalist: Vince Staples and "Prima Donna"

By Zack Boehm on August 26, 2016

Vince Staples has always maintained that, for him, music is first and foremost a paycheck. In interviews, he’ll often shirk questions about craft or aesthetic by insisting that he’s far more concerned with financial security. He’s known to boast about his prudent spending habits and sound investments, and he seems more interested in discussing his superlative credit score than his art.

The banality of the 23-year-old Long Beach Rapper’s priorities makes him something of an iconoclast in the world of modern hip-hop. Vince is a self-described soft-spoken homebody, with no real predilection for drugs or alcohol (he claims to never have had a drink in his life) or for club hopping bacchanalia. He resists youthful indulgence in favor of moderation, forswearing the conventionalized excess of the rapper lifestyle for temperance and quietude.

via vibe.com

This iconoclasm extends to Vince’s contentious relationship with hip-hop itself. In the past, Vince has attracted the ire of hip-hop traditionalists by suggesting that he doesn’t really care about 90’s rap. “Lil Bow Wow is one of my favorite rappers ever” he said in a video produced by Time, to a chorus of aggrieved gasps from twitter-militant rap purists. He’s also never shied away from interrogating the entire Gansta rap gestalt, poking and prodding, with his lacerating wit, at the way the form elevates and sentimentalizes gang culture (and he’s levying these criticisms from a position of unique expertise—Vince is an outspoken Crip). “I’m a gansta Crip, F*ck Gansta rap” Vince raps on the track “Norf Norf”. He’s never one to sentimentalize.

But from this tension between Artist and Form, from the apparent contempt that Vince seems to have for some elements of his chosen medium, comes music that is almost revolutionary in its unconcern for standard hip-hop practice. Vince raps candidly and incisively about his gang experiences without ever lapsing into recirculated Gangsta rap tropes. He is simultaneously proud of where he came from and wary of romanticizing his past. He is doggedly confessional and vulnerable in ways that can often be rending, and that fly in the face of what is expected from a rapper waxing about a troubled, violent upbringing. Vince is provocative because he’s stridently personal. Like Kendrick Lamar and (sometimes) Kanye, Vince shines when his verses bleed real blood, when his experiences are gnashing and his emotions are raw. In all of his major projects to date—his breakout EP Hell Can Wait, his exemplary first album Summertime ‘06, his EP Prima Donna released this week—Vince has succeeded in negotiating his brutal, penetrating honesty, his connate pessimism, and his infectiously wry sense of humor. All wrapped up in his effortlessly agile command of language. The result is a kind of sneering fatalism, about race, about economics, about how people consume his work, about rap itself.

via vincestaples.com

A Vince Staple project is a lot like prestige TV Drama. There is a definite, almost visceral sense of time and place (in Vince’s case, Long Beach, California and specifically the ever-present Poppy Street), and there is a complex and capacious interiority, a superego to be parsed and explored. Summertime ’06 fits this schematic perfectly. It is an album that, according to Vince, aims to be evocative of a particular summer in a particular place, and how that summer signaled the strange, abrupt transition from childhood innocence into adult cynicism. It isn’t strictly a concept album, but its articulation gives it a sense of narrative. There is a story being told.

Primma Donna shares similarities to Summertime ’06 in both theme and execution. There’s a conspicuous symmetry in the way both projects begin: Summertime ’06 opens with a woozy, heat-wave beach instrumental, with lapping waves and cawing gulls, that is suddenly cut off by the sound of a gunshot, whereas Primma Donna’s first track has Vince Singing an atonal, droning version of “This Little Light of Mine” before being, similarly, interrupted by the blaring of a gunshot. This is all to suggest that Vince is not through exploring that ways that violence—physical violence, the violence of systemic racism, the violence of structural economic neglect and abandonment—can plunder innocence and jade optimism.

Like on Summertime ’06, Primma Donna sees Vince mining his own experiences and anxieties with ruthless clarity. Over spare, roilingly industrial production from hip-hop adepts DJ Dahi and No ID, as well as from the melancholic English crooner/producer James Blake, Vince raps with a characteristic directness. On the Blake-produced track “War Ready” he strides through a manic instrumental tackling subjects like suicide (“Need a breather from the trippin / Either that or my brains on the ceiling / Bite the bullet tryna fight the feeling”) and America’s heritage of institutional racism (“County bus, slave ship, same sh*t”) with a cool stoicism. Vince is the calm in the chaos, but there are times when his calmness itself can be disquieting. He doesn’t seem to be rapping to protest or to effect change, but to report, dispassionately, what he observes, and how he internalizes those observations. He talks about entrenched injustices as matters of fact, unlikely to change. “Fed up with the gun violence” he sings on the projects title track, but it’s not a tone of defiance that he takes. Rather, it’s one of resignation.

via spin.com

While Vince’s dexterity and devastating turns of phrase continue to scintillate on Prima Donna, the most stirring moments on the record probably reside in the anemic outros on songs like “Smile”, “Loco”, and the titular “Primma Donna”.  These moments see the instrumental edifices crumble into a thin, staticky silence, and Vince’s untrained, fragile singing voice, muffled by feedback, pushed to the foreground. With the artifice of the beats stripped away, and with the audible discomfort Vince has with singing, these outros represent a constitutionally vulnerable artist allowing himself to be more vulnerable than he’s ever been. His voice, shrouded in mechanical distortion, sounds like it could be coming from his childhood, or perhaps from the deepest parts of his consciousness, its timbre and strength degraded by time, grief, and bitterness. These are the kinds of moments that really needle at something in the listener. I found myself having the urge to skip the outros on second and third listens, but being so arrested by the plaintive fragility of Vince’s singing that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. “Sometimes I feel like giving up” he intones in the outro to “Smile”, and the way his voice creaks and groans makes you feel that these troubles are real.

Primma Donna could rightly be seen as a kind of sequel or coda to Summertime ’06, but it also represents real artistic development for Vince. Primma Donna is a coherent work, a tight collection of songs with a focused, traceable vision. You can feel Vince zeroing in on an intelligible vocabulary, on a specific sensibility, and while he has always provided a singular perspective in the world of hip-hop, this projects sees him plumb the depths of that perspective in interesting and complicated new ways. Vince’s celebrity, and he is a celebrity, may be more founded on his extra-musical personality than on his tunes. He’s regularly featured in videos for outlets like GQ and Pitchfork, where he provides the kind of irreverent and tongue-in-cheek commentary that sometimes shows up in his music. But Primma Donna shows that, while Vince Staples the person may find much of the rap lifestyle objectionable, Vince Staples the rap artist is a vital, illuminating voice. Let’s hope he doesn’t ditch rap for real estate before he says everything he has to say.

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