Before Vince Staples became one of the most beloved rappers working today, he was just Vince from Long Beach. When he was first starting, he was admittedly pretty rough around the edges. Staples told Desus Nice for GQ in 2021 that it was a lot of the Odd Future crew that helped him out early on. Because he knew nothing about making music for a living, he just emulated others around him.
“Literally, I didn’t start making music until I started making music. When I was 15, 16, and I met Earl [Sweatshirt], Syd, Mike G, Matt Martians… Just so many people that helped me. I didn’t know anything about music or what I was doing,” Vince Staples admitted. “So at the beginning, for the first four, five years of just me trying to learn how to rap, I was just doing what everybody else was doing. ‘If you’re rapping like this, I’m rapping like this.’”
It’s those music friends who became pivotal to his career. Additionally, two notes from ScHoolboy Q and the late Mac Miller essentially helped put all the pieces together for the Long Beach MC to succeed.
Vince Staples Explains How Two of His Friends in Music Helped Make Him The Artist He Is Today
“I remember I was on tour with Mac Miller. He and his security guard used to always say, ‘Oh, make sure you say your name, because no one knows who you are.’ That’s such a thing that you don’t think about. So it was mostly learning about introductory steps of making music. I remember going on tour with Schoolboy Q and him going, ‘I hear you rapping, but it’s too slow. Make it faster,’” Vince Staples recalled.
Those little things became something he quickly fixated on. “People would tell me how things work, and I’ll just keep asking questions along the way. People will remind you. I’ve always been detail-oriented as far as how I wrote, because I used to speak really slowly or I’d start stuttering,” the “Norf Norf” rapper said.
Because of his asthma and his speaking tendencies, Vince Staples stressed that he really wanted every word to mean something impactful.
“I always had to make sure that my lines could convey something, because I wasn’t going to be able to do a bunch of crazy flows,” Staples added. “My asthma was f**ked up too when I was a kid. It was worse than it is now. So I try to make sure that I have specific things [to say] that stand out. I try to write certain things based on the beats I was getting.”
The post Vince Staples Praised Two Hip-Hop Heroes Who Made Him a Better Rapper: ‘I Was Just Doing What Everybody Else Was Doing’ appeared first on VICE.
