Every great artist is in pursuit of creative independence. Prince experienced it. Frank Ocean felt it. Sometimes, the label tends to keep the artist in a box, trying to get them to repeat the things that gained them fans over and over. It’s limiting and eventually, the artist gets sick of it. Vince Staples reached this point with his old label, where they wanted a standard hip-hop album from him. They didn’t want him to branch out and try new things in the event that it didn’t do well.
Eventually, the Long Beach rapper took his ball, went home, and made his politically charged punk rap excursion Cry Baby. During his performance of the album at the El Rey Theatre, he admitted that he didn’t do press because frankly, he was “sick of f***in’ talking.” “You do the press run, you tell jokes and s**t but like, ain’t nothing f***ing funny,” Vince Staples said in a deadpan.
Then, he looks back on when he released his first project, Hell Can Wait, in 2013, and how he was told early on to just make hip-hop. “‘It’s gonna translate better with your audience.’ Whatever the f**k that means,” Vince Staples shrugged.
Even when releasing Big Fish Theory in 2017, he pushed to label it ‘electronic’, given the sound of the record. But when streaming platforms wanted to heavily categorize him under hip-hop again, he sighed and kept moving. All of it led to him being particularly grateful he could release his passion project independently.
Vince Staples Explains Why He Had To Go Independent To Make the Music He Truly Wanted To Make
The rapper and actor’s experimental turn into harder rock edges remains consistent with his stance on rock stars in general. Back in 2015, he argued that the concept of a rock star is reflective of culture. What defined that more than hip-hop? “Rap is the genre. Rap is culture. Hip-hop culture is popular culture; it is American culture. Tell me who the rock star is right now?” Vince Staples asked the Kansan Newsletter at the time.
“Who is Axl Rose? Who is Gene Simmons? Those people are dead. The closest thing we have to rock stars are actual rappers now. That is the replacement. The rockstars are A$AP Rocky, are Travis Scott, are Kanye West, are Tyler, the Creator. Those are the rockstars. Gucci Mane.”
Vince Staples extended it beyond music, too. Hip-hop and Black culture had an impact on everything from lingo to clothing. Your traditional rock stars didn’t fit that mold. “You don’t see people walking around dressing like Jack White. That’s not real,” he explained. “So hip-hop is a popular, dominant culture. But the fact that hip-hop belongs to urban and typically Black people, [it’s] why we can’t just say that hip-hop is the popular culture. But it is. There’s no way around it.”
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