The thing that goes misunderstood about hip-hop is that it’s more than a genre. It’s a rich culture founded on grafitti, freestyling, battling, breakdancing, and rapping. It was a pure form of Black expression founded in parks and basketball courts. Over the years, that culture evolved in a variety of different ways based on the region. With that, the music itself changed. Artists like Vince Staples can experiment with abrasive rocks sounds and Chief Keef could tinker with what rapping sounds like.
Still, you’re bound to have the purists that will argue that it’s not hip-hop because it doesn’t sound like it used to sound. Frankly, Staples finds this logic to be reductive and harmful. In an interview with Rolling Stone, writer Jeff Ihaza asked about the limitations of genre. But the Long Beach rapper argued that the internet killed that idea. It’s only useful for the audience to have a frame of reference.
For rock music specifically, Vince Staples argued that The Isley Brothers and James Brown were foundational to acts like The Who and The Stooges. At the end of the day, it’s just music. So when someone tries to argue he might be “abandoning hip-hop”, he shrugs it off as noise on the internet from people who don’t know any better.
Vince Staples Says Genre Doesn’t Mean Anything to Artists
“I just let people say what they want to say. We have to be honest about conversations. There’s a difference between a conversation and a social media thing that’s based on engagement… So I don’t think you can kind of get too much in their business or what they’re arguing about,” Vince Staples said.
Essentially, the West Coast rapper/actor suggested that people can talk about whatever they want online. But he’s not interested in talking about subjects like hip-hop with people who don’t know what they’re talking about. “If you say that utilizing certain sounds is abandoning hip-hop, then you don’t know enough about hip-hop to have a conversation about it. Because it doesn’t make any sense, literally,” Vince Staples argued.
He has been consistent on this viewpoint for years, arguing that the idea of a ‘rockstar’ all the way back in 2015 didn’t mean the same thing as it did in decades past. Because of that, rappers eventually became the prototypical rockstar.
“You don’t see people walking around dressing like Jack White. That’s not real. 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,” Vince Staples said at the time.
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