Photo: Adrian Nieto
Out today on Loma Vista Recordings
While Kendrick Lamar and Drake are busy bickering in their bars, Vince Staples’s new album narrows its sights on the real menace to society. The titular Cry Baby is sitting on the cover with a tuft of blond hair, wearing the US flag as a nappy. It’s uncannily reminiscent of a certain someone. Can’t think who. The image is absurd but, as with much of the California rapper’s music, the comedy barely conceals the grotesque truth. He presents a biting survey of an America where he doesn’t feel safe. “Why do I live in fear of a gun and a badge?” he asks on Go! Go! Gorilla, a chilling fuzz-rock song about the sport of police brutality, where the title resembles a cheerleading chant: “Who can I trust for protection?”
Cry Baby is a sharp reminder of why Staples is one of music’s most incisive, and subversive, wordsmiths. He’s been blunt from the jump about his former life as a member of the notorious Crips gang and the violence he experienced as a boy, notably on his 2015 breakout album Summertime ’06. He’s also beloved for his sharp wit. But while his star has risen to the heights where he was given his own (semi-autobiographical, highly satirical) Netflix comedy series, The Vince Staples Show, Staples has never infantalised his audience, or tempered the darkness. He once said: “The people who listen to my music are probably looking for thoughtfulness or creativity.” Now, with his first album since cutting loose from his major label deal, he’s not holding back.
Blackberry Marmalade gets straight down to sticky business, as damning an indictment of the nation as Childish Gambino’s This Is America (2018). Its video, filmed in the style of a first-person shooter game where the cameraman carries out a mass shooting in a diner, ends with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.” Which is more extreme, Staples seems to be asking: the shooter or the system that enables them? Or perhaps he is simply suggesting that a return to radical politics is needed in order to affect true change. The first singles from Cry Baby were released without comment, leaving fans to unpack their meaning. But sometimes Staples is more direct: “Bout time for a revolution,” goes the opening line of The Running Man.
‘The word-association evoking the double standards of the American Dream is simple yet startling: “Shooting stars, scars like stripes / Red, white, and blue police lights”’
The commodification of Black music is another theme that surfaces throughout Cry Baby. On Cotton, a masterstroke of psychedelic soul-pop, Staples skewers the duality of Black music as escapism from oppression but also, perhaps, as mass entertainment (“dance for me, dance for me”). TV Guide is at first a tongue-in-cheek erotic paean to the television set. But of course, it’s much more than that, referencing racist stereotypes of Black people onscreen like in the 1940s Disney film Song of the South. On Only In America, meanwhile, the word-association evoking the double standards of the American Dream is simple yet startling: “Shooting stars, scars like stripes / Red, white, and blue police lights.”
The lyrical content isn’t the only confrontational aspect of Cry Baby. The soundtrack to his uprising is led by foreboding, post-punky rock – played live, all distortion. Staples and his production team also cleverly weave in echoes of soul, blues, doo-wop, rock’n’roll and other foundational Black American genres, underlining the irony of the music’s innovation and cultural dominance alongside enduring societal racism. On White Flag – which has the jaunty 60s soul of Amy Winehouse, whom he also references in the verse – he notes how “hip-hop taught me all y’all love Black folks, but it’s not enough”.
For all Cry Baby’s jaded social commentary, however, Staples is concerned for, and protective of, the next generation. On The Big Bad Wolf, with its lip-curling funk bassline reminiscent of N.E.R.D, he raps: “I’ve got more than money on the line / Got these babies and I’ll die for their motherfucking pride.” The song also samples Slick Rick’s 1988 cautionary tale Children’s Story, about kids-turned-robbers who are shot dead by a cop (and how a flashy life begets greed). How depressingly timeless. It’s a sentiment Staples echoed when YouTube put an age restriction on Blackberry Marmalade’s video, writing on X that “our children deserve the truth”. In this world of fake news, juvenile politicians and a system that doesn’t care about its people, it’s the job of artists to tell it.
