Vince Staples Dwells in Dualities

In the summer of 2021, Vince Staples, the 31-year-old Long Beach rapper, dropped his self-titled album, followed by Ramona Park Broke My Heart less than a year later, and rounded out his decade-spanning six-album run with Def Jam Records with 2024’s Dark Times. Amid this prodigious musical output, Staples—who had previously demonstrated a keen eye and interest in visual culture through incisive music videos and guest turns in film and television, including as a love interest on Abbott Elementary—fully stepped into his own as a visual auteur.

In 2019 Staples released a two-episode web series titled The Vince Staples Show in collaboration with Calmatic. In the opening scene of episode 1, “So What?,” Staples proclaims, “I need some of that Netflix money.” After having its production and release delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, The Vince Staples Show premiered in February 2024 as a Netflix production, executive-produced by Kenya Barris of black-ish fame. Other TV shows featuring fictionalized rappers, the FX productions Dave and Atlanta—created by Dave Burd (Lil Dicky) and Donald Glover (Childish Gambino), respectively—created distance between their rap and TV personas. Childish Gambino seemingly doesn’t exist in the world of Atlanta, which finds Glover in a supporting role as manager to the fictional aspiring rapper Paper Boi, and Dave centers on a version of Lil Dicky that also remains aspiring, having not yet found mainstream success in the rap landscape.

Staples collapses this creative and perhaps protective distance in his own show, creating a fictionalized version of himself, the rapper Vince Staples, grounded in the autobiographical, success and all. Though it shares a similar premise to the web series of a hypothetical day in the life of the rapper Vince Staples, the Netflix and Barris backing also comes with updates. In the web series episode “Sheet Music,” Staples’s girlfriend catches him in another girl’s bed via an Instagram post and proceeds to acquire a Taser and show up to his house to confront him. In the Netflix series, Staples’s girlfriend appears as a decidedly sanitized sitcom figure, and one of noticeably lighter skin tone, perhaps to appear more palatable to a wider audience. Her role is largely one of support, and even when the two begin to fight at the end of episode 4, the fight serves as mere background fodder both visually and auditorily, and the scene quickly fades to black.

As a teenager, the rapper was an affiliate of the LA rap collective Odd Future, including an infamous feature on Earl Sweatshirt’s 2010 self-titled mixtape which made insouciant and depraved references to sexual assault, a song that both artists have since repeatedly denounced. Breakout success came with his 2015 debut double record, Summertime ’06, and in particular with the anti-police single “Norf Norf,” which remains his most streamed track to this day. Each subsequent release has grappled with fame and notoriety, starting with the 2016 Prima Donna EP. The accompanying short film finds Staples checked into a surreal fever dream hotel and evading a horde of fans while reflecting on celebrities whose fame drove them to an early grave, before ultimately joining their ranks at his own hand.

On Dark Times, his most recent studio release, Staples sounds notably subdued and mature: a picture of a young man nearly 15 years into his career. With production that reunites him with collaborators from across his discography, including Michael Uzoworu and Cardo, Staples curates a decidedly down-tempo vibe to match the album’s bleak title. Gone are the high-octane beats of his earlier projects and the Detroit house–inspired beats found on his follow-up album, Big Fish Theory. Yet the dynamism of his flow and the sharpness of his lyricism remain, paired with heartfelt vulnerability and feeling. One could still throw some ass to this album, but it would have to be done respectfully.

Fame and celebrity status have come with a price for Staples. Through his lyrics, he documents the difficulty of maintaining romantic relationships and the members of his Long Beach community lost prematurely to gang violence and the socioeconomic conditions of their shared upbringing. “See, it’s hard to sleep when you the only one livin’ the dream,” he plainly raps on “Government Cheese,” and he bemoans his fate when “the woman that [he] love[s] won’t respond to [his] text” on “Radio.” Vulnerability suits him; he has perhaps never been more compelling than when he declares, “I long for lovin’ and affection,” on the album’s lead single “Shame on the Devil,” but is equally swift to set manageable expectations: that he still “chase[s] thrills” and is therefore “imperfected.” Staples bears the multiple burdens of representation—of the Crip set that he continues to rep, of the Ramona Park neighborhood he calls home, and of the former teenage rap prodigy now firmly in adulthood. He seems to be acutely aware of these burdens and actively responds to them in his work. In a Rolling Stone interview, when asked about the inherent voyeurism of the (statistically) primarily white hip hop audience, Staples stresses his newfound attitude toward the question of reputation: “Now that I’m older, I look at it from a standpoint [of]: If people are listening, what do you want them to know? What do you want to tell them? . . . What am I telling them about this area, this community?”

This awareness of a largely white audience spills into The Vince Staples Show. The series finds Staples playing puppet master—manipulating the viewer’s strings as a writer, producer, and acting lead. With the series, Staples proffers a highly stylized version of Long Beach, and himself, for the audience’s consumption. Each episode opens with a text placard claiming it to be a work of fiction, with all resemblance to actual events purely coincidental. Yet from the outset, the line between real and constructed remains intentionally blurred. Much like Staples’s performance, the show’s visual styling occupies a liminal zone; the cinematography, coloring, and lighting lend the show the air of a drama, despite its sitcom-esque storyline and framing.

In the first episode, the titular character is pulled over for a traffic stop and subsequently arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. Notoriety and celebrity status seemingly come secondary to the conditions of his birth: he is always a Black man in America. The principal bully figure of the cells couldn’t care less about his musical career, caring only about where he is from. Despite the cops’ familiarity with his music—they are caught watching the “Norf Norf” video both in Staples’s presence and in his absence in a post-credits scene—Staples is left at the mercy of the legal and criminal justice systems and eventually released due to a “case of mistaken identity,” which the cop confidently tells him “happens all the time.” Returning home to a scene of subdued domestic bliss, Staples tells his girlfriend Deja (Andrea Ellsworth) that nothing particularly interesting happened that day; there is neither surprise nor outrage at the humiliation bestowed upon him by the police.

In the second episode, Staples visits an elite bank in pursuit of a small-business loan to produce his own low-sugar breakfast cereal for the community. He is denied the loan because of his job as an entertainer; they do not consider him to be a sound investment. While Staples is still on the premises, the bank is held up by a motley crew of masked robbers. In a twist toward the absurd, one of the robbers recognizes Staples as “the homie,” and the two begin chopping it up. His childhood friend, actively engaged in holding the bank up, reveals that bank robbing is a “hobby” and that he in fact works as a medical assistant at his day job. Here Staples writes directly into the white imaginary, presenting a vision of a Long Beach in which residents cannot help but act on their seemingly dormant tendencies towards crime.

In the fourth episode, another familiar domestic scene—Staples and his girlfriend Deja take her younger brother to an amusement park for his birthday—quickly becomes twisted as Staples embarks on a quest to produce fried chicken for his family. Staples nimbly manipulates Black stereotypes and tropes for his own purposes, underscoring the limits to white understanding of Black culture. When Deja is accused of shoplifting by the amusement park gift store’s staff member, notably also a Black man, she threatens that her boyfriend Vince Staples will mess him up, to which the clerk replies, “Who is Vince Staples?”

This is a refrain repeated throughout the series, reflective of Staples’s real-life level of notoriety; for years he has dwelled on the fringes of the mainstream, with a sizable following but without reaching the level of arena tours. In episode 4, the funhouse mirror continues to reflect the mindset of Staples when he is chased by a gang of park mascots. Episode 5 likewise takes the form of a surreal chase scene between Staples and someone he has presumably wronged in the past. For a man who stated, “I ain’t never run from nothing but the police,” he is frequently found in movement as the subject of pursuit—a visual motif dating back to the gaggle of fans he outmaneuvers in “Prima Donna” that emphasizes his need to remain perpetually ahead of his audience and their expectations. His celebrity status, itself a product of the machinations of white supremacy and law enforcement, cannot be fought, only fled.

The condition of celebrity, Staples tells us, is one dominated by the uncanny and the surreal; freakish and dreamlike elements have prevailed within his visual output for nearly a decade. As a rapper now being granted opportunities in the realm of television, but one from a historically impoverished neighborhood pierced by gang culture, Vince Staples is forced to reside firmly in the gray area, further burdened with the mantle of representation. There is only so much room within the white imaginary for stories like his. The corporate behemoth Netflix is quick to cancel even fan favorite shows offering diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and even quicker to renew their white counterparts instead. He keeps one eye trained toward creating a financially stable future for himself and his family and the other focused on the past, on uplifting his community as a whole, with constant awareness of and guilt over those he has lost and left behind.