Vince Staples’ Revolutionary Rap-Rock Turn
The first sounds you hear on Cry Baby, the new Vince Staples album—the Long Beach rapper’s seventh—are a set of drumsticks kicking off a beat. This has been an intro for rock albums for something like 65 years, but for a Vince Staples album it feels—and is meant to feel—revolutionary. After six albums with Def Jam, where he routinely drew the best beats out of L.A.’s best producers, and made entire albums with the hyperpop godhead SOPHIE, he’s gone indie, signing with Loma Vista, and took a band into the studio to make Cry Baby, an album that blends rap and rock in a way that feels familiar but also fresh. It’s been a minute since a rapper has so openly “gone rock,” and especially in this way: This isn’t some move to become the new Jelly Roll. The band’s playing is distorted, heavy, clattering; more post-punk than punk, more lo-fi bedroom than arena rock.
The stylistic shift’s purpose is revealed the moment Staples opens his mouth: his first words on the album’s lead single, “Blackberry Marmalade,” are “Empires built on blood-stained ground / Kanye West I hope they all fall down.” This move towards a rock sound is the same one Rage Against the Machine pulled on frat-rock fans in the early ‘90s: There’s revolutionary, leftist politic-rap in every song here, with Staples turning his all-seeing eye outward towards the American experiment, towards police brutality, towards redlining, towards a bloody history that is too often swept under the rug. This is a public service album, explaining history to an audience that probably hasn’t thought too deeply about it.
Cry Baby doesn’t become just a lecture, though. As anyone who’s seen him on Hot Ones or Ziwe can attest, he’s the quickest-thinking, funniest rapper alive. He’s a master of metaphor across Cry Baby. He ties the transatlantic slave trade’s main crop—cotton—with the deliverance of music on the piano-lead “Cotton” and tackles media myopia on the crunchy “TV Guide.” On the bluesy “White Flag” he dissects the feeling of ennui you get when trying to fight back against oppression with lots of deft wordplay, and ties religion to the fear of the unknown with “Big Bad Wolf.”
The album’s most bruising moment is on the funky “Go! Go! Gorilla,” when Vince, amidst nine songs where he looks outward, remembers his own experience with an aggressive LAPD office who attacked him when he was a preteen. “I was twelve years old when they tried to sit me on the curb /I got choke slammed for resisting arrest from a grown man / I ain't even tell my mama what happened,” he raps in his normal deadpan delivery. It’s a moment that makes clear the revolutionary words of the album’s 37 minutes come from a hard-earned place that should not be forced on anyone. This is a timely album, and one of the year’s best. You can stream it here.
