The new, self-titled album from Vince Staples is so slight it barely exists. It’s about as long as a network sitcom episode once you strip out the commercials; it’s almost precisely the same length as his 2016 project Prima Donna, which was marketed as an EP. And yet the record’s name and its cover — a stark close-up of the artist’s face in faded black-and-white — suggest a major statement, or at least a notably personal one. This is both true and not; the aesthetic choices Vince makes do some of that heavy thematic lifting by implication, but also have a slightly narcotic effect. And so, despite its sometimes bracing content, the album’s near-uniform calm lulls the listener into a false sense of security — then leaves him there, declining to ambush an easy target.
Though still just 28 years old, Staples has been one of the most exciting rappers on the West Coast for a full decade. His early music was confrontational: In the very first verse on 2014’s Shyne Coldchain Vol. 2, Vince threatens to “murder God” and calls Obama a “house n----.” But his flirtations with shock rap were more than eclipsed by the frank way he rendered his upbringing in North Long Beach. These notes from his past could be jarring for their simplicity (“My mama cried the day I got put on the hood”) or for the way they blended the tragic with a comic sensibility that would later make him a media darling (see the way he recalls violent scenes that happened “back when Common had you tryin’ to read Qu’rans and go to college”).
