Vince Staples makes a compelling artistic shift on Cry Baby

In the opening moments of the music video for “White Flag,” a Ku Klux Klan member lingers in the bottom right corner of the United States flag. Vince Staples walks up to the large red, white, and blue fabric and unfurls it on the ground before covering it in white paint. He layers the flag with a paint roller, ensuring the stars and stripes are just barely discernible, their contours faint beneath the swath of white, a color signifying both a truce and the KKK cloak we saw at the beginning of the video. Then he suspends the white flag in midair, casually dons a pair of safety glasses, and aims an automatic rifle in its direction, spraying bullet holes through the cloth. 

The Long Beach rapper has long examined the United States’ profit-hungry ties to colonialism, racism, and gun violence, and that investigation of American imperialism and oppression continues on his seventh album, Cry Baby. The ways in which he explores those themes tend to differ from record to record, using the direction of the music itself to guide his ruminations on governmental malfeasance and police brutality. 2017’s Big Fish Theory deployed SOPHIE beats, clanging electronic drums, and globe-shattering low-end. Its follow-up, 2018’s FM!, adopted a radio format, emitting its tales of gang violence and incarceration through blistering beats fit for summertime car rides with the windows down. Meanwhile, 2021’s Vince Staples distilled his raps into a newly laid-back delivery and swift pacing, clocking in around a brief twenty-two minutes. 

For Cry Baby, his first record on his own Section Eight Arthouse imprint through Loma Vista, Staples raps (and occasionally sings) over standard rock instrumentation of guitar, bass, and live drums, a noted departure from his previous albums’ beat-centric production. It’s a novel and compelling artistic shift, one that keeps his raps fresh while demonstrating that he’s still among hip-hop’s best orators. No matter the vehicle, Staples navigates the streets with a keen eye for observation and an undisputed gift for richly layered wordplay.

To call Cry Baby simply a “rock album,” though, would be reductive. Here, Staples and his band pull from various offshoots of guitar-forward music. There’s the driving, double-time post-punk of “The Running Man,” the heavy-pocket disco of “Cotton,” and the fuzzed-out blues-funk of “TV Guide,” all of which underscore the Black roots of music old and new. Rapping through it all, Staples pays heed to the genre’s Black origins while showcasing how hip-hop emerged from many of the same elements: those thwacking drums, those viscous basslines, those looping melodies. “The Big Bad Wolf” samples Slick Rick’s classic “Children’s Story” to bind tactile turntable scratches with thick, syncopated grooves, and “Blackberry Marmalade” invokes Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.” refrain over menacing, distorted bass guitar and an insistent drumbeat that recalls a lower-BPM version of Outkast’s “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad).”

It’s true: rock music’s Black genesis has long been uprooted by white opportunists eager to harvest its profits. Cultural theft is as entrenched an American tradition as apple pie on the Fourth of July, and Staples illustrates this grim truth brilliantly in both form (the rock-adjacent, guitar-driven instrumentation) and content. In the penultimate “Cotton,” for example, he uses slavery’s main cash crop as a metaphor for the commodification of Black art and, by extension, Black artists themselves: “Music makes me feel just like cotton / Pick me up when I feel like falling down.” He speaks from the perspective of an avaricious label executive on “White Flag,” telling his subject “you’re my baby doll, Voudou” (a double entendre on voodoo dolls and the Haitian religion, hence this spelling in the official lyric booklet), that he can make their “dreams come true” so long as they “promise me you won’t be trouble.” “The Running Man” uses a backdrop of state-sanctioned violence to mourn personal loss: “Graves from minor grievances,” Staples raps, melancholy, “I still ain’t finished grieving.” He widens the lens further on “The Big Bad Wolf,” rapping how “it’s plenty Zimmerman among us / but that ain’t new / been gunning for us since Columbus,” and he starts “Blackberry Marmalade” with thoughts on how America is one of many “empires built on bloodstained ground.” On “Only in America,” he describes the United States as the “land of the free / home of the brave / home of the natives / home of the slaves.” 

He aims some of his most scathing critiques at the nation’s horrific obsession with mass incarceration. “It’s hard to see past the stars from behind the bars,” goes one line from “Only in America,” highlighting how the U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, a fact that becomes even more startling when factoring in the history of predominantly Black convict labor and the 13th Amendment’s carceral loophole that permits slavery for prisoners. The American dream is just that: a dream. No matter what, you’ll still be held fallible in the eyes of Uncle Sam and his landlord army: “Big house, picket fence / just don’t be late on that rent,” Staples warns in the song’s final verse.

That bullet-hole-infested flag from the “White Flag” video reappears in its direct sequel, “Cotton.” With the flag still aloft, Staples uses it as a makeshift projector screen, displaying alternating footage of joy (Black newlyweds; musicians; churchgoers dancing, playing, and singing) and devastation (1921’s two-day Tulsa Race Massacre, in which white supremacists murdered hundreds of Black residents). As the video progresses, the stars and stripes return to the flag, but a stark black and white have now replaced the former red and blue. Toward the end, Staples’ silhouette rests against it. The mic remains firmly in his hand until there’s nothing left to say, and he walks off the set, his shadow moving out of frame. Whether it’s to document the good or the bad, Staples has always been a conduit for the American experience, transmitting tales of systemic violence in minute detail that blends autobiography and ethnography. As long as there’s something worth speaking on, Vince Staples will be here. [Loma Vista]

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.

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