Vince Staples: Prima Donna EP

2016 has featured two rap projects that begin with a reference to the gospel staple “This Little Light of Mine.” On Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo the song was quoted by Chance the Rapper, setting the mood for a wayward album about using faith to reckon with temptation. On Vince Staples’ Prima Donna, the song is quoted as a final reckoning: stretching out the words, a quasi-fictional rapper sings the song right before blowing his brains out.
The first song on Summertime ‘06, Staples’ ambitious debut album, also ended with a gunshot, but the targets were varied. There, strafing between his past and his present, Staples wove a rich tapestry of adoration and alienation, a love letter to his hometown of Long Beach, California written in the blood that stains its streets. Prima Donna is much more narrow in scope. The brief EP finds Staples playing puppeteer to a rap star who finds fame to be unfulfilling. Nearly every song is appended by an acapella coda in which the forlorn rap star speaks directly, his voice heavy yet hopeful. It’s unclear whether the codas are song demos or confessionals, but that seems to be the point: the same art that gives the rap star life is slowly killing him.
Death is a vital force on Prima Donna. Chronologically, the album moves backward in time from the rap star’s death, beginning with him committing suicide and ending with him as a gangbanger, each successive track contextualizing his suicide. “War Ready” begins with a sample from Outkast’s “Atliens” where Andre 3000 proclaims he’s found a stronger weapon than his glock: his words. The sample is looped three times, 3000’s voice becoming more clear with each repetition, the rapper inching away from self-destruction. But the kicker is that what he inches toward isn’t particularly vitalizing. Staples peppers the first verse with a punishing string of desolate imagery. Unflinching, he raps “Heaven hell, free or jail, same shit/ County jail, bus, slave ship, same shit/ Wise man once said/ that a black man better off dead.” Death has always been a theme in Staples’ music, but here it’s a refuge, a perfectly reasonable consideration, not a consequence. And that’s just two minutes in.