Hip Hop Gets Darker: Vince Staples Lets His Demons Loose With New Album
The dark cloud looming above Vince Staples got a whole lot bigger for his most recent album, Prima Donna. The seven tracks featured on the album hold enough weight without needing a normal 13 track or so album. Staple’s Long Beach home and heavy gang violence from his youth is the narrator of this album. His rise to fame has brought him to question who he is and who he has become. He is no longer surrounded by gang violence on the streets of Long Beach, but he is still fighting, he just doesn’t know what he is fighting against anymore.
Let It Shine, this first track of the album, will make your bones shiver and your heart shrink. The vulnerable voice of Vince Staples solemnly singing this little light of mine is eerily calming the listener just to wake us up with a gunshot transition to the next song. War Ready, as with the rest of the album, is angrier and aggressive. In this track he battles the idea of being a black man in America, “A wise man once said that a black man better off dead / So I’m war ready.” He also struggles with rap music and how a rapper has to be wealthy in order to receive recognition “They only fucking with the rapper if the rapper rich / or got a platinum hit / a chain or two / seem the music interchangeable.” Rap has become blended together, and he doesn’t know what makes his music different from the rest.
The tracks off of the Prima Donna individually, besides Let It Shine, hold different weight separately than they do together. Together they create a dark and difficult version of a black man’s experience in Los Angeles and his rise to fame. An experience that does not end in the glitz and glamour of the hip hop lifestyle, but even once the goal has been reached there is still something missing. At the end of the third track, Smile, Vince repeats the phrase “sometimes I feel like giving up” and it feels as if he has never stopped repeating this phrase his whole life. This album asks the question that Vince must keep tip toeing around, “is it worth it?”
Hip hop has recently become flooded with rappers like Lil Yatchy, Fetty Whap, Lil Uzi Vert, and Rae Sremmurd that focus on creating party hits. A decent amount of their songs glamorize their current lifestyle of bitches, money, and cars. When an artists, like Vince Staples, dedicates a whole album to his current, confused famous state we are reminded that fame, even in the hip hop world, is not a party every night.
Pimp Hand, is a dark deep red track that brings back the violence of Long Beach Vince witnessed and took part in. He references the idea of a pimp hand, a backhanded slap across the face, repeating “Time to show these Bitches who the man / Pimp hand strong.” He uses this idea to claim that he still is the man and he still has the authority that he had, he doesn’t want to loose that even though he has gained so much. Here we are faced with the issue of abusing women as a part of an experience, to illustrate what is done in gang culture. The idea of a pimp hand is a way to show power and authority as a pimp. Vince in one sense is encouraging this act while he is also recalling it, as something familiar to him because of his adulthood. To him this is normal, which is a larger issue than the fact that this phrase is used. He is battling with He cannot get away from his former life. His current one with money and fame was supposed to be so much better, but instead it has him questioning everything.
Vince uses hip hop to release his own experiences, he doesn’t take on a hip hop star persona. It is Ironic that the album is called Prima Donna, as if he is labeling himself as one for rightfully questioning and complaining about his current fame. Through this album he is showing hip hop that life isn’t always bitches and money, life is a constant battle despite your situation. It is a real side to the hip hop lifestyle depiction that can often be very over the top.
The album ends with a small voice saying “Hello, Hello? Is anybody there?” from the last track Big Time. The voice echos as if it is trapped inside a cave or at the bottom of a well, asking for help to escape. This voice could be Vince still asking for help, even after the experience he created through his album he still needs someone and is looking for someone to help him. This dark journey didn’t end with a resolution.
