From the magazine: ISSUE 88, October/November 2013

Vince Staples speaks about rap as if it were something he tripped and fell into. After a chance meeting with Odd Future engineer Syd tha Kyd, Staples netted a guest spot on Earl Sweatshirt’s 2010 debut, EARL. As Odd Future blew up, with Earl tucked away at a Samoan school for at-risk youth, Staples began to draw interest from the absent rapper’s rapidly growing fanbase. “They were looking for people who had associations with Earl, and it came down to me.” But Staples is more than just a placeholder. His music imbues the caustic nihilism of the Odd Future ethos with a voice that sounds inherently more mature, delivering fatalistic dispatches and classic gangsta rap gun-talk in a way that’s simultaneously world-weary and smooth.

Staples hails from Long Beach, home of old guard West Coast rap luminaries Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg and Warren G. “It’s suburban, but it’s considered one of the ghettos of Los Angeles,” he says over the phone from home. His rough-and-tumble upbringing colored releases like 2011’s Shyne Coldchain Vol. 1 and Winter in Prague, last year’s collaboration with producer Michael Uzowuru. Both mixtapes offered 20-minute blasts of bleak but airy street rap. Money comes and goes/ The money’s low, we run in homes, he says on Shyne Coldchain’s “102.” The Odd Future association brought a modicum of name recognition, but Staples still struggled to turn a profit off of music. “Rap wasn’t bringing in any money,” he says, “so rap was always secondary to my family’s security.” He seemed content to eke out a normal life with rap as a hobby, releasing fleet mixtapes whenever he came upon the right beats and popping up at the occasional live show.