Photo by Meredith Truax

Vince Staples: "Progressive 3" (via SoundCloud)

Vince Staples is always trying to get his friends to play laser tag, for fun. He destroys anonymous strangers at Call of Duty and then laughs when they call him fat for fun, too. But the 21-year-old rapper—whose songs brim with drug addicts, errant gun wounds, dead friends, absent parents, and other harsh details of a life in Long Beach, California marked by violence from a young age—does not make music for fun.

“Where we’re coming from, it’s not cool, it’s not fun,” he says when we meet at his label Def Jam’s midtown Manhattan office. “And we’re documenting what’s going on in the world that we live in with this music, so it shouldn’t just be some happy stuff.” On his song “Nate”, he talks about wanting to kill someone because he saw his father do it; on “Blue Suede”, he contrasts the colors of the Jordans he wanted with the colors of the flowers left at headstones.

But his music isn’t all doom and gloom—it’s alive, rendered with an honest voice making no apologies for its point of view. This disarming straightforwardness extends to our conversation, as Staples’ voice rarely rises above a colorless drawl while his eye contact stays steady. He’s unafraid to debunk bullshit industry politics and rappers who mindlessly glorify street life in the same breath; he’s updating the idea of “keeping it real” for a new generation, making it seem not only necessary but dangerous.

True to form, he started rapping not because he saw it as his divine purpose, but because he had nothing better to do while hanging out with his friends. “For me, music was never like a dream or none of that other shit that people try to say,” he explains. “It’s more of an everyday thing than something that I would look at as an art form. My knowledge has improved since, but I still look at music in the same way.”

After getting kicked out of high school, he spent some time in Atlanta before ending back up in Long Beach, where he began hanging out with Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt and Syd tha Kyd in 2009. That led to appearances on early OF songs, though he was never a formal member of the group. He slowly started releasing his own material, finding a unique perspective along the way. Whereas his first mixtape, 2011’s Shyne Coldchain Vol. 1, is all post-Earl slurred cadences and sluggish production, this year’s excellent sequel is filled with soulful flourishes and insistent, in-your-ear dictation. “Blue Suede”, his most startling track yet, is built around a the sound of a police siren heard through a fever dream and will appear on the forthcoming Hell Can Wait EP, due out September 23.

For Staples, growing up means navigating a rap game that he wouldn’t necessarily be that interested in if it didn’t offer a tangible way to provide for his loved ones. It means going on tour with Mac Miller, getting phone calls to collaborate from Common, and coming to grips with the notion that people will pay money—yes, actual American currency—to see him stand onstage. “For someone to pay and wait in line and all that for you means everything,” he says. “That’s how I look at it. Fuck the show. No matter who’s there, the fact that they’re there is really what it’s about to me.” He says this very matter-of-factly, knifing through all the attendant nonsense that comes with greater exposure—a reminder to himself, if not just everyone else, that he’ll be here as long as someone’s listening.

Pitchfork: You’ve said that you felt like your purpose in music is to make people uncomfortable, what do you mean by that?

Vince Staples: I just feel like that’s what music is supposed to be. Like, that’s my problem with fucking trap music: People are rapping about killing niggas and selling fucking drugs all day, but it sounds happy—that’s bullshit. That shit’s stressful: You’re not going to make no fucking money, somebody’s going to end up dead, and you’re not going to be able to pay for his funeral because his mom probably don’t fuck with him like that, and he don’t got health insurance. So now you have to do a fucking car wash to pay for somebody’s funeral and bury him in some cheap shit. Where’s that song?

If you listen to shit about niggas being in a position where they have no hope, there should be nothing at peace about that. There’s a way to do it to where it’s listenable and likable, but it shouldn’t just be some happy stuff. Every song on the radio right now is about selling cocaine and killing people, but that’s not what you hear from it, so in your head that becomes OK.

The way I look at music—especially urban music, black-people music, whatever you want to call it—is that we’re all in the zoo, and the listeners are the people outside of the cage. You can look at five lions that could literally destroy you, but since you’re looking through the glass, it’s fun and cute. You point at the glass. You wave at them. But you’re not going to step inside that glass, because you know what’ll happen to you. Rappers are making this shit a petting zoo. They’re like, “It’s cool, you can walk up, we’re not threatening, we’re just musicians, it’s all an act.” But it’s actually a very real thing. It’s not a game. One of my friends just died last month—got shot in his face five times in the back of his mom’s house in front of his 5-year-old sister. He was 24 and a good dude, went to work, never really hurt nobody. So if this is what we’re rapping about, why do you not feel that?

Pitchfork: There certainly can be a disconnect between fans and artists in terms of backgrounds and being able to take something as seriously as it might be in real life.

VS: Listeners don’t take a lot of rappers seriously because rappers don’t take themselves seriously. And, to be honest, the majority of these dudes are lying. It’s not even that they’re just lying—because you can lie all day in your music and tell a story—they’re assholes who walk around like they don’t have any connection with the people. A lot of music comes from a selfish place, but there’s no sense of self within it. With rap, everyone’s fit in the same mold. And that’s one thing that you have to know about these people: They’re trying to portray this image because they’ve seen the prototype, they’ve seen what everybody thinks that community is, even though they’ve probably never been in it. So they feel like they can’t be themselves, when in reality those environments are made up of every single kind of person. I got homies whose parents have money that live two streets over. They did everything that we did. They don’t have to act like they don’t have anything, and they never will. Are they to be taken lightly? Hell no. They don’t have to pretend. There’s too much pretending within this music, and that’s why we get treated the way that we do.

Vince Staples: "Trunk Rattle" (via SoundCloud)

Pitchfork: How do you approach making music? Are you in the studio every day?

VS: I can’t do that. Because when your main focus is the music, you don’t live an actual life. That is the problem with a lot of rappers, too: They’ve been trying to rap since they were 12 years old, but your life doesn’t really start until you’re 15 or 16. That’s when you become your own person. So I feel like if you spend your whole life thinking “I’m going to be a rapper,” when it’s time for you to get your shot, you’re not going to have anything to talk about—because your whole life has been rapping. You’re going to rap about rapping. So I don’t feel like I should be in the studio every day, because when you’re not experiencing life you don’t know how to affect other people’s lives. I record when I have something to say.

Pitchfork: A lot of rappers are extremely collaborative, but you rarely have anyone else featured on your songs.

VS: People put other people on their songs so that name can propel the song and their career: You want Jay Z on a song not because it’s going to add to it or because that was your vision—but because you want Jay Z on the song. You want it to say “featuring Jay Z.” That’s it. Most of these songs don’t have concepts; there’s no point to them. But I feel like my songs should mean something, and a lot of the time it’s not necessary for other people to be on them.