A DISCUSSION OF SUMMERTIME '06 BY VINCE STAPLES, PT. 2

Round 2 AM the pool was filled with varicolored vomit.  Lars had stuck drumsticks in two of his orifices.  We was wasted off Miller Lites.

"Told you the VINCE album would grow on you," said Lars, waving a soiled Vic Firth in my direction.

"You was right.  I still maintain that YG and Vince are different strains of the same root sensibility.  They both the premier gangsta rap revivalists, right?  Only difference is YG fully inhabits the character.  Vince stands outside of it.  Put it this way: YG is makin Westerns, Vince is making revisionist Westerns."

"The way I see it is Vince made the album KENDRICK would have made if he wasn't so worried about bein a sympathetic character.  He's the good kid in a mad city.  Vince is less concerned with being liked."

"True, true.  It's the kinda shit Kendrick could make if he focused on making rap albums rather than 'short films.'  He's like KANYE minus the middle-class background, like this is what Ye's last two albums might have been if his celebrity hadn't metastasized to the point that everything is ultimately about Being Kanye.  Vince is more elusive. He's quicksilver.  It's like if ICE T wrote Invisible Man.  There's only one person experiencing the world as Kanye West. There are many experiencing the world in ways similar or identical to the Vince Staples concept."

"It's sort of like our Ride The Lightning."

"I hate you Lars."

Graceland came on and we danced until the early morning, Lars in his sarong and me in my Girbauds.

A DISCUSSION OF SUMMERTIME '06 BY VINCE STAPLES

Me and Lars Ulrich was boolin the other day when he put on the new VINCE STAPLES album.  It is called Summertime '06.  We was both nodding our heads along, but it was more like we was doin it for the other guy's sake, like we was tryin to save face and avoid an awkward confrontation if one of us was really fuckin with it.

After some intense nodding and an exchange of soulful looks that said, "Feelin this shit in my soul," I grabbed his Zune and put on last year's YG album.  We both laughed.  He leapt up outta his Endless Pool, revealing a gorgeously aged Danish body in full nudity, and tossed me a cold Miller Lite straight from the mothafuckin Rubbermaid.

"Man, I thought it was just me.  I like it but I don't love it.  It's a fuckin slog sometimes."

"I feel ya, Lars Whitemon.  He did what he was supposed to do.  I can't really even knock it, except to say I didn't want an album for the critics.  He shoulda followed EARL'S lead and cut the length in half.  Shout out to Earl, puttin out rap Paganicons while all his peers been damaged off The Suburbs.  That's why it was so dope Hell Can Wait was an EP.  No one puts out EPs no more, so it was like he was flippin th' bird to the line of thinking that equates length with significance (no homo).  I be hittin the snooze button on these mumblecore interludes n shit.  ROGER WATERS ruined a generation of rappers."

"Yeah bro," said Lars as his droopy cock billowed in the wind.  "It sorta reminded of when we recorded The Black Album with BOB ROCK cause we wanted our Led Zeppelin IV moment.  We got love from critics and mainstream rock 'n' rollers, but we kinda alienated our core followers - the hopeless cretins who moved on to Vulgar Display Of Power now that we was tryin to make timeless artistic statements 'n' shit.  Did I ever tell you about Bob Rock's business cards?  They said, 'If it ain't Bob, it don't Rock.'  That's why we hired him."

"Literally don't know what you're talking about, Skeet Skeet Ulrich," I said. "I don't listen to music where the artists actually play instruments."

I hopped out the Endless Pool and took sips of the Miller Lite as I looked over the Hollywood Hills, wondering if somewhere in Los Feliz James Newsted and his protege were having a similar moment over the new MEEK MILL.  I hoped they were also nude, I hoped they were also drinking domestic beer.

"IDK," Lars said. "Maybe it will grow on you like a staph infection contracted from an improperly chlorinated Endless Pool."

WHO'S MORE GANGSTA: VINCE STAPLES OR YG? PHIL SPECTOR, HE KILLED SOMEONE

Vince Staples got me all fucked up, mane.  He should call himself Vince Cellulose, 'cause he hard to process!  I wasn't really checkin for his shit since Odd Future jumped the shark, 'round the time Tyler dropped Goblin and everyone realized he was less teen RZA than new-wave Bam Margera.  Maybe when a decade passes, and Jasper Dolphin appears on a Celebrity Rehab/Fit Club crossover swagged out like W.A.S.P.'s guitarist in Decline Of Western Civilization: Part II, his raft sinking beneath the flab of countless late-night Taco Bell runs, we will all be able to acknowledge that Odd Future were the Insane Clown Posse for ppl who hate poor white trash.  Until then, let's all forget how earnestly we shat our drawers in 2010.  When I die, I'll have to account for all the time I spent listening to Hodgy Beats.

As a historical curiosity, Vince is the most intriguing artist to come up under the OF umbrella.  Earl is straightforward.  He's a smart kid making weird music, and rap history is riddled with weird nerds.  In a subtle way, Vince is doing something new.  Notwithstanding cursory nods to Doom and Madlib, Earl's music is ahistorical.  No matter how popular it gets, it's niche music following a generic template of underground rap.  You hear it and think, "Oh, that's underground rap," but you couldn't say if he's from L.A. or New York or Detroit.  Vince's music is tethered to a geographically specific rap tradition that was culturally and commercially significant - L.A. gangsta rap - which means he has a broader base of references to quote and subvert.  But he's also not being ironic.  He's the first (kill me now) post-postmodern gangsta rapper.

I been peripherally aware of Vince's subsequent work, mainly cause the cover for Hell Can Wait reminded me of the one for Suffer.  That's the kinda historical continuity I likes to see in my SoCal subcultures, and it seems that Vince is of the same mind.  Like YG and Kendrick, he's conscious of his place in L.A.'s gangsta rap tradition.  Kendrick never goes further than weaving G-funk signifiers into his Boyz N The Hood meets Fences drama-club raps. YG updates the genre while working within it. Vince, on the other hand, straddles gangsta and backpacker rap without committing to either.  He engages both, but never fully.

YG's persona is more convincing more than Vince, and not just cause he was (supposedly) a gangbanger.  Gangsta-rap is the unique genre where the authenticity of a persona really matters, and as far as I know, Vince grew up hard knock.  This is where the OF association works against him.  Gangsta rap requires a suspension of disbelief if it's going to work.  It's a relationship between the artist and listener: you gotta be willing to give in to the fantasy, but the artist has to do his job and convince you.  (Paradoxically, that's why Straight Out Of Compton is more compelling than Bangin' On Wax).  The price of Vince's come-up is he'll always have some association with the Fairfax kids lined up for the limited Supreme shoetree.

Why should it matter?  Wayne Perry was a gangsta.  I read his profile in Don Diva and felt sick to my stomach.  From the comfort of his TriBeCa loft, Jay-Z celebrates an unrepentant psychopath who murdered more black men than the cracker in Ferguson ever will.  We all believe De Niro as Jimmy Conway even tho his artist parents both fucked this man, and what is gangsta-rap if it ain't the most lucrative form of performance art?

It shouldn't matter, but it does.  Jay can't rap about hustlin no more.  Cube went from AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted to nostalgia act in the time it took to make Are We There Yet? (dope movie).  Rick Ross only lives cause no one believed him in the first place.  But Vince is fashioning a a new kind of persona, one centering on the tension between gangsta and backpacker.  YG is far and away the better artist right now, but he's limited himself to being a pitch-perfect formalist.  And there's nothing wrong with that.  The solution is simple: judge them not on the color of their bandana, but the way they fold it.