5 Takeaways From Vince Staples’ ‘Cry Baby,’ His Most Experimental Album Since ‘Big Fish Theory’

There are exceptions, but generally speaking, if you’re a rapper that says you’re “more than a rapper,” I, and a small platoon of other snarky music critics, probably hate you. Or, at least, we’ll audibly sigh.

For the last decade or so (maybe more TBH), rappers have unwittingly used the idea of genre-blending or fake genre-experimentation as a branding device to suggest that they, no matter their lack of musical talent, are beings that transcend typical rap bylaws. But most of the time they don’t, and whatever “experiment” they end up conducting is actually just a flavorless imitation of someone that actually cared about the music they were making.

So then, whenever a rapper is supposedly going in a new direction, I get skeptical. Except when it’s Vince Staples, the best Long Beach rapper since Snoop Dogg came from the depths of the sea. Last month, Vince announced that he’d be dropping a new album called Cry Baby, and when he released “Blackberry Marmalade,” it was clear it was going to be a rock or rock-adjacent album. And it is.

Now that it’s been out for about 18 hours, we’ve now got to try to answer an important question: Yeah, it’s genre-bending, but is it the good-genre-bending? More importantly, is it good at all?

Off of a few listens, I’ll say yes. It’s very good. But check out my five takeaways to get the whole rundown.

Police Brutality

For this album, Vince turns most of his attention toward police and the racist system that empowers them. There is hardly a song that goes by without Vince mentioning the threat of being shot by police. This one, like 2017’s Big Fish Theory, attacks macro systems instead of individual enemies, and the police feel like the biggest threat. Because of America being, well, America, it's all pretty evergreen. But this album in particular feels like it could have hit during the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor protests of summer 2020. 

It’s One of Vince’s Least Introspective Albums … By Design

From the very beginning of his career, Vince Staples established himself as a master of first-person narratives, using snarky wit and weary eye for humanity to distill all of life’s seesawing multitudes into tidily incisive couplets. At his most potent, he’s used that technique to tell composites of his own story, but here, he aims that perceptual lens almost entirely at external forces. With that approach in mind, you won’t get a “Nate” or “Justin” here; more like punk rock on the spectrum of “Fight The Power.”

His Versatility Isn’t a Gimmick — It’s a Functionality

“Genre-fluid” has become one of the most cringe branding buzzwords in the world, and it’s mostly because those supposedly versatile artists are usually just hop-scotching the same trite sounds every other supposedly “genre-bending” artist dances in and out of. For them, it’s a hollow aesthetic. For Vince, it’s an example of form follows function.

On albums like Summertime ’06 and Dark Times, Vince leans conversational, wielding longer, more conventional verse structures to make the granular personal and social observations he’s jotted down in his iPhone notes. The micro bursts allow him to collapse the distance between cosmic truths and the minutiae of gang banging. For instance, just take a look at 2015’s “Señorita.” There, Vince lays out shootout survival logistics and the idea of scarcity mindset: “My burner get stuck if I shoot it too much/So a nigga resorted to doming/That's somebody's son, but a war to be won/Baby, either go hunt or be hunted/We crabs in a bucket/He called me a crab, so I shot him in front of the Douglas.”

There, each couplet is a self-contained argument. His gun could jam up if he shoots it too much, so he aims for the head to eliminate an enemy more quickly. The person he’s going to shoot is someone else’s loved one, but he can’t afford to think about that because they’ll kill him in the time he takes to pause to consider it. Etc. That nuanced thought process is best explained sentence by sentence. Meanwhile, a song like Cry Baby’s “The Running Man” thrives on consecutive abrupt statements that phonetically mirror exasperation. With its sing-song couplets, tracks like the anti-police brutality anthem “Go! Go Gorilla” (also from Cry Baby) give Vince’s thoughts time to drift like resignation to an unpleasant fate.

It’s not a 1:1, but you’ll see a similar approach on his equally experimental album, Big Fish Theory, where he addresses themes like government corruption, racial stereotypes with broad strokes and varied rhythmic structures that break from his more traditional album song setups. Those techno and rock songs reach toward a broader, more visceral feeling because the lyrics aren’t as microscopically focused. His longer verses work best when the microscopic analysis is the point. It’s sort of the difference between JAŸ-Z and the Beatles (though JAŸ-Z knows when to lean into less granular structures).

Some rappers lack the malleable craftsmanship to make the switch-up, and as a result, they drift into corny after school special platitudes and the songs suffer from a bad case of fake deepness. Vince avoids all of this because he’s got a gorilla grip on symbolism and an instinctive understanding of nuance. He chooses his approach based on utility: experimental music for tackling large systemic issues, and linear raps for addressing personal ones.

Vince’s Vocals Have Always Been an Underrated Tool

Vince isn’t some classically trained singer, but he’s definitely mastered his own tone. He can carry a tune and modulate his inflections so he conveys sadness, delirium or rare warmth. He’s done that throughout his career, but he wields it to its fullest extent on Cry Baby, where he shows not just how to use his voice, but when to use it. Here, it’s clear he knows when to sing, chant (“God Bless The USA”), shout (“The Running Man”) and operate at the layers in between as he decides when he’s going to rage against the system and when he’s going to sit in quiet, hopeless resignation.

These tools were evident on tracks like “Lemonade,” but they’ve been present in some way or another on all of his projects. I’m not sure if it’s all the acting he’s been doing or the rock songs just make me appreciate his vocal control more readily, but it feels more important on Cry Baby than ever before.

It’s One of His Better Albums

I’m just a few listens deep, but I feel confident saying Cry Baby is one of Vince Staples’ better albums. There are some trapdoors for heavy handedness and lame musicality he could’ve fallen through, but his understated songwriting instincts, and the general fact that he’s some kind of genius sociologist moonlighting as a rapper, make it so this one rings through with the clarity of an experiment that was way more than worth conducting.

You can buy the Vince Staples' Cry Baby CD by visiting the Okayplayershop here.