![]() ![]() Staples wasn’t ambitious about rap when he started hanging out with Syd tha Kyd, Taco Bennett, and Mike G, of Odd Future. Of these early days, his mom, Eloise Staples, told me, “We went through a lot as a family, and that made him humble.” I don’t think they noticed that I noticed it. Sitting on the couch, face emotionless. Hear him screaming for my mama at the backdoor. ![]() Lights flashing, now he running from the Winslows. ![]() ![]() Drinking Hen with homies, blowing cig smoke. Staples tells some of that story in “Nate,” a song he released on Shyne Coldchain II, his fourth mixtape: Used to see him stand out in the alley through my window. That’s who the mother of my family is.” His parents divorced, and his father went to jail, arrested on Christmas Day. “My mom is everyone you’ve ever seen on every gang documentary,” he said. As he describes it, gangbanging wasn’t something you opted into. Staples grew up in North Long Beach, in the Ramona Park neighborhood, the youngest of four children. “So this is their trial run, and then I’ll go back to where I belong.” And where does he belong? “Long Beach.” And the people who I work with have been trying to get me to move closer.” Closer to what? “Exactly,” he said. If you’re not rich and you’re not successful in rap, you’re a failure.” Has nothing changed for him in the past year? “I have more money, I guess, which doesn’t mean anything to me.” What about the move to downtown? “Well, there’s a misconception that in this job, you have to be around or in the area or in the midst of whatever we want to call it. “I think this is the only genre where you can’t be a working-class struggling artist,” Staples said. If all stars are balls of gas, rap stars are among the most gaseous. I’m a person with a job.” He added, “A rap star is, like, a star. We were sitting at a picnic table next to a coffee cart in downtown L.A., not far from where he just rented a loft apartment. He performed on The Tonight Show on Wednesday, and this fall will join James Blake, a collaborator on Beyoncé’s Lemonade, on his North American tour.īut still: “I’m not a rap star,” Staples insisted one morning a couple of weeks before F.Y.F. (In a demonstration that he, too, is “regular,” Tyler, the Creator, the de facto leader of the hip-hop collective Odd Future, waited in line to get into the party.) This week, it was announced that Staples would appear in Alexander Wang’s fall campaign, alongside Big Sean, Skrillex, Tinashe, A$AP Ferg, and Kylie Jenner. He has a relationship with Sprite and with Levi’s, which two weeks ago hosted the premiere of his latest EP and short film, both called Prima Donna, at its showroom off Sunset Boulevard. The Fader has since declared him a “ regular genius,” and a “candidate for the most hilarious, intelligent, and subversive voice in rap.” Brands have also taken notice. But it was Summertime ’06 that cemented Staples’s place as rap’s “ devotee of realism,” as Pitchfork’s review put it. Staples had put out four strong mixtapes and an EP, and appeared on his friend Earl Sweatshirt’s 2010 mixtape, Earl, and on Earl's first studio album, Doris. But he lookin’ at me crazy when we pull up to the projects._ The crowd rapped along_: Uber driver in the cockpit look like Jeffrey Dahmer. Video of seagulls in flight ran on a large LED screen behind him. Then he strode onstage and started in: I’m just a nigga, until I fill my pockets. show, too, with “Lift Me Up.” Only, in a wry tweak, the gunshot was replaced with the banzai, hyenalike laugh that opens the ’60s surf-rock classic “Wipe Out”: Ha ha ha ha ha ha wipe out! Staples was still in the wings, walking in circles, jumping up and down, taking pulls from the inhaler. So tell me what’s the difference, so tell me what’s the difference? I feel like Mick and Richards, they feel like Muddy Waters. We are dropped straight into the second track, “Lift Me Up.” Synth, throbbing bass, Staples: I’m just a nigga, until I fill my pockets. Is this a rap album or a slasher film? Staccato stabs of bass and drum grow more frequent, then are cut short: Gunshot. The record opens with a 36-second instrumental that layers eerie piano-ish effects over the choking calls of seagulls and water lapping against something the industrial piers of Long Beach, it would seem. ![]()
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