He, as he often does, alludes to suicide: “Awkward silence, my brain scream louder / Askin’ when I’m gon’ blast myself / Couple problems my cash can’t help / Human issues, too strong for tissues / False bravado all masked by wealth.” Like on Kanye West’s “Blood On The Leaves”, a song whose title Staples references on album closer “Rain Come Down”, here on “Party People”, here, albeit more tastefully than West did, juxtaposes his struggles as a wealthy man with the struggles of the black community: “Deja vu from my bayside view / I see black cats in the daytime too / I see black cats on the daytime news / With handcuffed wrists and their skin turned blue.” “Move your body if you came here to party / If not then pardon me / How I’m supposed to have a good time / When death and destruction’s all I see?” Staples asks over a bass heavy beat. (“I don’t fair fight but I bear fight / Lookin’ for my next roadkill for the headlight / Hangin’ on my last four kills for the highlights / My life, hiii life, high five, bye, bye,” Kendrick Lamar slays.) From then on, he’s confident. “This day forward, I ain’t takin’ photos / And we wear our own clothes, we ain’t givin’ promo no mo.‘” Staples spits over SOPHIE’s squeaky machine beat.Īnd then there’s “Party People”, where everything comes to a head. He’s musically adventurous, too, throughout the album, too, employing a house beat on “Love Can Be…” and a funky Detroit techno beat from Jimmy Edgar for “745″.īut where the album truly takes an unexpected turn is with “Yeah Right”, a trap song parodying trap songs wherein Staples sarcastically asks material questions to rappers (“Is your house big? Is your car nice?”) before recruiting the greatest rapper alive to show them how it’s done. On “Alyssa Interlude”, which starts off with a sampled interview with Amy Winehouse from the documentary Amy (the film that inspired Staples to make last year’s great Prima Donna EP) and eventually intersperses solemn-sounding synths and a sample of The Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain”, Stapes is emotional.
Staples has always been unafraid to paint a picture of himself, and he alludes to his past as a Crip on Big Fish Theory just as he does on every album. Instead of the normally stark, sharp production that characterizes his tracks, there are sampled disco vocals and a garage beat (it’s co-produced by none other than Justin Vernon), the unconscious suggestion that life is an absurd and unfair party. “Big Fish”, meanwhile, containing some of his best flow to date, illustrates his struggle to balance being real and being successful: “At the park politickin’ with the kids / Tryna get em on a straight path, got the lames mad / Know they hate to see me make cash, got the space dash.” Every good deed pisses someone off. Immediately, Staples introduces you to his theoretical metaphor for society with “Crabs in a Bucket”–people rising to the top only to topple over each other and fall to the bottom. (It’s actually the latter that seems to haunt him more these days.) Fame and money, meanwhile, may not break his heart, but it won’t fulfill him. His daydreams are nightmares of him murdered by racially motivated violence or alone and heartbroken obsessing over a woman. Concentrating on the walls we build around ourselves, Big Fish Theory is a Staples album in that it takes you on a tour through his psyche, but what makes it so bitter is that at one point he’s rising above what holds him back only to be summoned by tragedy once again. Vince Staples is a ¾ glass empty kind of guy, so it’s no surprise that perhaps his best record to date centers around the different things that limit us. Vince Staples Album Review: Big Fish Theory
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