Long Beach artist Vince Staples has recently commented on the beef between Toronto emcee Drake and Kendrick Lamar. Staples, akin to Kendrick Lamar, is a West Coast native and has represented his city for over a decade.
To celebrate Youth Day, Staples sat down with the mayor of Long Beach, Rex Richard, as part of a panel to talk about the talent coming out of the California region. During the conversation, a fan asked the Big Fish Theory musician what he thought about Lamar and Drake going at one another.
In a previous interview with Complex, the lyricist revealed that he finds rap feuds “corny” and insisted he will never waste time talking about someone else on a track, exclaiming, “Shit is corny. It’s fucking corny! I’m not gonna go book studio time to talk about you.”
Staples has always been a supporter of black upliftment and believes that fans should listen to the music instead of focusing on the shenanigans. The artist began speaking about the different, more important things that have affected black MCs over the years.
He began speaking about Universal Music Group, explaining, “That record label just folded all of its independent labels and subsidiaries into each other. None of them exist no more. They fired all the heads of the labels, and if they didn’t, they turned them into glorified A&Rs. They cut off 50 per cent of the people who work in all these departments. Most of those people is us, people of colour, that come from hip-hop and R&B and these other things, right?”
He then proceeded to speak on what many have already highlighted concerning streaming, stating, “So then we getting priced out of our contracts, we getting priced out of our imprints. There are no labels, basically, that are incentivised to sign Black music, and it’s happening in front of our eyes. While Taylor Swift is fighting for people to be able to have streaming money, n***as is on the internet arguing with each other about some rap shit. So that’s how I feel about it, honestly.”
The rapper concluded, “Personally, I think we better than that. I think we deserve better than that because we’ve been saying for decades that we want people to respect Black music and Black art and Black people. I think for that to happen, we gotta respect ourselves, and they don’t make it easy for us, but we gotta try to work a little bit harder at that.”