Vince Staples hasn’t been shy about voicing his skepticism about the budding rapper’s ability to perform at concerts.
The Long Beach Raptor shared his thoughts on the subject during an appearance on the latest episode of Joe Budden. As far as Vince Staples is concerned, he doesn’t agree with the characteristics of today’s young rappers when it comes to live performances.
“You can get on a festival stage and embarrass yourself,” Vince Staples explained around the 1 hour and 50-minute mark of the episode. “Are you making a show to entertain people or are you making a show to boost your ego?”
Vince continued to credit Chance the Rapper, with whom he had been the opening act for Mac Miller a decade earlier.
“You have to create a show that’s for people that are passing by,” he explained. “I learned a lot about that from Chance. We were on the Mac Miller tour a long time ago. The way he incorporated dancing, Lauryn Hill, and intertwining things that didn’t have much to do with him [since he was still relatively unknown at the time] but the fans understood it and he made sure he was entertaining, by the time he got to the bigger stages he was a proven performer.”
He concluded, “Learning how to tour, you have to have bodies of work…You don’t even have a full set with these 2 min singles…we need more full-length projects.”
Vince’s interview with Budden comes as the West Coast native is in New York this weekend to perform at Brooklyn’s Afropunk Festival, which took place Saturday and Sunday at the Greenpoint Terminal Market. Vince performed a set with fellow headliners Flying Lotus, Tobe Ngwe, Durand Berner, Amindi, The Beatnuts, Iniko, and Proper.
Vince Staples is gone for a while. After releasing an album to widespread acclaim, he toured the press and was out of the limelight again. His absence begs the question, where is Staples? As mysterious as the Long Beach rapper’s tendencies are, and as much as we tend to hyperbolize his words and actions, the answer is simple he’s working.
This is not a surprising answer at all; Staples rarely doesn’t work. In fact, a constant feature of his character seems to be his tendency to shy away from the glamor and frills of a glitzy rap career instead, he chooses to stick to his work.