Lest you worry that critical acclaim and fame have brightened his outlook, Vince Staples opens the *Prima Donna *EP with a grainy recording of him singing “This Little Light of Mine,” cut short by the sound of a gunshot. Staples barely mumbles the song under his breath, making you lean in close to the speaker; the gunshot that punctuates the track might make you jump out of your seat. This intro provides a handy metaphor for how Staples operates as an artist: He draws you in with vital music, then hits you with the ugly reality. He’s clear on at least this much from the outset on Prima Donna—if you’re here for an uplift, you’ve come to the wrong place.
On his debut full-length, Summertime ’06, Staples proved that he was not just a great rapper but a great album artist, crafting an immersive sound that transcended its production credits. Despite the impressive array of producers who worked on the album (No I.D., Clams Casino, DJ Dahi, Mikky Ekko), Summertime’s feel was uniform, a creaky, humid canvas on which Staples painted his morally ambiguous street tales. Still, while Staples might have just cemented his aesthetic, he’s already looking beyond it. Far from an effortless victory lap, Prima Donna finds the rapper veering off in a number of different directions in search of new sounds to bend to his will.
No I.D. and DJ Dahi return to produce the bulk of Prima Donna’s tracks, though their mandate this time around seems to be sonic experimentation. “Smile” is practically a rap-rock song: fuzzed-out bass, a steady guitar upstroke, an unapologetic solo in its midsection. “Pimp Hand” sounds like a heart monitor wired up to a trunk full of muffled subwoofers. “Loco” matches Staples’ breathless narration of his descent into madness with shrill glissandos; more importantly, it contains some of the EP’s most richly evocative lyrics (“I’m in the black Benz speeding with my black skin gleaming” is a whole poem in a single line).
As much as No I.D. and Dahi push past their own boundaries here, Prima Donna’s two most adventurous beats come courtesy of James Blake. While the English musician has occasionally flashed a deft hand as a hip-hop producer, we’ve never heard anything quite like these instrumentals from him. “Big Time” sounds both airy and dense, cobbling together Atari buzzes, snares that sound like money counters, and stray whirring noises. Atop all of this, Blake slowly piles up layers of skittering drum tracks until the whole thing wobbles like a Jenga tower. Staples raps furiously atop this beat, sketching out a dark counterpoint to Drake’s carefree YOLO meme (“You never know when you gon’ catch a case/Never know when you gon’ catch an eye”) before a plaintive chiptune melody creeps in.
And then there’s “War Ready,” the EP’s strongest cut and one of the most striking songs either man has had a hand in. Blake kicks off the track by flipping a chopped up sample of André 3000’s final bars from “ATLiens” over a bed of bubbling sounds. The song then segues to a skeletal arrangement that consists of little more than a single synth line laid over a steady click-clack beat—an instrumental so sparse it makes the Neptunes sound like maximalists. All the better, though, to fully appreciate Staples’ lyrics, which are as devastating here as they’ve ever been. Expanding on an idea from his Clams Casino collaboration “All Nite” (“My people ready for war”), Staples reaches back into the history of oppression to draw parallels with the present: “County jail bus, slave ship, same shit/A wise man once said/That a black man better off dead/So I’m war ready”. When he delivers the line, “Turned the African into the nigga then they hung him,” it lands with the same impact as that gunshot in the intro.
Hopelessness has always been a throughline in Staples work but Prima Donna puts a finer point on that feeling, both in its songs and interstitial spoken word bits. Staples repeatedly tells us that he’s fed up, he’s tired, he feels like giving up. And can you blame him, an artist who has spent his career cataloging the brokenness around him? On Summertime, Staples studied his own city as a microcosm of America, but here he zooms out even further, inviting you to see the bigger picture. At his best, Vince Staples is an artist who stares hard truths dead in the eye. On Prima Donna, he dares us to do the same.
