Netflix deal or no, Vince Staples will tell the hell out of a story. For those keeping track, it may feel like his new album, Cry Baby, is finally making good on his assertion from two albums ago that he’d be leaving his traumatic past and complex Long Beach neighborhood behind him, material-wise. It turned out those records, Ramona Park Broke My Heart and Dark Times, were not a stark pivot, but an elaborate interstitial, entangling memories of hardship and community into his present psyche. Cry Baby, essentially a rock album, is instead a reflection and rebuttal to American instability writ large. It’s faster, louder, and brasher than anything he’s done since Big Fish Theory and even Big Fish Theory itself, with all its SOPHIE-produced clamour. He’s still a pointed rapper, though, relying less on personal anecdotes than concise socioeconomic analyses. Cry Baby asks: How the fuck are any of us—Black people especially—supposed to live here in peace?
Within seconds on “Go! Go! Gorilla,” the legacy of the Great Depression, redlining, the civil rights movement, and mass incarceration tumble out of Staples’ mouth. “Main line prison time for the crimes that we commit, but genocide?” he concludes, “Don’t mean na’an to Uncle Sam, guess it’s dignified.” It’s only after this broader history lesson contextualizing the brutal policing that maintains all these systems that he zooms in on a story that sounds like his own: “I was 12 years old when they tried to sit me on the curb/I got choke-slammed/For resisting arrest from a grown man/I ain’t even tell mama what happened.” There’s a particular emphasis on police violence across this brief and effective album, but there are also staunch critiques of capitalism (“Cotton,” “The Running Man”), war (“7 in the Morning”), and the way we’ve been subdued into complicity (“TV Guide,” where “television” seemingly encompasses the social media hellscape as well). If Staples’ prior discography made his lived experience more legible, Cry Baby insists it’s not unique—indoctrination is indoctrination, whether it’s into a gang or an ideology. The album is filled with narrators who either beg to be freed from their pain or who, more often than not, are being beaten into sedation.
Almost deceivingly, Cry Baby is also exhilarating. First single and album intro “Blackberry Marmalade” functions as the sugar to the medicine: There’s bounce in the drumline and defiance in the guitar’s incessant buzz. All throughout the album, the riffs are muffled but persistent, as if someone tried to smother the guitars under a pillow and they refused to die. “Blackberry Marmalade” similarly resists terror, particularly when Staples snickers, “Don’t let it get to you/Just know that they’re miserable/And know that behind every smile/They’re thinking ’bout killing you.” A sense of horror seeps into both sound and content here, especially on “TV Guide” and “Do You Know the Devil,” without tipping into Halloween-y camp.
On several planes, some cosmic and perverse, Staples’ choice to make a rock album is poignant. There’s the way hip-hop—moreover, Black people—have seemed to disappear from mainstream charts over the past year or so in favor of white country, rock, and pop stars. Parallel to this, there’s also the way Black artists have recently practiced reclamation, whether it’s Kehlani leaning into rich modern R&B standards over the digitized rap-ballads that had the last decade in a chokehold, Doechii remaking boom-bap in her image, or Beyoncé commandeering country on Cowboy Carter. Both of Staples’ mediums, rap and rock, are historically genres of rebellion. Especially as American stars—like Beyoncé—ride the fence on their country’s growing authoritarianism and genocide profiteering, it’s refreshing to hear Staples call out the undercurrent of white supremacy linking both in a language that Blacks folks created but white folks are thought to understand.
The only thing that feels off about Cry Baby is how uncomplicated Staples’ rapping often feels, as if he’s explaining the visceral and logical experience of racist domination to someone who’s never thought about it before. Lately on X he’s taken to calling people “dummies,” “crackas,” and “#newbooties” while explaining the Black origins of rock and its influence across his discography, so perhaps the simplification reflects his understanding of his audience’s present capacity. Six years removed from a cultural moment in which critiques of anti-Blackness were loud and frequent, following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, we’re in an era of vicious backlash to that uprising. Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer for her work on the legacy of slavery in 2020, now notes that the U.S. sits “at the brink of the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction.” This reality renders the modern history that Staples offers vital. Even when nihilism seems to overtake the shreds of hope on Cry Baby, the album works to remind us that we should still be actively pissed. The music video for “Blackberry Marmalade,” where Staples unsuccessfully tries to disarm a mass shooter, ends with this Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”
