Dark Times-Vince Staples
WALL OF PICTURE
The new and maybe? final Vince Staples album is here. Dark Times is the name. It sounds like something that could be heavy, dark (duh) and possibly angry. But in truth I found it to be sad. It’s a like a black feather. Ominous, haunting and also weightless. Much of it’s deeper meanings are found in somewhat random narratives that Staples weaves together into a larger vibe that is universal in it’s solipsism.
First off, let me say that I really like this album. It’s a little perfection- an work of art that uses it’s smaller scale to master it’s intense focus. There’s a lot of reflection and nihilism here. Staples is angry, but not in a screamy way, but rather a quiet, desperate rebuke of….the situation. And the situation varies across this record. This is a good record to think to, but it’s not a record that makes you think about anything good.
“Don’t play with my crip, go play with yo kids bitch.” Vince snarls on “Children’s Song.” This is one of many lines on the record that highlight a disillusionment with women, love, but perhaps most of all, companionship. One of the key points I think this record makes is that Vince is lonely. Not in an angsty emo way, but in a deeper existential way. And that success, or lack of success both drive you apart from where you where and who you were.
This record is moody and that starts with the production. There’s not any “This is hard” type beats per se, but there’s some great, subdued, boom bap style production all over this record, with some G-funk influence and some great samples. There’s good movement in these instrumentals. My favorite beats on this record: the piano line driven “Government Cheese”, the sad guitar woven “Children’s Song”, the equally sad and guitar driven “Shame On The Devil”, and yet another sad keys beat on “Radio.” These aren’t the most advanced beat but they’re really moving beats. The samples in the song “Radio” are weirdly chilling. These songs bleed nostalgia, wistfulness and descent into past lives.
I can’t really talk enough about how sad this record is, or the unique way in which it feels sad. It’s got this unique, nuanced late 20s perspective, that disconnected feeling when you’re too old for college friends and too young to have a family. Vince Staples, a music industry veteran at the age of 31, probably feels way older than a lot of people his age. It’s that helpless disconnect and that loss of youth that permeate this record.
Vince Stapes is cynical, but also somber, slowly, slowly, slowly, drowning in this existential grief that drives the everyday pins and needles narratives of his music. Like, I said, it’s not anger. It’s more like that feeling of eternal burnout, running up against that wall where reality seems about to snap. “We all have our things that could kill us.” Staples said in a presser about the record.
This statement really does address the dark anticipation of loss that’s present all throughout this record. I really like the cut "Radio”, where Vince Staples talks about the nostalgia, and wonders if there really is some purity in it that we lack in today’s world. “A better day was just a stones throw away” he raps on the track. I don’t think he’s wrong. I think there is a sort of hedonism to the digital era that doesn’t exist in analog. So be it.
I don’t know if this is the best Vince Staples album, or even if it’s my favorite one, but I think it’s definitely a big record for him. It’s the book end on a major label deal and a deep and often sad introspection on trauma, angst and growing older. And it sounds really chill, so all of that heaviness feels well dispersed. It’s one of the best records I’ve heard this year. Would recommend.
