With 2024’s Dark Times, Vince Staples turned introspective, inventorying his trauma, disillusionment, and sense of being lost in a limbo (neither connected with the reality of his childhood à la 2021’s self-titled set and 2022’s Ramona Park Broke My Heart, nor particularly at home in the world of rap, gangsta-biz, and/or Hollywood). With his new album, Cry Baby, he impressively pivots, offering his most outward-scanning commentaries. Throughout these ten tracks, he addresses the US’s polarizations, deadlocks, and murderous history as well as the country’s ongoing slide into a late-capitalistic, warmongering, and racist dumb-down.
Cry Baby is also Staples‘ most rock-oriented album since 2017’s Big Fish Theory, the majority of its tracks featuring notably riffy guitars. “Blackberry Marmalade” is structured around grungy progressions and booming synth sounds. Staples launches the track (and album) with the line, “Empires built on bloodstained ground”, proceeding to render pics of racially-charged altercations and persecutions. Meanwhile, his chorus is one of his hookiest. An artist attuned to thematic and tonal balances, Staples pairs a pop melody with confrontive content, mixing the sweet and the bitter.
Scratchy synths and a throbby bass drive “Go! Go! Gorilla”, as Staples offers a scathing depiction of the way in which “othering” is hardwired into American society. He touches on economic, legal, and judicial double standards, including governmental distortions of the 13th Amendment (“They gave wrist slaps to them and sentenced mines / Went from bread lines to picket lines to mainline prison time”). He ends with a searing indictment of the nation’s psychotic MO since its founding (“But genocide don’t mean nothin’ to Uncle Sam”).
The clamorous soundscape of “The Running Man”—bursts of fuzz, prominent drums, an urgent vocal delivery—recalls Paris, Texas’s Boy Anonymous. Meanwhile, the wiry guitar of “TV Guide” brings to mind a Jack White brainstorming session. “I think the television’s controlling me”, Staples declares, sharing a paranoid vision as a way to point out how we’re brainwashed by media, how our sense of what’s real, normal, and desirable is blasted into our minds 24/7 by corporate entities and global conglomerates.
“Only in America” is Crybaby’s centerpiece and one of the standout tracks in Vince Staples’ oeuvre. Stinging lines (“Land of the free, home of the brave / Home of the natives, home of the slaves”) are buoyed by strummy, staccato guitars that evoke Young Marble Giants’ Stuart Moxham. The chorus is arena-ready, darkly transportive, a reverb-y and beat-propelled earworm (“God bless the USA”). The meme and Staples’ voice drip with sarcasm.
“Cotton” is undergirded by a clean, bouncy guitar, crisp drums, and intermittent piano accents. Staples does his best to laud the healing powers of love but can’t keep his suspiciousness at bay (“If you choose wrong, they’ll take everything”). As the piece progresses, a funky bass carries the tune. Piano and synth parts interweave, feting 1970s-dance/disco spaces, albeit with a heaping dollop of contemporary anxiety.
“7 in the Morning” closes the record on a drugged-out note, Staples sounding as if he’s drifting into a narcotic-induced sleep. Lyrically, he evokes war, violence, what might be dubbed nationalistic betrayal. His chorus, meanwhile, conjures a post-1984 shutdown, the drift into a militaristic and totalitarian stupor (“Left, left, left, right, left”).
With Cry Baby, Staples, ever conscious of pitch and timbre, navigates his most paradoxical album: catchy riffs and beats set alongside portrayals of a country founded on hypocrisies, now fated to reap its karma. Having immersed himself, with previous work, in the shadowy aspects of his own story, he now turns his attention to a broader view. Over 35 adrenalized minutes, Vince Staples comments on the injustices and genocidal tendencies baked into the US’s DNA, striking a balance between satire, rant, and keen attunement to the tragic.