Vince Staples is exceptionally talented at making hell sound like heaven. The North Long Beach rapper isn’t religious, but on his new album Cry Baby, he uses faith-based imagery as a vehicle to spin tales about how we’re being systematically failed. On his previous albums — his excellent self-titled album from 2021, 2022’s regionally-specific Ramona Park Broke My Heart, and 2024’s Dark Times — Staples turned inward, gathering strength from his unique set of experiences, which led to him sharing stories about his stagnancy and growth.
Cry Baby sees Vince Staples focusing outward, aiming his ire at the long-established American way. Presented with an illustrated cover of a blond-haired baby in a US flag diaper (I wonder who that could be…), the project is a deliberate prodding of the perverse systems that have brought us to the current moment.
The lead single “Blackberry Marmalade,” released on April 25th, is a preview of Staples’ multi-pronged objective. Sonically, the song is tense and tightly-wound, fuzzy guitars and propulsive drums carrying the track to furious heights. Staples attacks the song with a fervor that matches the musical landscape: “Anti-establishment, crackers on that shadiness/ Crackers watched me work and break my back and said they gave me this.” The repetition is key here, as Staples moves from reiterating “Promise me you won’t gun me down,” to spelling out and saying the N-word repeatedly. It’s brutal, but necessary, a recurring theme throughout Cry Baby.
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The music video for “Blackberry Marmalade,” directed by Staples and Bradley J. Calder, is a first-person perspective of a mass shooter. Staples is the first to be shot, and one of the last to die, before the armed gunman turns the weapon on himself. While the video is haunting, it exposes the ingrained habits of this country. Staples shares a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote at the end of the visuals: “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”
Cry Baby is a cry for revolution. Built around urgent live instrumentation, the album is not only a mirror of the moment, but a challenge to do better. Despite Staples not identifying as religious, he leans into themes of God and faith repeatedly. “Do You Know the Devil” is the most overt example here, a thudding, mischievous track that tenuously explores the relationship between life and death, faith and non-belief. The song opens with a woman literally saying, “You’re the devil,” as a baby cries in the background. Staples repeats “hell” on the hook as the infant wails, though some utterances could be heard as “help me” from the right angle. At the end, Staples repeats “amen,” the word taking form in his mouth as though he were a believer.
Staples has previously said he used religion as a framing device in the context of his short-lived Netflix program The Vince Staples Show. “Well, I feel like religion directly affects perception and it directly affects what we deem to be real or not,” he told the Associated Press in 2024. “So, I think when you add signs of religion within specific framing — like the way that you frame things in contrast with iconography helps you see it without saying it. And we’re playing with the idea of reality and something being perceived or something being felt and not seen. And when you’re doing that, I think that the easiest anchor that you can use, especially like in something contemporary in American — and specifically Black American — contexts is religion because it’s something that everyone understands.”
In the setting of this album, Staples draws from the imagery of Christianity to get to the heart of America’s underlying issues. Instead of admonishing believers, Staples is meeting them where they are, in the hopes of getting them to wake up to our collective reality. Staples has long seen faith as nonsensical, but he understands the gravitational pull of God, and he’s using that to his advantage. Vince Staples will be heard, even in spaces he may not traditionally belong to.
In addition to interrogating religion, Staples uses Cry Baby to appeal to his community. Through keen songs that reflect the hardened experiences of Black Americans, Staples is sharing in the struggle, and encouraging Black folks to stand up. “The Running Man,” a growling, rambunctious track that will sound incredible live, is Vince’s opportunity to mix his goals of addressing his people (“‘Bout time for a revolution, dark times for the melanated”) and shining a light on the impact of religion, or the lack thereof (“Lost in translation, can’t find my religion/ Is God on vacation?”).
He continues directly appealing to Black people on the melody-driven “TV Guide” and the nimble, Slick Rick-sampling “The Big Bad Wolf.” On the former, Staples convinces the demographic to take control of their lives before someone does it for them. Of course, he says it in a way that only he can, in a way that only we can understand: “You better shake that ass before they take that ass, you better fuck back.” It’s ostensibly vulgar, yes, but in Vince’s hands, the bar springs forth as a call-to-action.
With “The Big Bad Wolf,” Staples kicks off immediately with the most pressing question in his arsenal of queries: “Who drew that white man hanging on the cross? Don’t put your right hand on the word of God.” Toward the end of the song, Staples speaks emphatically to his brothers: “Drop that noose, you should be swinging in the jungle, Black man/ What’s your master plan? What are you gon’ do when the shit crack off and the big bad wolf come and blow down yours?”