Vince Staples believes that rap beef is detrimental to the culture, though he is still having fun with this stance despite its serious implications.
On Saturday (May 4), the 30-year-old MC joined Long Beach Mayor Rex Richard for a panel discussion on the city’s inaugural Youth Day. During the chat, an audience member asked for his opinion on the ongoing feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, and whose side he is on.
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“I’m signed to Universal [Music Group], right? I’ve been signed to Universal since I was 17,” he began. “I haven’t got a back-end — that mean when you turn in an album, they give you payment — I haven’t got a back-end since 2017–18.
“So I done been on the same record label for 13 years, so to say. That record label just folded all of its independent labels and subsidiaries into each other, which mean how we was kids, you got Roc-A Fella, you got Def Jam, you got all these things — none of them exist no more.”
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He continued: “They fired all the heads of the labels, and if they didn’t, they turned them to glorify A&Rs. They cut off 50% of the people who work in all these departments — most of those people is us, people of color that come from Hip Hop, R&B and these other things, right? Then you got record labels opening up IPOs, you got record labels destroying their relationship with TikTok, Spotify — things that pay off artists — because they want to start their own shit.
“So then, we getting priced out of our contracts, we getting priced out of our imprints, there are no labels basically that are incentivized to sign Black music, and it’s happening in front of our eyes. And while Taylor Swift is fighting for people to be able to have streaming money, n-ggas is on the internet arguing with each other about some rap shit.”
Vince Staples speaks on Drake x Kendrick beef pic.twitter.com/4HBWTu3OSo
— Long Beach County Ⓜ️ (@longbeachcounty) May 4, 2024
Just a day after the above clip went viral, the Southern California native took to X (formerly Twitter) and wrote: “This n-gga Mustard in the studio tryna brainwash me so fucc it if we beefing we beefing! Who gon pop Shai Gilgeous Alexander for the West Coast?”
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It is worth noting that West Coast beatmaker produced K.Dot’s most recent jab at Drizzy, whose Canadian upbringing and citizenship has been at the center of the back-and-forth. To that point, the NBA star mentioned in the social-media post is also from the same country.
Just a minute after Vince hilariously reversed his position on the animosity in Hip Hop culture, the aforementioned producer uploaded a picture of the “Norf Norf” hitmaker sitting on a couch and smirking at his phone.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 https://t.co/HWRpVSQdnxpic.twitter.com/RthOjLcN7L
— Mustard (@mustard) May 5, 2024
Back in March, the Swedish company began running ads in New York City’s Times Square that read: “Hip Hop is a competitive sport.” This coincided with the C0mpton MC taking aim at his peers on an explosive guest verse from Future and Metro Boomin‘s “Like That.”
On an episode of The Joe Budden Podcast that aired in early April, the rapper and actor called in to comment on the beef and how the music industry has been taking advantage of it without actually helping the culture.
“Even a 50–50 split of publishing in Hip Hop is something that comes from [the labels and companies] not respecting rap lyrics as actual songwriting, and them finding a way to make it fair, which makes the producers king instead of the songwriter being king,” he lamented.
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“And then we have every songwriter that we’ve ever had in Hip Hop music complaining about their publishing splits, but we kind of don’t pay attention to that. But once n-ggas get mad, the whole internet is activated and we got billboards from streamers talking about, ‘Hip Hop is a sport,’ but we ain’t never seen a billboard from a streamer that said, ‘Give that n-gga his publishing back.'”
He added: “Why are we at war with the n-gga that’s making a song and not the motherfucker who owns the whole thing? We don’t say their name at all. We quiet when they do some fuck shit.”
