FLOOD Festival Guide Presented by Toyota C-HR — Hundred Waters Edition

F E S T I V A L PRESENTED BY

HUNDRED WATERS AND THE POINT OF CREATION

G U I D E

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MAKING MISCHIEF WITH BLACK LIPS

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DON’T MISS: WHITE REAPER

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GEAR UP: YOUR FESTIVAL SURVIVAL KIT

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IN CONVERSATION: MARCELLA ARGUELLO ON THE LONG, HARD ROAD TO NERDOM

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DON’T MISS: KWEKU COLLINS

10 FORM AND VOID: HUNDRED WATERS AND THE POINT OF CREATION 15 DON’T MISS: S U R V I V E

VINCE STAPLES COVER AND THIS PAGE SHOT BY NABIL ELDERKIN FOR FLOOD AT SONOS HOME LA HUNDRED WATERS COVER SHOT BY LENNE CHAI

16 VINCE STAPLES AT THE MARGINS

PUBLISHER ALAN SARTIRANA EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARTY SARTINI GARNER ASSOCIATE EDITOR NATE ROGERS ART DIRECTOR MELISSA SIMONIAN INTERN JAMIE LAWLOR WRITERS DEAN BRANDT, CAMERON CROWELL, JEFF MILLER, KURT ORZECK, LYDIA PUDZIANOWSKI, DOM SINACOLA, ERIC STOLZE, LAURA STUDARUS, JEFF TERICH, CARRIE TUCKER, JASON P. WOODBURY IMAGES ADAM BALLINGER, NABIL ELDERKIN ANTHEMIC AGENCY MICHAEL BAUER, ANA DOS ANJOS, JACQUELINE FONSECA, LAUREN GASPARD, CHRIS GEORGE, JASON GWIN, AMBER HOWELL, ED JAMES, CHRIS MURRAY, TAYLOR NUÑEZ, RICARDO RIVAS VELIS, KYLE ROGERS

NEW ORLEANS: “I like to go down to the Lower Ninth Ward. You might see someone like Big Freedia play at Siberia.

They have good Polish food. You’ll see more face tats per square mile there than you’ll ever see in your life. There’s also Saturn Bar, which I love. They paid this old Korean War vet who was an underwater engineer to paint all the murals on the wall. I think he got oxygen poisoning in the war or something. The murals are a mix of Eastern fantasy, like dragons and stuff, mixed with a Sailor Jerry tattoo. Apparently when Katrina happened they barely saved all the paintings. I heard Tommy Lee Jones came in and offered them five grand and they turned him down.”

BLACK LIPS

The life of a touring musician can be pretty unglamorous, but those who know where to look can find ways to wreak some havoc in every city where they park their van.

Cole Alexander, co-frontman of Black Lips, is an old pro at finding mischief in burgs throughout the United States. Here, Alexander shares stories of mayhem from two of his favorite cities—as well as his favorite place to raise hell in his hometown of Atlanta.

AS TOLD TO JEFF TERICH PHOTO BY LANCE LAURENCE 2

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SAN FRANCISCO: “I like going through the Mission. There’s ethnically diverse food, great for stores and stuff like that. It still feels electric, alive. Insane people wandering the streets.

I mean, San Francisco is so expensive, but there’s still people sleeping on the street at night. Or the Tenderloin: I could wander through the Tenderloin and just people-watch.”

ATLANTA: “I go to a place called Southern Comfort on Sundays. They have a karaoke night hosted by a local rock and roll legend named Tommy Lee—just a coincidence—and it’s owned by a guy named George Jones—also a coincidence.

You’ll see weird urban cowboy guys, like redneck truckers; it’s just a real weird mixed bag. It’s almost like a Harmony Korine movie. People do line-dancing. There’s this mix of Southern culture, but it’s so close to the city that there’s a refreshing progressiveness about it.”

SELF-PROCLAIMED BAND” assures me

White Reaper aren’t competitive, because there’s nobody they have to compete with.

“The throne was easy to take because there was nobody watching it,” says the frontman in between bites of chicken fingers before a recent Nashville tour stop. “There just weren’t that many cool rock and roll bands in the past five years or so.”

There’s hardly a hint of mean-spiritedness behind Esposito’s confidence, in part because the claim that gives the Louisville four-piece’s sophomore album its title is shrouded in a thin layer of irony. Consider it a sign of the times: good ol’ rock and roll has become an anachronism devoid of any chance at cultural dominance. Now that the youth rock and roll culture is no longer the one in the spotlight of arena venues, the days of self-serious fame may have left as well. But The World’s Best American Band is an album that seems to relish in the wailing guitar solos, bright keyboards, and bratty shouted vocals of greats like Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, and The Rolling Stones. The classic American rock and roll—only, you know, bands not from the United States.

past and tears down the veneer of merit. A group whose routine includes listening to The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” as pump-up

“A lot of people ask us who the best American band before us

music before their own lively drunken sets. And while they’re

[was],” says Esposito. “And I think about bands and realize they

not scared to mount the festival stages that will serve as their

aren’t American.”

launchpads throughout the summer, White Reaper does so with catchy pop hooks aplenty on songs like “Judy French” and the

WHITE REAPER

TONY ESPOSITO OF THE “WORLD’S BEST AMERICAN

This is the inherent absurdity of a genre like rock and roll, one

broken-carousel track “Daisies”—pastiche that is both 100

that is so wrapped up in American identity and notions of cultural

percent joking and 100 percent earnest.

FROM: Louisville, Kentucky

often be attributed to American icons with superior sounding

Consider it the band’s M.O. “We just called [the album] that

names like The Boss, it’s a fantasy to think it was ever exclusive

because we thought it was a really good record and that it

to the US, or even perfected here (or, for that matter, that rock

deserved a really good name, too,” says Esposito. What else

HEAR: The World’s Best American Band

and roll is the progeny of white artists at all).

should we expect from the world’s best?

exceptionalism. While the ’70s-style rock-star persona can

So what can this generation’s World’s Best American Band even look like? A band that simultaneously worships at the altar of the

BY CAMERON CROWELL PHOTO BY PAMELA AYALA

SEE: Bunbury, Bonnaroo, MO POP, Project Pabst, ACL, Bumbershoot FLOOD

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GEAR

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Y O U R F E S T I VA L S U R V I VA L K I T

BY LAURA STUDARUS

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PHOTO BY JAMES RICHARDS IV

FESTIVAL-GOING ISN’T FOR THE MEEK. IT TAKES A LOT OF PLANNING, COORDINATION, AND ENERGY TO HAUL YOUR BODY ACROSS THE FIELD IN TIME TO CATCH YOUR FAVORITE BAND. THE REWARDS ARE LEGION. WHO DOESN’T LOVE THAT PERFECT FESTIVAL MOMENT? BUT THE STRUGGLE IS REAL. THANKFULLY, WE’RE HERE TO HELP. HERE ARE A FEW THINGS TO BRING ALONG SO YOU CAN CONCENTRATE ON THE MORE IMPORTANT BUSINESS AT HAND.

Adidas flight bag, $35.95 We are suitably jealous of your vintage tote with that sweet/obscure/cool silk-screened logo. But do you really want that thing slipping off your shoulder all weekend while you try to dance, contents threatening to spill out across the field?

Free yourself up with a miniature messenger bag from Adidas. You’ll have more important things to attend to than potentially losing all your earthly possessions.

S’well 17 oz. water bottle, $35 Festivals providing free water stations throughout the venue on impossibly hot days? Heaven.

Standing behind the guy trying to reconstruct the disposable plastic bottle he dumped out in the parking lot and smashed in the bottom of his bag?

Dry-mouth-inducing hell. Don’t be that guy. Check out S’well’s impressive line of refillable, earthfriendly bottle options.

Neutrogena Sheer Zinc Dry-Touch sunscreen, $11.99 Because you are not Colin Farrell and your spirit animal isn’t a lobster. Protect your face without getting your fingers all greasy with this Neutrogena sunscreen.

Dubs earplugs, $19.99 Let’s skip the myth that ear protection doesn’t look cool—knowing you’ll be able to hear at eighty is straight-up rad. And if not being deaf in your old age isn’t enough for you, Dubs offers great protection without sacrificing sound quality.

Suddora wrist wallet, $4.99 Remember the guy at Coachella who stole all the phones? The same thing has been known to happen to wallets. Stash some cash in your wristband and you can dance all night.

Purell, $12.42 for four We don’t have to tell you that hydration is important, and that the bathroom situation at most festivals is the seventh circle of hell. Chances are you’ll have to pay a few visits to the porta potties during the weekend. At least this way you can purify yourself afterwards.

Rite in the Rain waterproof notebook, $3.95 Give your phone a breather by keeping a pen and paper handy. Great for jotting down phone numbers, where you parked, things you’ll wanna tweet later, and grabbing autographs when your favorite band just happens to stroll across the field in front of you. (Hey— weirder things have happened.)

IN CONVERSATION

MARCELLA ARGUELLO ON THE LONG, HARD ROAD TO NERDOM

BY LYDIA PUDZIANOWSKI PHOTOS BY KIM NEWMONEY

Marcella Arguello is a force. The standup comedian and regular on Chris Hardwick’s Comedy Central show @midnight packs an arsenal of material, which includes musings on growing up Latina in Modesto, California, the ability to freestyle rap at a moment’s notice, and a spot-on Beyoncé impression. She’s also “the same height as Steph Curry,” per her Twitter, and will 100 percent yell at you if you’re being a jerk in the crowd.

After a decade-plus of doing what she does, she’s a pro at reading a room and knowing when to ask the tough questions, like, “White people, you having a good time?”

You’ve mentioned in interviews that you’re the youngest child in your family, and you had to be loud and funny to get attention.

Basically, anything you can do, she can do better.

Lately, those things include acting (in Rhea Butcher and Cameron Esposito’s show Take My Wife) and podcasting (she’s been a guest on many, and she’s got her own in development).

I’ve been doing standup for eleven years now, which seems to surprise some people, but it shouldn’t, because ten years is usually the mark where people start to get on TV and headline [shows]. You have to spend a lot of time figuring out the math problem. That’s what I always call it. You have to keep studying and keep putting in the time.

And if you’re only doing two nights a week for four years, you’re not gonna get as good as quickly as someone who’s gonna be going out every single night, multiple times a night, seven days a week.

We caught up with Arguello before her appearance at Hardwick’s inaugural ID10T Music Festival + Comic Conival, which takes place in Silicon Valley at the Shoreline Amphitheatre on June 24 and 25. The lineup features bands like Weezer and Animal Collective and comedians including Demetri Martin, Michael Che, and Garfunkel and Oates. Arguello talked to us about tailoring her material to her audience, working hard to get where she is now, and what she may or may not dress up as for the cosplay events at ID10T Fest.

When you’re a kid, you just see a reaction [to something you do] and you love it, so you repeat it. I come from a family of performers. My grandmother was a singer. My father sang, toured, and played lead guitar. So the performer side was always in me. It’s just that as a kid, I was also looking to be the center of attention.

Talk to me about the amount of work that’s involved in becoming a standup comedian and how you got to where you are.

How did you come to know Chris Hardwick?

He saw me doing standup at the Hollywood Improv one night. I was first on Ron Funches’s show, and Hardwick was there, so I introduced myself. I was like, “Oh man, I gotta do my solid material.” Oh, girl— I crushed. And he was like, “You need to do Beyoncé on @midnight,” and I was like, “Yep, I do need to do Beyoncé on @midnight!”

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Did you always want to be a comedian?

No, no. Being Latina in Modesto? I was set to be a teacher, to have six kids—I had my heart set on that, and I wanted it. I really did.

But then every year passed by and I was like, “Man, I sure can’t get a boyfriend, can I? I sure am a weird girl, huh?” Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. “I sure am different, huh?” But I was always obsessed with standup and sketch. I loved watching Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn when I was a teenager. My big crush was Dave Attell, which is already a sign that I’m a weird girl.

How are you going to tailor your material to the audience at ID10T Fest?

I have some...I don’t want to call it nerd humor, but I have some comic-book jokes. And my brother named his daughter Atara, after Atari, and they love when I bring that up, because it’s so silly.

Who are you most excited to see there?

I’m excited to see Weezer. I’ve been listening to Pinkerton, and I’m like, “Damn, I do remember these songs!” In terms of comedy, everyone that’s on the lineup I either know or have worked with already.

I’m excited to watch them in that setting. Some comics can’t do it, and it’s really funny when they can’t do it. So basically, I’m looking forward to whoever’s gonna bomb.

Are you going to wander through the cosplay arena?

Oh, absolutely. I was actually thinking about getting dressed up.

I’ve always wanted to be Dr. Girlfriend [from The Venture Bros.]. I think it’s Dr. Mrs. The Monarch now. But I always wanted to be her because I wanted to do the voice. I wanted to look sexy and have a man’s voice. I think that’s hilarious.

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Chicago’s Closed Sessions label, but one can practically hear the twenty-year-old Collins shrugging over the phone when asked about what’s changed over the past twelve months.

“People heard this body of work, and now they look to the next body of work to be better than that,” he says of the critical praise heaped upon him from the beginning.

“There’s no pressure [around] that for me, because it’s not like I’m not the artist who made that project. I made that, which means that I can make better than that.”

Collins is like this when you talk to him—metaphysical but logical—and his music exists in that same liminal space between hip-hop and not, his ostensible role as a rapper belied by a voice much too mellifluous to be reduced to cadence. And so Nat Love and new EP Grey are a mélange of genres at the mercy of his inspirations, which include his father (an African and Latin percussionist), Kendrick Lamar, and Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, all “unbelievable songwriters in their own way,” as he puts it. Describing his favorite albums, Collins describes himself, even if he’s still discovering what that means.

“Tame Impala’s Currents—to me that’s a perfect album,” he says, love beaming from his words. “The way [Kevin Parker] constructed that album: [It’s] Beatles-esque in the way it’s thought out, the concept is easy to follow, there’s almost a plot to it. Front to back the project just flows, and you can listen to it all the way through or you can pluck songs out and they sound just as good [out of context].”

Living in Evanston, a straight shot down the Red Line to his set at Lollapalooza in Grant Park, Collins can’t dodge comparisons to the other young, conscious hip-hop

artists coming out of the city proper: Chance the Rapper, Noname, Joey Purp, Vic Mensa. Not black or white, Grey is an exquisitely produced record that should allow Collins to extricate himself from “conversations about the city” that fail to give him his unique due as a bedroom producer and classically trained musician.

“I’m in the city—I still live in Evanston, but I don’t consider myself part of it. I think I’m part of it in the way that I’m not.”

BY DOM SINACOLA PHOTO BY COOPER FOX

KWEKU COLLINS

IT’S BEEN ABOUT A YEAR SINCE KWEKU COLLINS RELEASED HIS BEGUILING DEBUT, Nat Love, on

FROM: Evanston, Illinois HEAR: The Grey EP SEE: Lollapalooza

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FORM AND VOID: HUNDRED WATERS AND THE POINT OF CREATION

By Dom Sinacola Photos by Lenne Chai

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“If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.”

Nicole Miglis is referring to Hundred Waters’ new life in Los Angeles, but one can’t help but think of her band in such terms of give and take, form and void, isolation and community.

Miglis—who you can hear scaling the stately edifices of the group’s music, her piano arpeggios belaying a voice that seems incapable of losing its grip—hails from Melbourne, Florida, while her bandmates Trayer Tryon (bass and electronics) and Zach Tetreault (percussion) hail from Orlando. After meeting in Gainesville at the University of Florida, they formed Hundred Waters, and their eponymous 2012 debut, a sweetly foreboding collection of virtuosic electro-folk and space-consuming art rock, bears the hermetic confidence of a group of exceptionally talented musicians finding that together they have the resources and rapport to emerge as a fully formed entity.

“We lived in a small town that was really supportive, which made us feel like we were doing something that mattered,” says Tryon. They had no idea that just beyond the outskirts of town there was even such a thing as an abyss to stare into. “We didn’t have any conception of a music industry before we started putting out records,” he remembers. “No idea what a manager was, how people released music… We were immune to a lot of the fear of failure that people can have in a big city.”

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Still, the debut garnered acclaim, and Skrillex invited Hundred Waters along on his Full Flex Express Canadian train tour. Though the band and the emo-coiffed electronic dance musician ostensibly share little in the way of sound or fanbase, Tryon talks about their match-up as if it was meant to be. “[He’s] a very open, fun person who’s [involved] in anything he does for the right reasons. We like [working] with him because he doesn’t overthink things and just follows his intuition.” Post–train party, Hundred Waters signed to OWSLA, Skrillex’s label, and toured with acts like Grimes and Julia Holter—the combination of which pretty succinctly sums up Miglis and Co.’s studied, omnivorous approach to genre.

While on tour, and over the course of three years, the band recorded some sixty songs that would eventually be winnowed down into their sophomore album, 2014’s The Moon Rang Like a Bell. From the soul-stirring opening salvo of “Show Me Love” to the comparably ostentatious and twinkling “Xtalk,” the album shows them flexing their strengths—leaning especially hard into Miglis’s voice, a force simultaneously elemental and ephemeral—while also being a clear reflection of how far they’d come as a group of friends.

“Emotionally, I think that record really paralleled the feeling of being in a car,” Miglis says. “Like, experiencing things in this self-contained box on wheels. Specifically, as the passenger [you’re] powerless, but moving forward—or powerful, depending on how you look at it.”

Each song seems painfully aware of its place, of its limits and how far it can push away from its nucleus before the noise of the outside world pushes back. Which could simply describe

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a group of songwriters with a healthy sense of self-awareness, but there’s something so much more spacious to Hundred Waters, something physical, as if one sound—a trilling flute, say—cannot exist without a counterweight to balance and define it. It’s all a very holistic experience.

Upon release of Moon Rang, the band created FORM Arcosanti, a music festival in a small community in Arizona an hour north of Phoenix. Former band member Paul Giese discovered Arcosanti while studying architecture at UF, and upon stopping there on tour to check it out, the band fell in love.

“Paolo Soleri, the founder of Arcosanti, was an architect, designer, artist, and philosopher who constantly explored the possibilities of human aspiration,” says Tetreault, aligning the experimental community with the way the band operates as artists. “Arcosanti’s foundation exists around art, culture, and people coming together to share ideas and celebrate compassion.” Having just completed its fourth annual staging, FORM represents an ecosystem of empathy.

“We were more noticeably inspired by the ethos of Arcosanti, its natural beauty, architecture, and intention,” Tetreault says. “[It’s] an alternative human habitat and paradigm for urban development, and FORM demonstrates a [different] festival environment and platform for cultural exchange.”

“Initially, yeah, I think the intention was to play a show in a more interesting place than the places we were playing on tour,” Miglis agrees. “But every year it seems to adopt a greater meaning. I think it’s grown in tandem with the world and now seems to be at this place where it can be used as a vessel for a lot of things.”

EACH YEAR IS A REINVENTION, A REFINEMENT, AND THE POSSIBILITIES FEEL ENDLESS. —ZACH TETREAULT

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the way Tetreault and Miglis talk about FORM resembles the way the band has grown, from its first steps outside of Florida and into the aforementioned abyss: “Each year is a reinvention, a refinement, and the possibilities feel endless,” Tetreault says.

Had Hundred Waters not entered the world with such a strong conception of themselves, 2017 would probably mark the moment in which their notions of what it means to be in a band became completely codified. With the Currency EP, which was released as a surprise in May, and a third album following closely behind it, Miglis, Tryon, and Tetreault seem surer than ever of what they’re doing.

“The songs from the EP and the new record were written in a completely different headspace than our last album, I think because we had the luxury of being settled and having a home and being able to play instruments every day, and live somewhat normal lives,” Miglis says.

And yet, she still speaks of Hundred Waters as an outfit formed of otherworldly alchemy, a band apart: “I personally (deliberately) tuned out everything while we were writing this record. I pretty much dropped off the planet. I’m still adjusting to life outside the troll hole.” It’s impossible to not hear her coming full circle, the hermetic environment of the new album’s genesis recalling their obscure Floridian beginnings.

“On a more abstract level, I think the heat and the humidity had a sort of vivifying effect on our music, and the outsider-ness of Florida made us slightly Juggalo,” she says.

It’s like she’s answering a riddle she never really posed: What happens when you stare into the abyss? The Insane Clown Posse stares back.

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FROM: Austin, Texas

DON’T BOTHER ASKING: Kyle Dixon of minimal synth outfit S U R V I V E and one-half of the composing team behind the music featured in the Netflix series Stranger Things can’t tell you anything about the show’s upcoming second season.

HEAR: RR7349 SEE: Movement, FYF, Panorama, Outside Lands

But Dixon and his bandmates—including Stranger Things partner Michael Stein, plus keyboardists Adam Jones and Mark Donica—have plenty going on outside of the ’80s-influenced science fiction show. In 2016, the Austin, Texas, band released their second fulllength album, RR7349, on Relapse Records. Though its foreboding analog vistas share common ground with the duo’s soundtrack work, influenced as it is by the music of John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream, it’s often even spookier. This summer, the band has the unique challenge of adapting the kind of sounds you might imagine listening to on giant headphones in a wood-paneled basement to festival crowds of kids wearing bikinis and shorts.

“It’s not really dance music, but you can dance to anything,” Dixon says. “Some people decide to do that, some people want to sit there and enjoy it.”

While the band doesn’t make traditional pop music, there’s a songwriting logic at work that’s helped them gain ground with the kind of listeners unconcerned with pared-down synth aesthetics or even the VHSfueled horror/sci-fi underground that’s embraced them. He doesn’t consider S U R V I V E a pop group, per se, citing influences like French electronic duo Space Art and German Krautrock group Amon Düül, but

says S U R V I V E strives to streamline those influences into a more economical format.

“We like a lot of prog music from the ’70s, but…there’s like five songs in one,” Dixon says. Instead of aiming for that same theatrical sprawl, S U R V I V E distills the most driving progressive rock tropes, creating a soundtrack to balmy festival nights: something that’s equal parts dread and euphoria.

S U R V I V E

“I can’t really say much,” he says, feigning exasperation.

“There are some new characters…[and] it takes place one year later.”

BY JASON P. WOODBURY PHOTO BY UNA BLUE FLOOD

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You don’t know Vince Staples. That’s the takeaway of “BagBak,” the first single from the twenty-four-year-old rapper’s sophomore album, Big Fish Theory.

“You don’t know me.” Over a looping synth bass line and crisp snare claps, Staples repeats the line, his voice weary and knowing. “BagBak, better back, back, you don’t know me homie,” he intones, his voice pitch-shifted down to a subterranean drawl. It’s not the most confrontational line in the song, but it’s a telling lyric. Staples has been hailed as a rap wunderkind, but he’s not here to be reduced to any single idea. He’s not easily knowable. Vince Staples contains multitudes. “I hate when you lie,” he once rapped.

“I hate the truth, too.”

BY JASON P. WOODBURY SHOT BY NABIL ELDERKIN FOR FLOOD AT SONOS HOME LA

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The new album follows a period of intense productivity and artistic daring. In 2016, he released the genre-bending EP Prima Donna and an experimental short film of the same name (the latter of which having been directed by Nabil Elderkin, this article’s photographer). He followed up the EP with a collaboration with Gorillaz on “Ascension,” the most pointed and aggressive song on the animated group’s 2017 record Humanz.

“When someone will say, ‘Vince Staples, gangsta rapper, ex–gang member from blah blah blah,’ you didn’t have to say that,” he says. “And someone else will say, ‘This song, yada yada yada, which is a song dedicated to this or that.’ [When you do that] you’re limiting someone’s opportunity to make their own opinion, you know what I mean? That kind of defeats the whole point of this thing.”

Staples raps furiously over Damon Albarn and Anthony “The Twilite Tone” Khan’s hyperactive beat, meditating on delirium, dance, and blackness, shifting at the end into a ghastly scene of racial horror.

So what is the point of Staples’s thing? Increasingly, it feels like his goal is evolution. Staples exhibits an artistic restlessness. While Summertime ’06 adhered to a clanging, nearly industrial template, his work since has grown more wild and kaleidoscopic. Prima Donna was filled with mutant cadences (“War Ready”), swaggering riffs (“Smile”), faded soul (“Prima Donna”), and glitchy electronica (“Big Time”). Scroll through his Twitter feed long enough and you’ll inevitably come across a response from the rapper to a follower questioning the validity of his beats. But he’s not out to confuse fans—he’s interested in pushing himself.

2015’s Summertime ’06, which for many served as an introduction to the Long Beach native’s often bleak worldview and dark comedy, was less than sixty minutes long, but Staples presented it as a double album—a taut, focused set of songs that examined his youth and felt definitively like a statement.

Reception was alternately rapturous and baffling: Reviewers fawned over the record, scrambling to position Staples in the lineage of West Coast gangsta rap; alternately, an unidentified “Christian mom” went viral with her tearful and confused reading of Summertime’s “Norf Norf.” Staples, in a measured response, tweeted in support of her right to free speech, saying, “No person needs to be attacked for their opinion on what they see to be appropriate for their children”—a reaction utterly removed from the hot takes and waves of Internet mockery that sprang up in the video’s wake.

For those who listened close to Summertime ’06, Staples’s empathic response wasn’t surprising. Whether cracking jokes online or sitting down for interviews, he’s interested chiefly in expressing himself outside of the boxes or context worked up for him. To paraphrase Wayne Campbell paraphrasing Dick Van Patten and Kierkegaard: If you label Vince Staples, you negate Vince Staples.

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WORKING MUSIC

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“I don’t see a need for a true artist to get stuck within any medium,” he says, citing the work of Richard Prince, who is known these days for his recent series of controversial, slightly altered Instagram portraits.

“You look at actual artists—nothing can stop [someone like] Richard Prince from doing a short story, or a quick poem, or a painting, or an installation… It’s all art at the end of the day. When you create music, I think you should have that same freedom.”

Staples’s pursuit of freedom extends to his own creative process. As he describes it, his approach on Big Fish Theory is discrete, and it establishes new artistic footing.

“Everything is brand new whenever we start working on music,” he says. “Nothing is a tangent of anything else, everything stands on its own.”

That’s another key theme for Staples. His songs, his records, his tweets: He wants them to be evaluated as they are. And consequently, he’s grown tired of explaining his art.

“I just never do it,” he says bluntly. “You look at something on a wall in a museum, it doesn’t come with an elongated explanation of what it is,” he says, citing the work of Kerry James Marshall, whose paintings present communal scenes of black life with a ceaseless dignity and warmth.

“You look at something…like [Marshall’s] Garden Project as something that’s rooted in his memories of growing up in communities in Chicago and Los Angeles,” Staples says. “You can look at him trying to show the beauty of

poverty and black communities, you can look at him showing it positively. You can look at in different ways.”

Staples wants his songs—or potential multimedia projects—to exist freely, open to interpretation in the hands of his listeners.

“The painting can mean something to [Marshall], created for his reasons, but also it can mean something completely different to someone else,” he says. “At the end of the day, that’s OK. Art can always mean something different to someone else. That’s how I look at that.”

It’s difficult to get a grip on Staples, to place a label on him that feels like it sticks. He’s no moralizer, but his words pack a righteous, warning tone. He’s quick to crack a joke, but deadly serious when the subject turns to his craft. If there’s any way to know him, it’s to step into his songs, turn over their complications, and stutter-step between ideas while they simmer.

“I don’t know what part of art theory [suggests] the need to over-explain yourself,” he says. “I think that comes from entitlement. When I was a kid I didn’t get to ask Ja Rule, Jay Z, Lil’ Bow Wow, and Kanye West what [their songs] meant. I didn’t get to demand explanations—I’d sit there and appreciate their art… I don’t get to demand an explanation from Kerry James Marshall; I don’t get to demand an explanation from George Lucas. These dudes don’t come with this. They’ve given to us, and we should be thankful for it.”

“I don’t want to over-explain my music,” Staples says.

“I’m not messing with that. Listen to the song.”