Photo by Sandy Kim
This story appeared in the March issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe. Vince Staples couldn't help but riff a little. Even though he was clearly not thrilled about being put on the spot, and even though he was already making a larger point about image and pop stars and the media, this was low-hanging fruit. And if we were going to talk about money and musicians and big-picture stuff about popular culture, which he didn't really even want to discuss in the first place, then there was absolutely time for an aside. So he offered one: "All rappers, it's like, 'I'm fucking rich. You want to be rich, too? Yeah. Look at my Bentley.' It's like, 'Yeah, it's an ugly car. It's a hideous car.'" He paused briefly, considering this, winding up. "And you know what that engine intake's looking like? Because the outside, it looks very heavy. I doubt that 0–60 margin is worth the price."He said all of this with the skeptical, knowledgeable tone of someone who has compared the relative perks of various luxury cars, which I don't doubt he has done, despite the fact that he was dressed almost identically to me, a non-car-buying person, in black jeans and a black crewneck sweatshirt, with a cloth belt so long that it nearly wrapped twice around his skinny waist. "Electric's a thing now," he added, almost over this bit but not quite. "Go get you a Fisker, same price. Fisker's probably gonna be like one, 110, 125, somewhere around there. Go ball out. Save the environment. And you won't have to pay for gas!"I laughed because I didn't really have a response that would have done the topic justice, so I changed the subject to some other thing that Staples didn't want to talk about. It didn't occur to me at the time, sitting there, eating sushi in a cabana on the roof of a recording studio in Hollywood, but later I realized this type of one-sided exchange must happen to Staples constantly. After all, he is almost without fail the wittiest, most charismatic person in the room.Continue reading on Noisey