Vince Staples

In the glitzed-out trap dream of 2010s hip-hop, Vince Staples feels like a grounding force. Raised in Long Beach, California, Staples (born in 1993) started rapping in his teens, aligning himself peripherally with the Odd Future crew. Released in 2015 on the heels of a series of increasingly impressive mixtapes, his first album, Summertime ’06, felt like an instant classic—a bleak, boast-free coming-of-age story that recalled ’90s gangsta rap without a whiff of nostalgia. (A sharp interview and endlessly entertaining personality, Staples once complained that he thought the ’90s were overrated and never much figured into his life because in the ’90s he was, y’know, a baby.) His second LP, Big Fish Theory, took a dive into dance and electronic music without sacrificing any of the frankness that made his early music so striking—proof that he wasn’t the throwback some had pegged him as. Plainspoken and fiercely independent, he introduced his 2018 project, FM!, through his own Apple Music show, RAMONA RADIO, with a backhanded apology: “We might not sell a gang of records,” he said. “We might not make millions of dollars. But y’all not nice like that. We nice like that.”