Earlier this year, Vince Staples dropped “Bagbak,” his first song since his 2016 EP Prima Donna. Since then, he’s collaborated with the Gorillaz and dubbed Kendrick Lamar the greatest rapper alive, but now we’ve got details on his own new music.
The rapper sat down with Complex where he detailed his upcoming second album Big Fish Theory, explaining its title, what he learned while creating it, and the perception and personalities of rappers.
ON THE MEANING OF ‘BIG FISH THEORY’:
It encompasses things: Being larger than life in a smaller world, so to say. How rappers are perceived and perceive themselves….Influence aside, [being a rapper is] a very unique perspective because a lot of people have these larger-than-life personalities and these overbearing senses of wealth and things like that, but they aren’t necessarily the majority. We’re still large in our own right, even though we’re kind of in a smaller facilitative space. They’re still not even showing all the hip-hop awards on the Grammys, and things like that, but you still find these great personalities and these great success stories within the small pond that is our music.
ON WHAT HE LEARNED ABOUT HIMSELF WHILE RECORDING ‘BIG FISH THEORY’:
I don’t think this album was a learning process itself as far as the creation of it. I just think it was a culmination of things I had been learning over the past few years, and coming to an understanding. Often times, music becomes a coping mechanism for people….I think everybody’s coping with the same shit. It’s just life. You live a long life, and then you die….I feel like it’s just life. A lot of time we don’t look at people that we deem to be more important than us as human beings. We become just fixtures based off the things that we create, or the things that we give the world, and those things kind of limit our ability to be looked at in a humane fashion. Everybody has and deals with the same stuff. There isn’t that many aspects to life to the point that we aren’t all dealing with the same things. It’s pretty basic.