Vince Staples says that a particular line on “Feelin’ The Love,” a cut from his Hell Can Wait EP that was released last week, is the most important on the project, which was released on Def Jam Recordings.
“‘These niggas fiendin’ for these luxuries they’ll never get’…because you don’t think about it like that,” Vince Staples says during an exclusive interview with HipHopDX at Red Bull Studios in Los Angeles. “Everything that we look for as people coming from that situation…everybody wants to do better. Everybody wants the nice cars. Everybody wants the money. Everybody wants these things, but we’ll never really get ‘em nine times outta 10, because of how the system is set up. It’s a sad realization. The majority of us will never become anything.”
Given this, Vince Staples says he has an idea of how to help break the cycle of hopelessness.
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“I just don’t want everything that I ever been through to be for nothing,” he says. “It’s to the point that people really don’t know what goes on where I live at. Like Corey [Smyth, my manager] didn’t know nothing until — he knew, but he really didnt understand it — he seen me and seen my friends, just a bunch of kids trying to take of their kids and take care of their parents. We was getting shot at. We wasn’t doing the shooting, for the most part.
“People don’t know that it’s not colors,” Vince Staples continues. “It’s not race. It’s not anything except circumstances. To me, it’s like, lower middle class…It’s not being dirt poor. It’s not food stamps. It’s the people whose parents have to work to barely pay the rent to want to live in a half-decent area, but then they don’t have any more money. What about them? What about the people who aren’t doing bad enough to get help, but aren’t doing good enough to help themselves? It’s just a lot of stuff that gets left out of the loop and I feel like those people need to be spoken for. And younger people need to know that it’s not cool…It’s cool. Don’t get me wrong. I had fun. I’m never gone regret anything I did in my life, but I would rather you not do it. I’m pretty sure a crackhead has an amazing time when he’s high. But when he’s not, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.”
RELATED: Vince Staples “Hell Can Wait” EP Release Date, Cover Art, Tracklist & Stream
