“There’s some deeper shit too, but I won’t tell you. But you’re close.”
Photo: Netflix
While mild-mannered, Vince Staples is a trickster at his core. His work marries a depth of thought with inscrutability, and for over 15 years, this has resulted in rap music that is ambitious and vulnerable while Staples comes off as ambivalent about it in interviews. His Netflix comedy, The Vince Staples Show, captures both sides — the creative polymath and the dispassionate observer of life — at once. It’s a show that interrogates fame, especially Black fame, while also conveying how unimportant and irrelevant it is. Staples explains his paradoxical perspective on this week’s episode of Good One. “The perception of celebrity is something that I don’t think people speak about enough,” he says, “because it’s not a real thing at all.”
In The Vince Staples Show’s second season, which premiered earlier this month, Staples explores this concept through the legacy of O. J. Simpson; it should be noted that, in the world of the show, Simpson is named James Brown, but it’s definitely O.J. Simpson, but also a little bit Jim Brown, and it’s also a completely fictional guy. Staples is similarly hard to pin down about his influences. He admires deep cinephile directors like the Swedish absurdist Roy Andersson, but later in the conversation, he says he still prefers Back to the Future III. His is a comedy of Is he fucking with me? He is — except when he isn’t.
The show pulls from a varied set of influences, and I want to ask about some. What is your history with The Simpsons?
Growing up, we didn’t have cable, so I’d watch The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and Seinfeld and time it to go to sleep. I wasn’t the biggest Seinfeld fan as a kid; I didn’t understand it, obviously. But I’ve probably seen every episode of The Simpsons. I watch new stuff sometimes, but not as much as I did when I was a kid. I watched that shit every night for decades, so I honestly can’t pick a favorite episode.
The most Simpsons aspect of your show is how every character, even if they are only in one scene, will feel like these big cartoonish swings. Where does that come from?
It’s definitely a “season one versus two”–type thing, but I think because of my lack of experience in everything involving film and television, I leaned on the things that you know without knowing. It just came naturally that every character is just as important as the next; there’s not any “main” anything. Vince is a lens rather than a character, and everyone else are the characters. I’m just kind of there.
The example I think of is that the guy you have reading your uncle’s will in episode three is on drugs, and he’s tweaking and hallucinating throughout the process.
That’s how I see things. It’s not even about a joke, really. Of course jokes happen because life is funny, but that’s a narrowed-down version of the story. Also, everything that you see from me has probably 30 notes — room notes, network notes — that shorten it up and make it digestible. One thing about my directors and production team is they’re going to try to shoot everything, and there are moments where nobody knows what’s going on, and they know I’m not going to tell them what I’m trying to do, so they’re just going to do it how they see best. And I think that allows for creativity.
The show tends to have very distinct episodes, but this season was more serialized than last season.
I think that serialization is a fucking myth. We just had more days. I hate serial storytelling, but maybe that’s just me personally. What I like about The Simpsons is because of how I grew up watching terrestrial television and not knowing when things air, I didn’t know when the show ever started or stopped. With The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, you just dive in those things. I didn’t know Mr. Rogers wasn’t airing live when I was a fucking kid. No one knows those things. That’s the strength in that kind of storytelling — that you can just drop in on an episode and be entertained.
In interviews, you’ll often cite Roy Andersson as an influence. I will admit I wasn’t familiar with him before this, so I watched some of his movies before this interview, and it’s wild how similar it is to your show while at first looking so different. I want to play you a scene from his 2000 film, Songs From the Second Floor, that reminds me of you.
That’s my shit. When you deal with brainstorming and things of that nature, certain things are hard to explain. You just have to see them, right?
I say his name a lot. I don’t know if anybody that works with us went back to look except, obviously, the directors. What’s interesting about that kind of storytelling and composition is that the focal length and the frame feel congested, even though they’re outside. Also, the width of the frame doesn’t take away from the narrative that’s happening.
In television, we get a lot of whys. They’d watch a scene like this and say, “Why are they pushing the car? Why are we not cutting in? Why is he doing this? Why did they kick him?” To me, they’re just living. And in life, we’ve seen people fight — we’ve seen people push cars, we’ve seen arguments on the sidewalk — and we don’t pay attention to it, because life is fucking ridiculous, and we ignore it over and over again. I think that shooting that is forcing people to understand the dynamics of what’s going on. There’s almost like an awkwardness to paying attention to the world around you. We’re all constantly distracted.
In season two, we were able to lean on a lot of those ideas. Of course, you get certain pushback, like, “Can we cut the shot of the house?” And it’s like, “No. If we’re talking about the house, let’s show the house.”
What reminded me most of The Vince Staples Show is how this scene captures different perspectives. One guy is having the worst day of his life, but everyone else is just having a normal day.
I always say it’s like a perspective piece. Everyone has the ability to be right or wrong.
I remember one of our producers was like, “We just really want people to like Vince.” And I was like, “Why?” I understand fully what she’s saying, but why is that integral to the story and the universe? Because it’s just not realistic. I’m honestly not that likable of a person. I don’t really understand the need for certain things, especially when we talk about being creative. So I just try to make sure that we have as many points of view as possible, as many perspectives as possible, and you only can do what you can get away with. We’re able to get away with a lot, so I’m grateful for it.
Andersson grew up post–World War II in Sweden, a country that stayed neutral. One could see how that leads to a sort of dispassionate worldview. It’s not nihilistic or cynical, but just a perspective of “things just happening.” This is a worldview you share. Where do you think it comes from for you?
Environment has to do a lot with a lot of the ways that we view things in art. Life is just life, and you don’t get to pick what goes on and what happens. Some people say I’m nihilistic. I don’t really pay much attention to that. I think I’m more realistic than anything. My show is actually very bright. It’s funny, because we lean on what we’re comfortable with. Certain things should be skewed to be dark to our minds, and certain things should be skewed to be bright. And when you go on the other side of that coin, it just gets uncomfortable for people. But that discomfort is when things kind of get interesting.
The other major influence I see on this season is the Coen brothers. There are aspects of Fargo; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Big Lebowski …
A Serious Man.
What does that mean in practice for you?
It’s just a matter of letting the environment be the catalyst for the humor. A lot of things are forward-facing, and I get it. I’m a big fan of Lucille Ball and physical comedy, but I don’t have the talent to be a Lucille Ball or a Martin Lawrence or Will Smith. I think Bernie Mac wasn’t that physical in his show. That’s more my era. He’s giving a monologue sitting in a chair, but its shot like a fucking French film with the floating cameras through the hallways and things of that nature. A lot of great people have taken a lot of risks, so to say, so it’s something I wanted to do, and I felt comfortable with it because I’m not a very emotive person.
The other Coen parallel is that The Vince Staples Show appears to be highly allegorical.
Absolutely.
Your music is often considered almost documentarian in how true to life it is. Why do you like working in a more surreal, allegorical space?
I agree with what you said, but I think that’s just a by-product of hip-hop music and the framing of it. It’s just a weird genre and a bullshit thing in music. I understand it to a certain capacity, but in film and in television, it’s one of those things where people are looking for you to be creative, and in hip-hop, they’re looking for you to be real. You can be telling the exact truth, but if you don’t physically or socially embody what they perceive your version of that music to be, then it’s “alternative.”
In film, you can work within genre and then have a lot more control within the genre, because there are more anchors within the genres. And music, if it’s a specific kind of song, can only come from production or optics or the messaging and the writing of the song, the lyrics of the song. But with comedy, you can have comedy writing, comedy shoot style, rom-coms, dramatic comedies, dark comedies, yada. It is just more to play with. You also have another element of watching something that gives you another leg to stand on, rather than it just being a listening experience. Unless it’s a music video, which is not really viewed as something that people are looking to go to for thought.
This reminds me of the fact that in the first episode, one of the chapter title cards reads “Being John Malkovich,” which was connected to a story about people’s perception of you as a famous person versus what it’s like for you to live it. Can you explain what that meant to you?
I mean, perception is interesting. I think that playing with the perception is the fun part. I never explained anything, but I think that you’re onto some things …
This is another Coen brothers aspect of you. They also never like to give anything up in interviews.
It’s not fun. But what I will say is that the perception of celebrity is something that I don’t think people speak about enough, because it’s not a real thing at all. I’ve seen some very famous people at the Sprouts parking lot. Playing with that perception gives you a nice thing to lean on when you’re being surreal in certain elements. Because since people don’t necessarily understand fame, a lot of things can just be chalked up to fame. They’ll say, “Vince got away with killing somebody because he’s famous.” You know what I’m saying? You never know what kind of mistake — not mistake, but what kind of thoughts people could make about the mistakes that the characters have in the show because they can chalk it up to whoever they are in life. And a lot of the characters constantly blame things on Vince being successful, and it literally has nothing to do with anything. It is not supposed to make sense.
My sense is that fame is allegorical, because this season is a lot about fame, but you seemingly do not care about being famous at all.
It was a studio note for the original first season: “We need Vince to be making music.” And one of the people on my team was like, “Why?” I do find it silly. I’m not that famous of a fucking person. It seems to be a thing for people close to you. You see that within the family, where their proximity gives them an excuse or retribution: “You’re famous. That’s why I can’t do this and you can do that.” Or there is a feeling that “If you’re successful, we as a family have succeeded.” It means more to the people around you than you yourself, whether they use it as a crutch or a stepping stone.
Not to spoil too much, but in this season, your uncle James Brown dies. At first, it seems like you might be talking about the legendary football player Jim Brown, but it becomes clear your uncle is essentially O.J. Simpson. You were one year old when the Bronco chase happened. What does O.J. represent to you?
O.J. Simpson’s a very interesting character because, like I said, fame means more to the people around you than you. O.J. Simpson’s case, to a lot of people, felt like retribution or vindication for the Black community in Los Angeles, and it had nothing to do with that. But I think that within the season itself, he represented guilt for Vince. Vince is looking at it from a standpoint of, Okay, this is a very similar situation to what I’m going through personally. So Vince’s relationship and connectivity to Uncle James has nothing to do with any of the things that it might have to do with for the rest of his family members. That’s just a fun thing to play with.
But as far as him as a person, O.J. Simpson is very, very funny, because it was a very personalized thing when it came to how he’s viewed culturally. Later down the line, a lot of people are like, “All right, that’s a little bit fucked-up.” But in the heat of the moment, we utilized it, as we do all of our celebrities or public figures. They’re comfort measures for a lot of people. Whether it’s “We like your art” or “We like you” or “You make me feel like I can one day be successful” or “I can escape whatever my circumstances are,” he kind of just stands for that kind of viewpoint of celebrity. But you’re the first person to say the Jim Brown thing.
That was my next question, because Jim Brown is almost a mirror image of O.J., in terms of how they dealt with celebrity. What is your perspective on him?
Jim Brown’s interesting. I’m from Los Angeles County, so Jim Brown was very instrumental in a lot of things. Politically, he’s very instrumental in gang intervention and other causes. But then he took the turn he took later down the line. So it’s just interesting to see how perception of people can change over time, and how people utilize that celebrity, and where they go looking for certain things.
Michael Jackson also comes up a few times in the season. What does he represent?
Michael Jackson is like Judy Garland to me. They’re the same person. They look alike too, obviously after some work. We had to cut out some Michael Jackson stuff. We had a horror sequence in there with Michael Jackson. It didn’t come out how I wanted, but we turned him into the Babadook.
Michael Jackson is more of a reference point for Vince’s mother than it is for him himself, in terms of perception of fame. Her reference point is Michael Jackson and his Motown performance where he basically kind of shit on his family. That’s her statement of how Vince needed to stand up for himself. I utilize that as a reference point for Vince dealing with his uncle’s death and family. There’s some deeper shit too, but I won’t tell you. But you’re close.
Earlier this year, you tweeted that they’ll never let you in the Criterion Closet because you’ll “break the matrix.”
We’re going — I think tomorrow.
Are you ready to reveal the matrix?
It’ll be fun.
What is the matrix?
I fucking hate the perception of a foreign film being so deep just because it has subtitles.
The clip we watched was foreign.
It doesn’t count. But also, it’s not Back to the Future. If you asked me to pick between A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and Back to the Future III, I’m picking Back to the Future III. That is the matrix of it.