{"id":491101,"date":"2026-06-13T16:19:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T16:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/491101\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T16:19:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T16:19:23","slug":"words-they-never-stopped-no-bullet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/491101\/","title":{"rendered":"Words, They Never Stopped No Bullet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Art by DJ Short<\/p>\n

In the early 2010s, the north side of Long Beach, California became a place synonymous with hell. You understood cops were out surveilling as early as 6 a.m.; you lived and died by the gun in spite of it. Grandma\u2019s prayers were of no use. There was no time to atone for your sins, weigh what\u2019s right and wrong. There was only the shit you do\u2014robbing, stealing, killing as not to be killed\u2014and the shit you don\u2019t. And it was here, in the world of the 20-year-old Vince Staples where a growing sub-culture of chronically online, blog-era rap fans would find him. Sending prolific, unsparing dispatches from his daily hell that in just 12 years would morph into an eerie glimpse into the nation\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

In the family of his early-career records lives the forgotten stepchild of Vince Staples\u2019s discography, Shyne Coldchain Vol. II. Named after Belizean Bad Boy rapper Shyne and Clipse affiliate Rosco P. Coldchain, it\u2019s the sequel to Staples\u2019s first-ever mixtape, from 2011. It may ring a bell for even the most casual Staples listeners due to its acclaimed single \u201cNate,\u201d a disarming reflection on the role his absent father played in his life. But while preparing a meal in the kitchen in my box of an apartment in Brooklyn and listening to Staples\u2019s Ramona Radio show through my headphones, it wasn\u2019t a throwback to \u201cNate\u201d that stopped me in my tracks, but rather a drop into the distorted, alternate universe of Shyne Coldchain Vol. II\u2019s fifth track, \u201cOh You Scared.\u201d<\/p>\n

Its low-pitched, warped synths evoke a fever dream or bad acid trip; Jhene Aiko\u2019s airy harmonizing and a jazz-piano melody combine to lull you into a trance. Right before the spell has become totalizing, it\u2019s pierced with drums thunderous enough to snap you into hypervigilance. And that\u2019s exactly where Staples wants you. His opening lines\u2014\u201cN—-, what\u2019s the deal? Pay attention\/Most the time that I\u2019ve been living, we been public housing tenants\/Never had no pot to piss so bitch excuse me if I brag a lot\u201d\u2014ask you to behold every opinion of the world he\u2019s been tossing back and forth in his mind since becoming the artist in the booth before you.<\/p>\n

After the muted receptions of his first two mixtapes, Staples had mostly given up on making music. He was reinvigorated when his close friend Earl Sweatshirt returned from a notorious stint at Samoa\u2019s Coral Reef Academy and brought him around Mac Miller. Vince describes his time with Mac as one that changed his life, the late rapper teaching Staples extensively about the technical parts of the craft: staying on beat, projecting his voice, ad-libbing. The attention from Stolen Youth, his full-length collaboration with Miller, and his striking breakout verse on Earl\u2019s \u201cHive\u201d put the battery pack in his back to refocus on making music of his own.<\/p>\n

The same choppy cadence and poignant frankness that characterizes Staples\u2019s verse on \u201cHive\u201d is what cements \u201cOh You Scared\u201d as indispensable in both content and delivery. \u201cIf Illuminati buying souls\/and only fear was dying broke\/and God who made my life this hard\/So hell where we decide to go,\u201d he opens its second verse, an immediate pull into both the song\u2019s thesis: a critique of the use of religion to pacify Black communities living in poverty. It\u2019s a topic that Vince had spent a great deal of time talking about both in his songs and interviews in the time between Stolen Youth and Vol. II\u2019s release.<\/p>\n

As a child, Vince\u2019s family went through a great deal of turmoil in a short period of time. His father went to jail and his older sister\u2019s father passed away, leaving his mother, Eloise, to take care of the family by herself. She, in turn, became hyper religious, spending a great deal of time in church with Vince in tow, and even enrolling him in Long Beach\u2019s Optimal Christian Academy, where he attended school until eighth grade. Like many church-raised kids, Staples took a more cynical, counter view of religion as reprieve from his everyday struggles. In \u201cOh You Scared,\u201d heaven is as much of a place that he aspires to go to as hell is a place he fears.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy friends have been getting killed since I was 14 or 15 and there ain\u2019t no prayers or nothing that can help,\u201d Staples said in a 2013 interview with Complex<\/a>. \u201cIf a n—- gets shot and stays in a coma for two days, he\u2019s probably gonna die. All the prayers in the world can\u2019t prevent that.\u201d On the song, brings this idea back just before before Jhene sings the final chorus: \u201cFriends that\u2019s killing n—-s is the only ones you praying for\/But words, they never stopped no bullet\/Oh, you scared, n—-?\u201d<\/p>\n

As the synths warp back and forth between your ears and Jhene\u2019s melody fades out, you can\u2019t help but to wonder if its Vince\u2019s obsession with disproving Christianity\u2019s moral compass that protected him through all his years of gangbanging in LB, a slew of life-or-death choices being the very thing that carried him into his current role as a political rapper-turned-rock frontman in his newest album, Cry Baby.<\/p>\n

A couple months ago, in the midst of my spring semester, I shuffled my body weight in an uncomfortable blue plastic chair among a large circle of my classmates, all of our attention aimed towards our special guest, novelist and essayist Alexander Chee. He was visiting our campus as a part of a regular lecture series of distinguished writers. One of my classmates asked Chee how he continues to show up to the page in the midst of the grotesque social climate we\u2019re currently living in. He shared a story in response, of a time where he was asked a similar question while on a panel with other authors, and a colleague of his aptly answered: \u201cI am protected by my obsessions.\u201d He writes about the things he loves and can\u2019t shake from his psyche; goes down research rabbit holes that keep him up through the night and away from the sore thumbs of a doomscrolling binge. Chee\u2019s answer brought me back to a time in my life last year, early 2025, when in the short time since he had been sworn into office that January, our current president was committed to wreaking as much havoc on the American people as quickly as he possibly could.<\/p>\n

Day after day my feeds were filled with news of repealed bills, funding cuts to research grants and social services, and the newfound presence of ICE agents across the country. My first lifeline in the midst of this was to keep my mind occupied with as much music as I could possibly listen to. And somewhere on this journey I arrived at those archived episodes of Ramona Radio.<\/p>\n

Roughly a year after being transported back to Staples\u2019s 2014 universe through these archives, it dawns on me how even at 20 years old, Vince\u2019s hyperspecific tales of his adolescence in Long Beach were a warning signal of the disarray that we deal with today. There\u2019s a saying that whatever is happening to the world\u2019s most marginalized groups will someday happen to you. In the 12 years since Shyne Coldchain Vol II.\u2019s release, we\u2019ve watched an insurgence of Christian nationalism throughout the country; we\u2019ve seen innumerable attempts, some in good faith but most not, to put band-aids to the bullet wounds of our nation. You combine that being ushered into an era of resource scarcity, from petty war-driven oil shortages to clean water-guzzling AI data centers sprouting across the country like weeds, and you\u2019re bound to create not just \u201crough areas\u201d or cities where crime is especially bad, but a version of America reminiscent of the one depicted in Octavia Butler\u2019s The Parable of The Sower. One where we all have to ask ourselves not what\u2019s wrong or right, but just what exactly we\u2019re willing to do to survive, and if whatever faith we\u2019ve been previously indoctrinated with will hold up in the fire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art by DJ Short In the early 2010s, the north side of Long Beach, California became a place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-491101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}