Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, intranet's busiest music nerd, and let's talk about Mr. Vince Staples. Rapper, songwriter, and as far as modern West Coast artists are concerned, he's built up one of the most impressive catalogs over the years, recently adding to it the album Cry Baby. In light of that album cycle, of course, he has been touring, he's been promoting, he's been getting interviewed left and right, as any hard-working artist would, and a recent short-form interview that he did has been going viral for all the dumbest reasons.

Interviwer: What's the best Vince Staples song?

Vince Staples: Shit, I don't know, man. I'm one of them. They don't got a favorite burger when they flip them at McDonald's.

Now, to those of you who are maybe not so parasocial, you might have read that and thought, what are people mad about? What's going on here? But no, believe it or not, people online were actually angry over the clip, and even that, in and of itself, might not have been enough reason to really make this a discussion.

But the thing is, Vince actually started responding to a lot of these criticisms as well, kind of firing back with his own thoughts. Now, to make a long story short, the crux of what a lot of people are taking issue with here is not just simply Vince's nonchalant sort of above-it-all attitude, but rather likening his music and likening his art, his process, to the process of flipping burgers.

Which I'll grant you is maybe not the most romanticized portrayal of, creating art that we've ever heard. But honestly, the responses to Vince saying this, in my opinion, are even more insane.

I think we want you to love the job we gave you, because it's an occupation we aren't all blessed to have, Vince. You have bars that even the best couldn't come up with. We have put you here, and we love you, and we want you to love what you do for us. - Twitter user's response to Vince

Which, honestly, is so fucking weird, is a really weird fucking take. And, funnily enough, it kind of reminds me of that one Billy Woods line from "Maps," where he's like, "People don't want the truth; they want me to tell them grandma died and went to heaven."

Look, I've dealt with this in my own experience as a critic, but a lot of music fans, sadly, really want you to sugarcoat everything for them. And you have to put things in, the most careful and the most bubble-wrapped way, or else, they're just quick to be offended.

Unfortunately, Vince kind of gave himself a bit of a self-inflicted wound on that front here with this comment, because there are at least a very loud subset of his fans, which this exists for a lot of different artists, who view the artistic process that went into their favorite music as this, beautiful, hallowed, whimsical, flowery thing that's, beyond words, beyond understanding, beyond description.

And, look, as a music fan, I get it. I've heard music and felt that exact same way. For sure, there are even artists who may go into records with the intention of trying to create that exact sort of experience. But that's not everybody, and above all else, that's also not reality.

Personally, I subscribe to the adage that great artists are made, they're not born. And while, yes, there are people who are Nepo babies and may cheat themselves, to the top, and some musicians who seem to have a natural knack or talent for certain things when it comes to playing and performing. When you're writing records and when you're conceptualizing things and you're trying to make an artistic statement, more often than not, what's putting artists in the position to succeed at doing exactly that is consistency and hard work. Envisioning your art and your artistic process, no matter how much you or others might romanticize it, as a labor - a labor of love is one of the quickest and most functional ways to go into a project or a goal that actually allows you to finish something and complete something, make a statement, realize a vision, without getting bogged down in the expectations of others and emotional attachments and a host of other things.

I know how Vince acts a little aloof and everything might annoy some people, but think about it. This guy has been successful in the rap game for well over 10 years now. There are a countless number of artists who came up at the same time that he did and came and went, even some who had way higher commercial peaks than he did and are completely gone now. They're off the map. Their career is over. If they put out one, two, five more albums, nobody would give a fuck. And yet Vince is still here putting out albums that people routinely care about every cycle, even with a big genre change on this new one.

I mean, look again, I'm not crazy about Cry Baby myself, but it takes a compelling and a talented artist to be able to shift your typical rap listener into hearing a rapper go rock and have it be received as well as Cry Baby was. That's not just something you do as evidenced by fuck like a dozen other attempts that rappers made in the past at doing the same and they were received terribly.

I mean, Vince made that transition so smoothly he almost kind of made it look easy. I feel like another part of this bubble that Vince is popping here that fans are having a hard time hearing and understanding is the idea that Vince might not love what he does to the most intense degree he possibly can every waking moment of the day.

It's like people are getting off less on the quality or the idea of the music itself and more on the idea of like, wow, all the love and passion and all the completely indescribable emotions my favorite artist was putting into this project, which is just such a weird, unrealistic expectation.

Not only given that some of the best music on the planet was made while the artist who created it was maybe at like the lowest point of their life. They were so goddamn fucking miserable that they were this close to ending it and yet they still somehow like made a record, an amazing record. Like the idea of the tortured artist is such a long and storied stereotype.

In addition to that, at what point in music journalism history has the question, oh, what is your favorite song ever gone well in an interview? This is what leads me to believe that a lot of these people freaking out, like don't read a lot of interviews or don't really interface with a lot of music journalism. Because how many times of artists like during a conversation, during a discussion about maybe a new work, they go back and talk about an old record where they're like, yeah, that album kind of sucked or I have a lot of regrets about that record. I don't feel quite the way that the fans do about it in retrospect.

Some of my favorite artists outright dislike some of my favorite albums in their discography. Artists have and are entitled to feel all sorts of ways about the music they create for a living, mostly because their perspective on it is totally unique. They fucking made it.

But also, I don't take Vince's response here as an indication that he doesn't care about his art or that he's not passionate about it. In fact, you can hear the fact that he cares about it and is passionate about it in the art itself. You don't need to learn that from an interview. If he wasn't passionate about his own art, he wouldn't care so much about the lyrics. He wouldn't care so much about the storytelling. He wouldn't care so much about going into a different aesthetic or thematic direction with each new album. He wouldn't want all of his records to sound distinct from one another. If he didn't care, he would just hand in the same fucking slop every time he has a new record to release. If he didn't care, he wouldn't be fighting with his label to make a genre switch when they have been trying to prevent it. All of those things are indicators that he cares.

Maybe the real takeaway from this situation is that Vince doesn't really care about giving interviews, which fair, a lot of artists don't. In fact, doing interviews can sometimes be one of the most annoying things an artist has to deal with in order to get their work out there. Making music can obviously be great and really fulfilling, but rarely does that and that alone suffice. When it comes to making a career out of creating music, you have to do all of these other tangential things in order to make the machine work.

The streaming industry sucks. Labels suck. The commodification of music sucks. The state of social media and music journalism sucks. Dealing with annoying fans telling you how you're supposed to feel about your own art sucks. It's funny to be living in a time where simultaneously people are so obsessed with the idea of performativity and authenticity, but simultaneously, when an artist refuses to perform and makes it very clear that they are just barely trying to get through this lame ass interview where they're being asked their favorite song in their own catalog.

Fans are like, no, no, you have to show us that you love what you're doing for us, please. For the love of God, leave Vince Staples alone. Let this man be. He's made it abundantly clear that he's a very blunt, unfiltered, low key guy. And if a performance is what you want from him, go to a show. Go see him play live or listen to his music. That's clearly where he's focused about putting that kind of energy. For Vince, an interview is not that place.

Anthony Fantano. Vince Staples. Forever.