The Rap-Up: Half-Lives
In a special edition of The Rap-Up, Paul Thompson considers new singles from stars and would-be stars of the 2010s, including Vince Staples, JPEGMAFIA, Action Bronson, and Lil Yachty.
Vince Staples, “Blackberry Marmalade”
As shortcuts to profundity go, a Martin Luther King Jr. quote laid over footage of racialized violence is not exactly novel. But the one that that appears at the end of “Blackberry Marmalade”—“So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be”—is a pretty perfect organizing principle for American life in 2026. When King wrote that line while locked up in Birmingham, he was tracing a history of moral resistance and state persecution that snakes back through this country’s founders and all the way to Jesus; today, you and I and everyone we know are on various lists for innumerable and unknowable reasons, Excel tabs stashed away for a rainy day.
A decade ago, Vince Staples released the video for a song called “Señorita,” from his debut album, Summertime ‘06. The superstructure takes a familiar idea—violence in Black and brown neighborhoods is commodified for white amusement—and executes it with chilling effect, a tap on the glass, a smiling family. Today, the lines between participant, prop, and target are a lot blurrier. “Blackberry Marmalade” adopts the visual logic of first-person shooter games—though it looks an awful lot like the compilations of drone strikes that float around, the livestreamed mass shootings we’ve endured, and recalls the way young school shooters sometimes document their preparation. There is no authentic-inauthentic divide. There is just violence.
The guitars on “Blackberry Marmalade” are as Long Beach as Yankees and Indians caps; the Chuck Taylors and neatly tucked-in white tee Vince bleeds through in the video are archetypal in a few different subcultures there. Where his music circa “Señorita” was more bone-on-bone, Vince’s work in the 2020s has tended toward fuzzier beats, rolling flows, blurred edges. The vocals here feel of a piece with that, but those guitars are nicely serrated.
Action Bronson, “Triceratops” f/ Lil Yachty & Paul Wall
Despite being the target of the second-greatest non-song diss in rap history, Action Bronson has proved remarkably durable because he has adventurous taste in production and understands that he’s going to live and die by keeping the imagery lucid and the sports metaphors teetering on the brink of self-parody. His opening verse on “Triceratops” makes express reference to this graceful-ish, bankable-ish aging process (“I’m the old hound dog still humpin’ the leg”); Paul Wall, riding a gentle caterpillar at an amusement park, references the verse that made him famous in a flow buoyant enough to never seem too ruminative; Lil Yachty continues to finally show the charm that executives swore he had in 2015. This is low-stakes by design, superbly competent via sheer volume of practice.
JPEGMAFIA, “babygirl”
When he broke through in 2018 with Veteran, JPEGMAFIA’s gift seemed to be an innate sense for texture—how to make his session files feel like physiological gauntlets and how to parse and increasingly unparsable internet, isolating the actual engines of sociopolitical fury and decay. He drew some ire for announcing that his new album will be called Experimental Rap, and in fact lead single “babygirl” has primary vocals delivered in a triplet flow that has been legible to audiences since 2013 or so. But the vocals are in fact buried, threaded through the mix in a way that treats them as a component part rather than stylistic anchor.
Shoreline Mafia, “TAKE U HOME”
During Covid, out of boredom and financial panic, I spent a few months writing press releases for most of the major labels. This was when drill rap from New York and club rap from across the Hudson was exploding; the labels were signing rappers, mostly 14 to 21 years old, at a dizzying rate. They were, almost uniformly, fluent in production that would have seemed absurdly uptempo in most branches of hip-hop for many years. It’s clear that the majors thought these scenes were full of cheap and replenishable lottery tickets. A few years removed from that—and even further removed from the L.A. street rap renaissance that birthed them—Shoreline Mafia’s two founding members, OhGeesy and Fenix Flexin, return with an album full of quick, nimble stabs and rejuvenation. In 2017, they sounded relatively plodding next to Greedo, Drakeo et al.; today, it’s nice to hear some emcees with bite on tracks like these.