The Seductive L.A. Noir of "Loca" by Vince Staples
Drumming Upstream 27
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 452 songs to go!
This week I learned “Loca” by the Los Angeles rapper Vince Staples, produced by No I.D, the first of several Staples songs that I’ll cover in this series.
Now, let’s go “Loca”.
Side A
“Loca”
By Vince Staples
Summertime ‘06
Released on June 30th, 2015
Liked on December 9th, 2015
How do you remember the summer of 2006?
That summer I turned 16. It was a lazy aimless summer by design. I remember gobbling a lot of quesadillas from a restaurant on 7th avenue between Berkley and Lincoln whose walls were covered in SoCal psychedelia. It felt like eating inside of a Santana album cover. That restaurant doesn’t exist any more. I remember listening to a lot of Iron Maiden1, having bought one of their many greatest hit compilations on June 6th, 2006 (get it?). I poured hours into Kingdom Hearts II, one of the last video games I played start to finish before quitting the medium entirely. I spent my 16th birthday that July acting like an idiot late into the night with two of my friends, stone sober. I briefly spent part of the night literally on fire after one friend applied Axe body-spray on his hand, ignited his fist with a lighter, and punched me in my shirtless sternum. I wasn’t hurt, but in the moment before I beat the fire out I felt the split-second difference between a cute anecdote and pain that I hadn’t yet learned to imagine. We ended the night by watching The Warriors, another tale of young, male recklessness in New York City, as the sun rose.
Vince Staples remembers the summer of 2006 differently.
Vince Staples is a rapper from Ramona Park, a neighborhood on the north side of Long Beach, California. He was born in 1993, which means he was 13 in 2006. Only four years later, Staples put his name on the map with an appearance on Earl Sweatshirt’s shock-rap debut mixtape Earl, part of the early salvo against good taste from the then ascendant Odd Future crew. Another four years later, Staples came across my radar with Hell Can Wait, his first release with Def Jam Records. Hell Can Wait announced a serious artist with serious ambitions. By this point his lyrics had thankfully matured, as had his delivery. Staples’ voice settled into a single consistent register, animated but never excited. Like his emotional affect had been compressed.
Just as he was making his name with his music, Staples employed the same voice to build a reputation as a terrific interview. Whether sitting across from over-eager hosts on MTV2 or calling in to an NBA podcast, Staples never failed to come across as the sharpest guy in the room. A lot of rappers of Vince Staples’ stature come off as too cool to care about interviews. Staples shares the air of being above the game of public relations, but instead of making him aloof it grants him a devil-may-care honesty. Firmly a member of the 140 character era of Twitter, Staples cut straight to the chase, shredding the artifices of the entertainment industry in the process.
Despite his generational brevity, Staples emerged into public consciousness with the cynicism of a much older man. Whether in 2015 you found that cynicism perceptive, darkly funny, or merely obnoxious, Summertime ‘06 arrived with plenty of evidence to support your impression. Before a single note of it reaches your ears, the album asks challenging questions about itself. Executive produced by Dion “No I.D.” Wilson (who we will discuss on SIDE B) Summertime ‘06 is a 20 song double album that doesn’t even crack the 60 minute mark. Why is it split in two if it could be a single disc? Is this a joke about pompous double records? Is this just a classy way of bloating an album for more streaming income?3 This top level concision trickles down to the individual songs. No track lasts for more than 5 minutes. Guest verses and hooks are scarce. Staples raps over tracks stripped down to little more than rattling percussion and bass. Even famed cloud rap producer Clams Casino4 turned in beats of cirrus wispiness rather than his usual cumulus lushness.
Reviewers at the time celebrated Vince Staples for this sparseness, praising his “plain, hard sentences” and “casual, disinterested air”. Detractors, both in the press and those I’ve spoken to anecdotally, took this minimalism to be less a sign of sharp writing than settling for the bare minimum. The rap fans I knew weren’t sure if there was any substance under Staples’ style. The acid charm on camera registered as a kind of anti-charisma on record. You wouldn’t call someone that spoke in the voice Staples raps with monotone if you were in a room with him, but given his preference for his voice to sit low in the mix (“I want my music to sound like music”), its shockingly easy to tune him out. It doesn’t help that even at his best as a lyricist, Staples is rarely surprising. The lines are good, but you’ve heard lines like them before.
And yet, Summertime ‘06 adds up to much more than the sum of its pared down parts because of its commitment to atmosphere. All of the empty space in the music, even Staples’ lack of conventional star power, serves to create a mood of dread. The album has no ornamentation because the world it describes doesn’t have any either. Whether you catch every word of Staples’ lyrics or not, you’re going to get the gist of their emotional core just from how they play against the production. The emotional core is rarely a happy one. To hear Staples tell it, in a lengthy and forthright interview on NPR, the primary feeling he wanted to invoke was fear, the kind he felt at age 13 with his father in prison and guns in his house. With time that fear birthed a distrust of others deep enough to resemble misanthropy. It’s an understandable perspective for a former gang member, for whom every social occasion offers a chance for violent danger. “There is no pride in helping your race overcome where I come from.” Staples told Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley in 2015. “All we have are escapes. You can go to the beach. Probably get shot at cause the cops don't come to the beach. You can go try to kick it with this girl who you don't know who her brother is. You don't want to catch the bus cause it's in the summer.” Instead of adopting the burden of saving the streets, Vince Staples at age 21 settled into the detached nihilism of a L.A. Noir protagonist. Jaded, out for himself, head perpetually on a swivel without cracking his cool demeanor. And like any hardboiled hero, Staples is susceptible to a femme fatale.
“Loca” is the fifth track on the first disc of Summertime ‘06. It is not a particularly popular song from the record. The song’s play count is dwarfed by the other tracks on the record on Spotify, and only two contemporary review that I found mentioned it by name. One review, from XXL, only brings up “Loca” to note how it doesn’t live up to their standards for a radio single. This is a strange criticism for “Loca” specifically considering that the song was never released as a single, and for Staples’ work generally since he’s openly disparaged the idea of writing for the radio in interviews. The writer confused the song’s content with its form. Just because a song is about the club doesn’t mean that it is for the club.
After four songs proving his tough guy credentials, Vince Staples opens “Loca” with flirtation, hoping to coax a girl at the club into letting him “spend all night in her nine lives”. If you’re a Staples skeptic, this first verse won’t convince you otherwise. “I know you’re sick of all the same old things” Staples says to the unnamed woman driving him crazy. He could just as easily be talking to rap fans who’ve heard these kind of come-ons over club beats for decades. There’s nothing wrong with the verse, no lines that make you scratch your head or think that Staples won’t get the girl by the end of the tune, but little from the song’s first half rises above perfunctory on a lyrical level. Things get more interesting on verse two. Staples starts in the same mode, comparing the girl to a King Magazine model, but it only takes him one line before his paranoia bubbles up to the surface. Now on a late night drive, Staples justifies staying strapped and sober even on a booty call. When someone can kill you at a stop light it doesn’t pay to be relaxed. This tension eventually boils over to the girl Staples is seducing. In a clever inversion of his pick-up questions in the first verse, Staples wonders aloud whether she’ll sell him out, either in the courtroom or the streets, before concluding with a sigh “maybe, still gon’ drive me crazy”.
Taken on its own “Loca” is a perfectly fine rap song. But taken in hand with the Vince Staples project writ large the song reads as Summertime ‘06 in miniature. Here is a man incapable of enjoying himself, of trusting anyone, of stopping himself from acting on risky impulses. Desire and danger intermingle into fatalism. However, this interpretation can’t be attributed to Staples alone. Reading this much into “Loca”’s limited text is only possible because of the work of producer No I.D.
Side B
“Loca”
Produced by No I.D.
Time Signature: 4/4
101 BPM
When I remember anticipating Summertime ‘06 in the early days of summertime ‘15, I can recall the exact height my eyebrows lifted reading the name ‘No I.D.’ next to Vince Staples. I was then (and now remain) more of an enthusiast about hip-hop than any kind of expert, so my interest was piqued by my awareness of No I.D.’s star-making, not his beat-making. Just four years older than Staples myself, I knew No I.D. as the man that introduced Jay-Z to Kanye West. My feelings about Mr. West’s political views and behavior aside5, No I.D. clearly had an eye for talent. Whatever he saw in Staples, I was ready for it.
Long before he was a Def Jam exec, No I.D. cut his teeth in the Chicago hip-hop scene as the exclusive producer for Common. If you know Common for something other than his ubiquity at award shows and advertisements for Windows computers, it’s probably for the extendedly metaphorical rap-about-rap classic “I Used To Love H.E.R.”. The man responsible for the beat? No I.D. After falling out with Common in the late 90s, No I.D. relocated to Atlanta to study with pop-rap hit maker Jermaine Dupri. Trading out his dusty sample-based style for the synthetic sleekness of the era, No I.D. produced a number of radio-friendly tunes for Bow Wow, G-Unit and more. Humbling himself and adapting with the times in the 00s paid off handsomely for No I.D. in the 2010s, as he’d go on to produce tracks for Jay-Z, his former protege Kanye West, and rising stars like Big Sean and J Cole.
No I.D. started working Staples after telling one of his A&R reps to bring him the next Tupac or Nas, someone young with a unique perspective. Asking someone to find the next version of two of the agreed upon greatest rappers ever is a tall order, like encouraging a basketball scout to find the next Michael Jordan in a high school gym, but apparently Staples fit the bill. Staples doesn’t sound anything like Tupac or Nas, but in 2015 he had youth and perspective to spare. Moreover, Staples’ youth and perspective were inextricably linked. Openly disdainful of rap’s golden generation (“I don’t know what Native Tongue is. I know what De La Soul is because of MF DOOM and Good Burger.”), Staples was probably more excited by No I.D.’s Bow Wow6 credits than his boom-bap bona fides. Despite the generation gap, the two made a productive pair, spending hours in the studio cycling through beats until they found a match for Staples' pre-written lyrics.
“Loca” features two distinct grooves, one for the song’s hook and another for Staples’ verses. Neither section features more than a handful of instruments. If you wanted to recreate “Loca” with live instruments you’d only need a trio of bass, drums, and auxiliary percussion. With these limited tools, No I.D. instead builds variation out of changes in rhythm. In the verses the bass and drums dance around each other, both leaving plenty of negative space for hand claps and metallic percussion to push Staples along. In the hook all of these scattered elements fall into line, pounding out quarter notes under Staples’ and Kilo Kish’s cooing.
I can guarantee you that when I Liked “Loca” in 2015, I hit the heart button while the hook played. I am an absolute sucker for big loud quarter notes. The song’s tempo gives No I.D.’s 808 bass line just enough to wobble up and down before playing the next note. I’m no neuroscientist, but low notes bouncing slightly on impact have a tendency to suggest a similar movement in the nerves of my neck. After four measures of head nodding, the bass line drops an octave down into the territory of sub bass. At this the nerves on the other side of my head, namely the ones that make my face scrunch up when tasting something sour, start firing off like the 4th of July.
No I.D. leaves a massive gulf between this gut-rumbling bass line and the vocals up front. The empty space only heightens the contrast between Kish’s whisper and the pounding bass, the former seductively drawing you in while the latter looms ominously in the darkness beyond. You know stepping into that shadow is a bad idea, but the danger only makes it all the more alluring.
When it came time to learn “Loca” on drums, I wanted to make sure that I preserved No I.D.’s minimalism. For the verses I chose to only learn the kick and snare pattern instead of trying to translate the clapping pattern onto the cymbals. The rhythm isn’t supposed to sound cluttered, and I think keeping my sound sources limited helped keep the part in line with the song’s underlying groove. I did allow myself one indulgence during the hook however. To match the bass line’s plunge into the lower octave I switched from the house kit’s floor tom to my own, which I unpacked for this occasion. Playing this second, lower floor tom required a more exaggerated twist in my upper body than I expected, so I was glad that I only had to use it twice in the song. I’ve since found a more ergonomic set up for this extra drum, whether I’ll find more chances to use… find out soon.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves aren’t we? Let’s first find a place for “Loca” on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
Some of you might be hung up on a specific detail of the song that I have yet brought up. If you, like Colin Farrell as Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot in The Batman, can tell the difference between “el” and “la”, then you might be wondering why the song is called “Loca” if Vince Staples is the one being driven crazy. After the song’s final chorus, Staples’ girlfriend (played by actress Olga Aguilar7) chews him out in two tongues, ripping him a new one for spending all his time out of the house with his troublemaking friends instead of being with her, slipping briefly into English to urge him to “get his shit together”. Clearly she's the one being driven nuts by Staples, not the other way around.
That’s a nice little twist to sneak in just as the track is winding down, but I wonder if the gesture toward nuance may have come a little too late. Once the dopamine from the first chorus wears off, “Loca” feels increasingly slight as it goes. Sure, the verses do a reasonable job of sketching out Staples’ psychology if you’ve done your reading in advance, but absent an investment into the Vince Staples experience before hitting play I’m skeptical that the tune adds up to much. I do not believe that the song was meant to be heard as often as I’ve had to hear it for this letter without the rest of Summertime ‘06 backing it up.
Luckily, it’ll be joined by a superior track from Staples’ debut before we’re finished. Until then it’ll rest at 23rd place.
I’m going to keep to digital drums and the lower rungs of the leaderboard for the next entry of Drumming Upstream, featuring another member of the Twitter generation. Until then, have a nice week.
This interview is a trip to rewatch in 2023. So much pop culture drama that I vividly remember hearing about in the moment that I hadn’t thought about in god knows how long. Why has my brain retained this information? Two favorite bits from Staples: 1) When one host says she wants to believe the music industry is a big family Staples calmly tells her “watch Family Matters”. 2) When Staples beats the hosts at their own game by coming up with a more interesting question about Madonna kissing Drake at Coachella than the one they asked him.
No I.D., who is also an executive at Def Jam, supports this theory in an interview with Complex.
Clams Casino will show up later in Drumming Upstream. Had his best work in the early 10s been available on Spotify at the time of its release, I’m certain he would appear many more times. It’s all available there now, but old habits die hard. You’ll never convince me to listen to “I’m God” on anything other than YouTube.
I’m not kidding, Vince Staples finds occasion to talk about Bow Wow in nearly every interview I read and watched for this entry.
Aguilar was in a few episodes of Animal Kingdom, I show I’ve only experienced through trailers in between NBA games on TNT.