When Vince Staples wrote an episode set in an amusement park for his new Netflix series, “The Vince Staples Show,” the Long Beach rapper and actor hoped to film it at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, where gang-affiliated kids grew up. . Under “extremely humble circumstances,” as he puts it, he and his friends went for fun (and sometimes more than that) instead of going to Disneyland, which is much more expensive.
“We always thought, 'Man, I wonder why trouble follows us to the $10 amusement park,'” he recalls, laughing.
Decades later, unfortunately, it was Knott's that turned out to be out of reach: Thanks to the show's limited budget, Staples, 30, ended up filming the episode in Riverside's Castle Park, a (let's call it cozier) place that remakes on screen as the slightly sinister Surf City.
“It was probably a quarter the size,” he says. “But I think limitations are what allow you to really push the limits of your creativity. When the going gets tough, will you still have an idea that can thrive in that smaller environment?
“The Vince Staples Show” is packed with powerful ideas. Loosely inspired by events in Staples' life, the series (which arrived on Netflix on Thursday) reflects on the randomness of existence and the futility of celebrity as it follows a protagonist named Vince through a bank robbery, a period in jail and a visit to that bastard. theme park; the scale is lush but intimate, the tone comic but slightly surreal: a pocket-sized mix of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Atlanta” with a dash of Jordan Peele's ambient horror.
What exactly happens in a given episode (and what exactly it means) is less important than how it makes you feel, says Staples, who has always been drawn to movies and shows that aren't fully explained to the viewer.
“'Barton Fink,' 'Donnie Darko,' 'A Serious Man'… with all this stuff, you're like, 'Okay, I seem to know what's going on,'” he says. “But what's really going on in 'Eraserhead'?”
What happens in an episode is less important than how it makes you feel, says Vince Staples. In the first episode, he spends the day in jail, only to discover that it is a case of mistaken identity.
(Netflix)
The show shares a certain absurdist attitude with Staples' rich but unshowy music, which he began making in the early 2010s as a satellite member of the Los Angeles collective Odd Future. And of course, he ended up on Netflix as a result of his success in hip-hop, which includes five critically acclaimed studio albums, collaborations with artists like Billie Eilish and Gorillaz, and an ad for his song “Magic” in one of the former president. Obama's Annual Summer Playlists.
However, according to Kenya Barris, the creator of “Black-ish” who is among the series’ executive producers, “This is not a rapper show; “That was very, very, very important to Vince.” In fact, Barris says Staples' deadpan expression reminds him of no one but… Bob Newhart.
Staples, who appeared in last year's “White Men Can't Jump” reboot and had a recurring role in season 2 of “Abbott Elementary” (as Maurice, who dates Janine de Quinta Brunson), cites many other influences not related to rap in their comedy. “I'm a fan of Kevin Smith and Andy Griffith,” he says on a recent rainy morning at the Netflix building on Sunset Boulevard. Dressed in a black cardigan and baggy cargo pants, he remembers watching reruns of “M*A*S*H” and “I Love Lucy” with his grandparents and identifies the work of Adam McKay and Steve Carell as a crucial part from his childhood.
“I find humor in moments of discomfort and in the way we deal with misfortune,” he says, though what's so funny (and so seductive) about “The Vince Staples Show” is the ease with which it handles the prospect of disaster. , as in the episode. where those bank robbers turn out to be old friends of Vince.
Vince Staples and Myles Bullock, who plays a bank robber, in a scene from “The Vince Staples Show.”
(Be Baffo/Netflix)
“There's a naturalness to his storytelling that brings humanity to the neighborhood,” Barris says. “The neighborhood is not lewd or explosive for the people who live there. If you grow up in that situation, you don't think, 'Oh my God, every day is a nightmare!' “It’s just your life.”
In Staples' opinion, the program is “somber but with a sense of optimism that one day does not define the next.” (He may have seen billboards around town that borrow an Ice Cube lyric: “Today was a good day,” as a slogan above an image of Staples smiling with a black eye.) His original conception of the series was darker than the finished product: so dark, Staples says, that Netflix insisted he start it for eight weeks in a writers' room.
“We had a meeting where they said, 'Hey, this won't work on the platform,'” he recalls. “But I don't know if that was necessarily a bad thing.”
Staples calls himself “a process person,” meaning that for him the value of a project lies in its creation (in what he can learn, good or bad, about creating art) rather than in its reception.
“Whether a million people watch the show or one person watches it, that doesn't really dictate how I feel emotionally because I have to do it,” he says. Plus, tastes change over time. When he released his second LP, 2017's “Big Fish Theory,” “everybody hated it,” he says, which isn't entirely true even if some listeners were taken aback by the music's harsh electronic production. “Now it is my best album and people ask me for another one.”
Are you still thinking about rap in the midst of your foray into Hollywood? “Why not?” he answers. “It's all the same, it's just words and the particular application of those words, you know? And many of the concepts from these episodes I have been referring to in my music for years.”
Not that he cares if anyone knows. Staples, who despite his growing profile says he doesn't consider himself a famous person, was at a friend's teenage daughter's birthday party the other day when he was surrounded by a group of kids asking for photos with the guy from ” Abbott Elementary.”
“The way I look at fame is: If those kids tell me they love me on TV and I say, 'Name a song,' then I'm an idiot.”
