“Hey!” Vince Staples shouts with the cheer of a late-night host walking out to the audience. The greeting is the first word on his debut album, and sets up the black humor that follows: “I’m just a nigga, until I fill my pockets/ And then I’m Mr. Nigga, they follow me while shopping.” Just two lines in, Staples is already joking, serious, and referencing a deep cut from Black On Both Sides.
This is the playfully bleak mood of Summertime ’06, which turns 10 today. The masterful record reintroduced Staples as a nimble livewire who could swing between intensity and levity in a blink. At 59 minutes spread over two discs, it’s a lean epic, a coming-of-age story that’s scrambled but legible. Heavy without being leaden, the record surveys the underbelly of Staples’ hometown of Long Beach, California with harrowing flair. This isn’t Sublime’s easygoing LBC: Vince depicts the coastal city as “the end of the land,” where the shells in the sand are bullet casings. Grandmothers are gangsters. Boys learn to be shooters rather than men. Bodies amass in the alleyways. When Staples says, “Long Beach City, pay a visit,” on the defiant “Norf Norf,” which would become his signature song, it’s a warning.
Thrillingly, it’s also an earnest invite. Summertime ’06 is welcoming despite the ever-present danger — the violence juxtaposed with the soothing sounds of ocean waves and seagull cries, the buzzing, sawtoothed beats relentlessly kinetic. This isn’t a hellscape; it’s a home. “I just want people to see what I see,” Staples explained matter-of-factly. These songs turn his gangland upbringing into tactile landscapes that submerge the listener in his life. “I know some things are better left unsaid,” Staples muses on the title track, laying out the M.O. for his discography and later his TV series. He is an avowedly tacit songwriter, an artisan of mood and suggestion rather than exposition. To this day, he raps as if speaking to a friend on a wiretapped phone, his every word clipped yet intimate.
Summertime ’06 set the agenda. The album’s gravitas was a conscious reboot: Five years prior, Staples had traded queasy horrorcore bars with Earl Sweatshirt on “ePar” and gotten swept up in Odd Future mania. He was not a member, but his early music, recorded in the same home studio as many OF releases, shared the collective’s penchant for spacey production and dyspeptic storytelling. “The only girl I ever loved turned into a bitch/ If I ever see her and I got a gun, she getting hit,” Staples said on “Versace Rap” from his first mixtape, fitting right in.
The Crip left the shock rap behind on subsequent releases, but his flow remained listless and his voice stayed cold, as if all the violence and poverty he endured had numbed his ability to emote. Formative tours with Mac Miller and ScHoolboy Q and access to better production through signing to Def Jam helped him unthaw. Over time, he started rapping with more tempo and bounce, shifts that made his writing more enveloping and pointed.
The soulful, thumping “Nate,” released a year before Summertime ’06, previewed his immersive style. Staples’ voice subtly swings from pride to woe as he profiles his outlaw father:
Used to see him stand out in the alley through my window
Drinking Hen with his homies, blowing cig smoke
Lights flash, now he running from the Winslows
Hear him screaming for my mama at the backdoor
Sometimes she wouldn’t open it
Sitting on the couch, face emotionless
I don’t think they ever noticed that I noticed it.
He doesn’t just tell the story; he inhabits it, becoming his childhood self while observing the precocious kid from a distance, a ghost in his own memory.
Summertime ’06 refined that haunted sensibility. The record, inspired by the summer during which teenage Staples lost friends to violence, prison, and schisms, nominally takes place in 2006. But time and perspective are intentionally blurred. Staples raps as a teenage gangbanger, his father, a pimp, a dopeman, and as his present self, roles he doesn’t distinguish with special voices or flows the way Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Minaj, or Tyler, The Creator would. References here and there, like the mention of Motorolas on “3230” and the allusion to Young Dro’s Best Thang Smokin on “Norf Norf,” provide the occasional reminder that the setting is 2006. But this isn’t really a period piece. The concept is more a prompt than a device, a means of acclimating the listener. To see as Staples sees, your eyes have to adjust to the darkness he knows too well.
It’s a rich abyss. No ID, Clams Casino, and DJ Dahi handle the bulk of the production, and the beats sound light years removed from their signature work. The drums clang and rattle like soda cans filled with coins. Vocal samples are warped into ghostly wails and cries that somehow emanate warmth. The basslines rumble and roar like jet engines, smothering songs in pressure, while the melodies dance atop the often swarming mixes.
“I want my music to sound like music,” Staples said of the arrangements. “It’s not my voice over a beat. Everything plays an important, equal part, because I feel like – as people – we all play an important, equal part in life.” To that end, the features, most of them singers like Jhene Aiko, James Fauntleroy, and Snoh Aalegra, all melt into the overall sound. The record is punchy and catchy, but always on Staples’ eclectic terms.
The production’s pairing of smooth and harsh sounds can bring to mind Yeezus, Björk, and Nine Inch Nails, but those echoes are coincidental. The main goal of the album’s industrial aesthetic is to reorient rather than reference. Where other 2010s debuts like LONG.LIVE.A$AP, My Krazy Life, and good kid, m.A.A.d. City make explicit allusions to the canon, Vince and crew consciously shun recognizable sounds, especially those of G-funk and trap, which was cementing its dominance on the genre at the time. The Future sample on “Señorita,” the lead single, is almost trollingly subversive. Producer duo Christian Rich don’t flip a radio-ready Future melody: they loop the trap maven chopping. 


Staples’ rapping is just as arch. He’s a technician and an expressionist whose voice can curdle, gnash, and pierce. He’s a charming soft-voiced flirt on “Lemme Know” and a menacing street urchin on “Get Paid.” His flows whip against the pockets on “Señorita” and stretch and loll on “Dopeman.” On the pleading “Lift Me Up,” his melodies float over the beat, while they scrape and drag against it on the melancholy “Summertime.” He’s constantly in motion as a performer and storyteller, comfortable in the ambient tension but never still. No two songs sound the same.
The writing is sharp and vivid without being showy, prizing impact over dazzle. Sometimes, Staples is concise and direct: “Why they hate us? Why they wanna rape us for our culture?” he pleas on the bluesy “C.N.B.,” his nasally accent stretching the vowels into wounded wails. Other times, he’s a cineaste, the bars dense with imagery and rhymes: “Fingers do the talking when the C’s do the walking/ And the seas been polluted, baptism for the shooters,” he says on “3230.” Throughout, his humor stays firmly in the gallows.And when he does flex or talk shit, he’s often hilarious: “Heard the feds taking pictures, let a motherfucker pose/ Tryna be the only Crippin nigga sitting in the Vogue,” he quips on “Street Punks.” The rapping is indelibly pleasurable and clever even when grim.
Staples packs his entire worldview into “Norf Norf,” a swaggering slapper that questions the hope of the Obama era, mocks the death of Ricky Baker in Boyz N The Hood, taunts enemies of his set, and includes the all-time one-liner, “I’m a gangsta Crip, fuck gangsta rap.” Staples is unapologetic and unromantic: proud of his past, blunt about its costs, and cognizant of the real enemy. “I ain’t never run from nothin but the police,” he chants for the hook, floating over crisp hand claps, a droning synth, and a seismic bassline. The song is anthemic and weary, steely but not invincible.
If Summertime ’06 was just a reintroduction and rap clinic, it would be impressive. But Staples doesn’t settle for merely representing his Long Beach. He probes it, tracing the arcs of all the ricocheting bullets. His loyalty to his set and family is steadfast without being dogmatic. He’ll mow down the opps on one song, then ask why adults let kids inherit this “deadly game of tag” in another. He’ll play the amoral dopeman then become the distressed user wracked by seizures in his sleep.
When he says, “Got some homies from the set who ain’t never coming home,” on “Street Punks,” you immediately think of the somber spoken word piece by Haneef Talib on “Might Be Wrong.” Performed over the phone from inside Ironwood State Prison, the verse is interrupted by alarms. “Another day in Ironwood,” he sighs. Staples isn’t a moralist, but he is constantly playing his ideas about gang life against themselves, producing songs that are as questioning and mournful as they are prideful.
The subject that occupies him most, quietly explored throughout the album, is love. He’s unsure if it’s real or worthwhile, but is constantly pondering it. Women seem to offer it, but he’s too paranoid to trust them (plus the OG’s tell him to watch out for “big booty cuties”). His crew bangs the set because “we love our neighborhood,” but the hood is also a “cage” into which outsiders peer for amusement. He best distills his dilemma on “Summertime,” crooning, “My feelings told me love is real/ But feelings known to get you killed,” through a wintry scrim of Auto-Tune. Resolving that tension drives his restless songwriting, and really his career, which he’s spent attempting to rebuke popular depictions of gang and black life without sanitizing them.
Is that even possible in America, land of caricatures? Staples doesn’t find an answer by the jarring end of Summertime ’06, which cuts the music mid-word as if he’s been struck by one of the ubiquitous bullets. But his approach to the question is his alone. Vince Staples wants the listener to breathe Long Beach, not tour it — to swim its waters, not just dip a toe. Sharks abound, yes, but don’t fear. He knows them by name.
