This kind of fatalism is not new to rap, but where many rappers have superficially used it to justify excessive celebration-“champagne for the pain”-Staples uses it to justify his attachment to being a menace. Shunning the deceitful simplicity of school as a path to grace and grace as a path to happiness, pleasure, Staples chooses to be a menace, throwing on a blue Yankees hat and embracing his ancestry: “a bloodline of crips.” Hell can wait because heaven, especially the heaven that he wants, is impossible given his circumstances. As deceptively simple as these lines are, in his typically oblique manner, Staples is actually making quite a mission statement. “School couldn’t get me into heaven/And heaven couldn’t get me in a bitch bed,” raps Long Beach rapper Vince Staples on “Fire,” the first song of his major-label debut.
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