Summary: Vince Staples made his debut album, Summertime '06, so that people who hear it will know how he felt then, as a young teenager in Long Beach, Calif. "That's when we understood the power we had in fear," he says. "Because it's either they're scared of you or they're better than you. And no one wants to feel like anyone else is better than them. So we established fear." Who Vince means by "they" changes over the course of this interview, but throughout he acknowledges his complicity in a rigged system while laying the blame for its perpetuation at our own lazy, fearful feet. "I saw that all of it was fake, from the streets to music to the government to my own family to my parents to — all of it was not real," he says. "Look where I come from. Everyone's pretending they're not sad."
