Vince Staples on Fame and the Influences of His Netflix Show

While mild-mannered, Vince Staples is a trickster at his core. His work marries a depth of thought with inscrutability, and for over 15 years, this has resulted in rap music that is ambitious and vulnerable while Staples comes off as ambivalent about it in interviews. His Netflix comedy, The Vince Staples Show , captures both sides — the creative polymath and the dispassionate observer of life — at once. It’s a show that interrogates fame, especially Black fame, while also conveying how unimportant and irrelevant it is. Staples explains his paradoxical perspective on this week’s episode of Good One . “The perception of celebrity is something that I don’t think people speak about enough,” he says, “because it’s not a real thing at all.”

In The Vince Staples Show ’s second seaso