Album Of The Week: Vince Staples Summertime ’06

If the cover art of Summertime '06, the first proper album from the Long Beach rapper Vince Staples, looks familiar to you, that's not an accident. That Summertime '06 cover is, of course, the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, tweaked just slightly in that it now recalls ocean waves rather than wavforms or mountains. And it's not a case of some Def Jam graphic designer getting cute. In the Instagram post that he used to unveil the album's cover, Staples wrote a short essay that starts with the sentence "Love will tear us apart." Staples wasn't writing about the song. Instead, he was writing about the album's title, and its themes. 2006 was when Staples was 13, the moment he believes his innocence went kablooey. And the album is about how the things that we love the most can be our undoing: "Love tore us all apart. Love for self, love for separation, love for the little we all had, love for each other, where we came from... Summer of 2006, the beginning of the end of everything I though I knew. Youth was stolen from my city that Summer and Im left alone to tell the story. This might not make sense but that's because none of it does, we're stuck. Love tore us all apart. Summertime ’06, June 30th." Summertime '06 is a concept album, and it's one without a clear narrative. We're not following one young California kid on his path to somewhere else, the way we are in Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City or YG's My Krazy Life. Instead, we're hearing a young California kid reflecting on all the ways that he feels he's still stuck. Staples is a successful young rapper with a major-label contract, but that kid is still him. Summertime '06 is an album about the weight of trauma, about the feeling that you can't escape the darkness that made you. And even if Staples' context and specific darkness are different from what Ian Curtis was singing about, there's a certain commonality there. These are two young musicians (Staples is 21, a year younger than Curtis was when Unknown Pleasures came out) trapped in their own mind-hells, two brilliant minds who sound dead inside.