If DJ Khaled Is the Social Media Superhero We Deserve, Vince Staples Is the One We Need Right Now

Oh, 2016: what a time to be alive and a rapper in the age of social media.

Artists are born and bred on the timeline nowadays, and many have seized upon social channels not only as a means of self-promotion, but as a medium unto itself: look no further than DJ Khaled, aka DJ KHAAAALED, whose Snapchat has literally superseded his musical output in terms of both popularity and influence. A New York Times profile from December estimated Khaled’s Snap-audience numbered somewhere in the ballpark of 2 million viewers per post. Much like his self-referential drops, the Human Caps Lock Key’s Snapchat catchphrases have evolved into memes unto themselves: “MAJOR KEY,” “SPECIAL CLOTH ALERT” and the ever-present, ever-watchful “They” whom Khaled warns us don’t want to see “Us” succeed and shine. Through all of this, Khaled has somehow/someway parlayed his meme-hood into a business empire that spans from music to modeling. There’s a site that spits out motivational Khaled-isms at the push of a button. He’s even palled up to the CEO of Snapchat himself, Evan Spiegel, though the exact results of that meeting have yet to be made public.

While Khaled’s web presence is lucrative and engaging, it’s largely inoffensive. The content is bubblegum: Khaled has never put his massive following onto the plight of his homeland of Palestine, for example; instead, he encourages us to hydrate, use Dove soap, maintain a garden, and follow a healthy fitness regimen.

Ergo, while DJ Khaled may very well be the maven we deserve, Vince Staples is the social media superhero we need right now. The Ramona Park emcee has always been known for delivering dark, sardonic observations with a gap-toothed grin in his music, but his internet presence has turned into a platform for the emcee to vent his frustrations with sports stars, Earl Sweatshirt’s barber and human society as a whole. In his better moods, he’s sung the praises of Lil Bow Wow, Pokémon, Klay Thompson’s waves and, perhaps most lucratively, Sprite. He ping-pongs between these two poles on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis.

Through it all, he seems surprised at the attention, noting in an interview with The FADER:

I don’t know why anyone takes anything I say on the Internet seriously and I don’t know why people think I’m smart.

Much like Khaled’s Snaps, much of Staples’s online output has not been long for this world: Staples went and deleted over 10,000 tweets worth of widely-acclaimed, polarizing material when the timeline took issue with a string of statements that the artist made on the history of slavery.

It’s not the first time he has been chased off the Internet, either: when the blogosphere caught wind of Staples’s hilarious Yelp account, they blew his spot and the young rapper was forced to shutter another channel before it had the chance to grow wings, citing a deluge of struggle rappers’ mixtapes crowding his inbox. As of this article’s writing, he has reactivated his Twitter account, but his output since has been less opined, and more straightforward and promotional.

Staples is often the contrarian: when he revealed that he thought that the ’90s got too much credit in pop culture, he spent weeks on end parrying ”real hip-hop” heads in his mentions (often clowning them viciously in the process). Months later, magazines and media outlets still ask him to sit down and explain himself and his hot takes.

Thankfully, much like Khaled, Staples’ social media persona bleeds over seamlessly into his IRL presence. Take his performance at this year’s SXSW Spotify House stage, when Staples’s mid-set banter veered way off-script: ”Shout out to Spotify. Thank you for giving me this check to make up for what you’ve done to me and all my musical friends,” he said, before reminding those in attendance to ”listen to your favorite album 1,000, 2,000 times so everybody can get an album sale.” Talk about biting the hand that feeds.

It’s crucial to note that this woke behavior doesn’t elevate Staples above DJ Khaled; Staples would resent this sort of preferential treatment. Just as Khaled celebrates every occasion with a Green Apple Ciroc name-drop, so too does Staples take the time to thank Sprite. Both Staples and Khaled exist on the same cultural plane, like The Wire and Keeping Up with the Kardashians, each of them thriving in their own lane; two sides of the same social media coin. Using the same channels that Khaled uses to motivate Us against Them, Staples plays cultural gadfly: unabashed, unafraid and unmerciful in his opinions. Both of them are what Staples refers to as “members of the public,” each of them thriving in their own genre. On different waves but still building.