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Vince Staples might be independent, but he doesn’t quite feel free, at least judging off “Blackberry Marmalade.” In the Bradley J. Calder-directed video for Staples’s latest single, which is shot first-person shooter style, "we" shoot the rapper outside of a diner before heading inside to kill approximately two dozen Black people. Watch the clip below.
An acerbic edge has always marked Staples’s music, but “Blackberry Marmalade” is surprisingly straightforward, opening on “empires built on bloodstained ground" and toying with racial epithets throughout. These concerns remain exceedingly personal — a Ted Joans-channeling third verse sees Staples carefully dissecting the myriad facets of his public image — but there’s a clear political intent to “Blackberry Marmalade,” his first solo release since 2024's Dark Times (his last album on Def Jam). From its brash, hard rock instrumental to the choice to end the video on a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" on becoming “extremists,” it’s clear Staples wants to make a bigger statement than his major label work.
Naturally, the video will bring to mind “This is America” by Childish Gambino, but that Hiro Murai-directed video had a far more surreal spin to its violence. By comparison, “Blackberry Marmalade” plays things almost entirely straight, save for a bumbling, phone-immersed security guard; when the gunman flashes peace signs at the only diner-goer to survive, it’s sickening rather than humorous. When "we" finally turn the trigger on ourselves, it almost feels like relief.
