During a recent discussion with Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson during a town hall at the inaugural Youth Day in the LBC, Vince Staples put across his views on the feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

Responding to a fan’s question about the feud between Drake and Lamar, the rapper began by explaining that he has been signed to Universal Music Group since he was 17 and then touched bigger issues.

“That record label just folded all of its independent labels and subsidiaries into each other. None of them exist no more. They fired all the heads of the labels and if they didn’t, they turn them into glorified A&Rs. They cut off 50 percent of the people who work in all these departments, most of those people is us, people of color, that come from hip-hop and R&B and these other things, right?” he explained.

Staples then addressed the ongoing feud between Kendrick and Drake, saying, “Personally, I think we better than that. I think we deserve better than that because we’ve been saying for decades that we want people to respect Black music and Black art and Black people. I think for that to happen, we gotta respect ourselves and they don’t make it easy for us, but we gotta try to work a little bit harder at that.”

When Mayor Richardson emphasized the importance of uplifting Black artists rather than “celebrating” two rappers “tearing each other down,” Staples said, “The dude that work at Dunkin Donuts is [as] important as Drake and Kendrick cuz it’s an ecosystem,” and added, “We all matter and I think that’s our problem is that we looking too high up. We need to kind of look at each other. If we don’t do that then we wasting our time.”

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