Vince Staples, Enemy of Groupthink

Somewhere in America last year, a woman took to YouTube to complain about a song that she’d heard on the radio while dropping her daughter off at school. Tears in her eyes and strain in her voice, the self-identified Christian mother of three recited the lyrics from Vince Staples’s “Norf Norf,”  pronouncing every profanity, sobbing at the Long Beach rapper’s mentions of sex and crime and running away from the cops. She was horrified. “I couldn’t even believe the words I was listening to,” she said into the camera. “As a mom, it infuriated me.”

Online media gleefully snarked on the video, writing about the woman’s “melt-down” as a piece of comedy. “That dang, while Funny or Die the logical inconsistencies and offensive bits of what she’d said. Her words were even , racking up tens of thousands of listens.