Vince Staples Explains Publishing Splits Is a Deeper Issue Than Rap Beef: ‘I Just Think We’re Into Bullsh*t’

After Ish clarified that he “was with the competition” between Kendrick and Cole, Staples agreed that “hip-hop is a sport,” although audiences get “happy about little stupid shit.”

“But then we want to be like, equal and respected and having good business acumen, and shit like that. It’s like, you kinda can’t have both, but I get it though.”

Staples then delved into hip-hop being “adopted into other forms of music” and “cutouts” being implemented into the genre for “musicians,” “middlemen” and “publishing.”

“When you think about hip-hop as it originated, there was a technical skill that was part of every facet of hip-hop,” he added before getting into the evolution of hip-hop production from analog to digital.

After bringing up RZA, who claimed in the late 2000s he invented the Final Scratch technology on Serato, Staples returned to the music industry capitalizing off of rap feuds.

“Even a 50-50 split of publishing in hip-hop is something that comes from them not respecting rap lyrics as actual songwriting and them finding a way to make it fair, which makes the producers king, instead of the songwriter being king,” he said.

“And then we have every songwriter that we’ve ever had in hip-hop music complaining about their publishing splits, but, we kind of don’t pay attention to that. But once n***as get mad, the whole internet is activated, and we got billboards from streamers talking about ‘hip-hop is a sport.’ But we ain’t never seen a billboard from a streamer that said, “Give that n***a his publishing back.”