After announcing his new album Cry Baby with a provocative music video, Vince Staples is seeking to anger all the right people with his music video for “White Flag.”
The second single from the 32-year-old rapper’s forthcoming seventh studio album is accompanied by a music video directed by Staples and Bradley J. Calder. In the video, an American flag is shown with the looming shadow of the Ku Klux Klan behind it. Staples takes down the flag, paints it entirely white, and opens fire on it with an assault rifle.
“Squabble up, I see the Devil in the audience,” he raps in the second verse. “Seen friends turn foe, eyes locked on the backdoor, gotta keep it shut / Hip-hop taught me all y’all love Black folks, but it’s not enough / Chicken feet in the yard, .223’s and ARs, but it’s not enough.”
“White Flag” is taken from Staples’ debut album via Loma Vista records, with 2024’s Dark Times marking his last release through Def Jam. When announcing the project last month, he indicated that he wasn’t holding anything back with the violent video for “Blackberry Marmalade,” which ends with a shocking mass shooting in a diner.
The provocative video for “Blackberry Marmalade,” directed by Staples and Calder like “White Flag,” ends with the anonymous shooter dying by suicide alongside a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”
Cry Baby is due to arrive on June 5.
