During an interview on the YouTube series Back on Figg, Vince Staples explained how his collaborator and good friend Mac Miller changed his life.
Staples listed a number of artists who really helped put him on early, including Earl Sweatshirt and Matt Martians of the Internet, but suggested none of them "change[d] the way I thought about life" the way Miller did. "He changed my life, like my perspective, and made me a better person," he shared around the 33-minute mark of the episode, as seen above.
"I used to be confused, like, 'Why is this white boy with all this money fucking n****s and not [just] anybody with some substantial talent," he said. "Like, he would sit there and teach me how to make sure I'm on beat, and like rap with certain energy. It took a long time... I was other everyday with nothing else to do for, like, months, and he was teaching me how to rap on beat, how to project. I didn't know how to ad-lib, I didn't know what ad-libs was! I didn't know what a metronome was."
The two released their first collaborative project in 2013 with Stolen Youth, which Miller entirely produced under his Larry Fisherman pseudonym. "[He was] introducing me to people I had no business meeting, because I wasn't at the skill level yet," he continued. "I was talking to his mom today."
During the episode, he also spoke about how he met Miller for the first time. "Earl [Sweatshirt] had just came back from where he was at, and I introduced myself to him at the house and he was like, 'Yeah I know who you are,'" he shared, noting that he was surprised because he wasn't making music at the time but had one project out.
"I was like, 'I don't have no beats,'" he recalled around the 26-minute point, adding that he wasn't very good at networking because he doesn't party, go to the club, or smoke and drink. "I didn't grow up making music, I'm not from L.A., I'm getting on the blue to come out here. ... He was like, 'Yeah I'm making some beats come over tomorrow.'" At the time, Staples wasn't driving, so Miller actually came to pick him up from his grandmother's house. "
Schoolboy Q, who also sat in during the interview, said that Miller was already a huge fan of Staples early in his career, he even heard him share huge compliments when he had "barely started rapping."
Watch the full interview with Staples above.
