Schoolboy Q: Why the Reluctant Rap Star Almost Quit
Schoolboy Q has a fraught relationship with his fame. “I thought rap was just, you make this album, you do the shows here and there, and then that’s it,” he tells Rolling Stone. “But it’s a lot of press, it’s a lot of shows, it’s a lot of pressure. When you go out, you gotta have a security guard. You gotta take 1,000 pictures before you even enter the place that you’re trying to enjoy yourself at.” After the success of 2014’s Oxymoron – which debuted at Number One — Q was thrown into the celebrity hamster race, and he didn’t like it. “My mind was set on leaving rap,” he says.
None of this frustration was initially in evidence on a recent Wednesday in Midtown Manhattan, where the rapper hosted a cheerfully truculent listening session for a new album. “If y’all don’t want to hear it, take your ass outside,” he announced before playing snippets of his second LP, Blank Face. Also seated on a small stage was Hot 97 radio host Peter Rosenberg, who prodded Q for information about his album in between songs. The rapper swigged from a plastic bottle, smoked weed and offered a few amusing answers: “I don’t even know what I’m saying on that song.” “Whateva U Want” and “Big Body” got him dancing; at one point, he removed Rosenberg’s bright red baseball hat to pat his bald head.
But a hint of angst peeked through as the night was winding down. After Q played “Overtime,” a collaboration with a pair of R&B singers – Miguel and Justine Skye – that appears near the end of Blank Face, he appeared to disavow the track as commercial fodder. “You always got that song you gotta give up for the label,” he noted. “Sometimes the label knows what they’re talking about.” He likened “Overtime” to “Studio,” a Top 40 hit from his last album the featured a honeyed chorus from BJ the Chicago Kid.
Speaking on the phone the next day, Q returns to his statement and recants. “I said something at the listening party and people got it all wrong,” he asserts. “A label can’t make me put nothing on the album. I said the Miguel record that I got is like ‘Studio;’ I didn’t actually mean it in that way. I said the label forced me to put it on; I didn’t mean it that way.”
Despite the tension around “Studio,” Oxymoron‘s commercial prospects were buoyed by its inclusion. Though Q is wary of the comparison, a similar thing appears to have occurred with “Overtime.” “They let me do a whole album how I wanted top to bottom; they just asked for one song,” Q says. “It’s a dope song — I wrote the song, I just thought it didn’t fit my album. But like I said, I also didn’t want ‘Studio’ on my album. I also didn’t want ‘Man Of The Year’ to be one of my singles. Both of ’em went Platinum.” He concludes on a note of uncertainty: “I don’t know every fucking thing.”
“Studio” was the most monochromatic song on Oxymoron and the most radio-friendly, a concession to programmers on an album that otherwise seemed unflinching in its depiction of urban poverty, depression and drug-dealing. Though that R&B collaboration was the obvious hit, other singles were more alluring and more unusual. “Collard Greens,” with its playful, tottering bassline, still sounds like a rap outlier three years after it came out, while “Hell of a Night” incorporated the fizzy energy of big-tent electronic music.
Schoolboy Q: Why the Reluctant Rap Star Almost Quit, Page 1 of 2