ScHoolboy Q is one of the most acrobatic rappers at it today. Success has been good to Q, by the look of things (“I’mma keep on eating till my ankles fat,” he memorably raps on “What They Want”), but his flow remains lean and agile, always at home over the shifting sands of the album’s set of intricate and unconventional beats.
Over PharrelL’s Neptunes-inspired “Los Awesome,” Q easily coasts over the frenetic waves while label-mate Jay Rock sounds uncomfortable, his tonal shifts forced and ungainly. “Collard Greens,” one of the album’s lead singles, is a pleasure by comparison as Q and Kendrick Lamar spar, their deliveries increasingly contorted. The result, which includes a Kendrick verse with rapid-fire Spanglish, is both artists on top of their games.
The album also displays Q’s sharp tongue. Anyone who’s watched an interview knows how much of a clown he can be, but it’s only over a beat where he can whip between jokes and a straight-faced homage to Nas, as on “Hoover Street”: “Find a n***a realer than me, my socks stink, eat so much pussy that my moustache pink” is followed up with “My hate felt my .45 elder, poetry’s deep, I never fail ya.”
Q’s respect for history and his West Coast lineage is apparent in the slow-jam “Studio,” where BJ the Chicago Kid is a pretty good ringer for Nate Dogg (h/t Rap Genius for that comparison), and Q is at his foul-mouthed best with the line “put my tongue in different places, play of game of Operation.”
At times, Oxymoron feels like it has something to prove, which makes sense given the amount of noise that label-mate Kendrick Lamar has generated over the past two years. When it comes to subject matter, Q is not the poet Kendrick is: he’s more comfortable with traditional street-fare relative to Kendrick’s far-reaching and emotional Compton bildungsroman.
But Oxymoron accomplishes something remarkable by painting a multifaceted and vivid gangsta rap portrait over a foggy, drug-addled soundtrack that makes mincemeat of Jay Rock and 2 Chainz alike, keeps Kendrick on his toes, and Q at his best.
Oxymoron