“Gang shit, I invented that, huh?” asks Schoolboy Q on “Pop,” a observe from Blue Lips, his first album in almost 5 years. It’s clearly an overstatement. However give the previous Hoover Avenue Crip credit score: Again within the early 2010s, he fused the open-eared, genre-less sensibility of Tumblr rap with classic L.A. gangsta flows in basic moments like “Fingers on the Wheel” and “Druggys Wit Hoes Once more.” Together with Vince Staples, Boogie and others, Q marked a transparent break from the town’s G-funk identification, at the same time as he paid homage in collaborations with the likes of Tha Dogg Pound and Suga Free. Nonetheless, he’s an enigma. Paired with Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock — the famed Black Hippy quartet on the middle of High Dawg Leisure — Schoolboy Q has lengthy appeared just like the hooded thug quietly nursing a brew within the nook of the room, solely to startle his mates with an lively, hair-raising social gathering chant.
Q has promulgated that sense of thriller and hazard via a lot of his catalogue, whether or not donning a ski masks for 2014’s Oxymoron or titling his 2016 album Clean Face. The latter, which shifted between taut, noir-ish cop funk and percussive turn-up anthems, stays a spotlight of the rapper’s profession. After the disappointing 2019 album Crash Speak steered too closely within the latter sonic route, Q went on an unexpectedly lengthy hiatus, solely often resurfacing with loosies like 2022’s glorious “Soccer Dad.” Fortunately, Blue Lips returns to the dynamic stylings of Clean Face, albeit with a couple of necessary twists. And with Lamar having departed TDE to type his pgLang imprint, it represents a second when listeners can absolutely recognize Q for his singular capability to craft compelling, thought-provoking gems with out resorting to comparisons between the 2. (SZA, after all, is now TDE’s primary breadwinner.)
A type of twists arrives early within the almost hourlong Blue Lips with “Blueslides,” a title seemingly impressed by Mac Miller’s 2011 album, Blue Slide Park. The late Pittsburgh rapper grew to become a key determine in L.A.’s hip-hop scene earlier than he died in 2018. An iconic Mass Attraction cowl from 2013 depicted Miller strolling barefoot alongside Q on practice tracks in a hauntingly pretty and harmless picture. “Misplaced a homeboy to the medicine/Man I ain’t attempting to go backwards,” Q raps on “Blueslides.” “Once I realized that his mama harm/And assume was it value it/Man I gotta shake this shit/Get up and transfer with a function.”
When Q leaked “Blueslides” a number of days earlier than the discharge of Blue Lips together with a handful of different cuts, followers speculated that the 39-year-old rapper was depressed. (“Bitch, I’m not unhappy,” he hilariously responded throughout a pre-release occasion. “Look, I rap about my life … so I come off unhappy generally. However bitch, I’m wealthy as fuck!”) They needn’t have anxious. For each confessional second like “Cooties,” there are three or 4 teeth-baring mashers like “Pop,” the place he flexes alongside an animated Rico Nasty, and “Again N Love,” the place Devin Malik chants “Again in love with this shit” time and again. The music, crafted by TDE regulars like TaeBeast and JLBS in addition to a number of others like CardoGotWings, Alchemist, and Infantile Main, juts between the form of soulful live-band preparations and wordless vocal arias typical of the TDE catalogue and brusque, bass-riddled assaults like “Yeern 101.” Then there’s “Foux,” an unimaginable pairing with Ab-Soul set over UK jungle rhythms. “Marijuana, hydro, pussy, hoe, ass, titties,” Q chants close to its finish.
Blue Lips is stocked with samples that really feel each musical and textual. Two tracks, “Foux” and “Germany ’86,” are culled from the Watts Prophets’ 1972 album Rappin’ Black in a White World and an earlier period of L.A. road poetry. “My mother keep working late/She taught me the way to be nice/My superhero’s a lady,” Q raps on the latter. But his persona stays out of focus. It’s not simply the way in which he clips his bars like he’s twisting off a knot on a twomp sack. It’s additionally his raspy voice that he can soften or harden at will. It’s the way in which he spits out “God/Credit score/Bless/Love/The Realist” in a staccato assault. Most significantly, it’s how his oscillating raps distinction with the incessantly dreamlike manufacturing that makes Blue Lips really feel like an inebriated haze.
A part of why Blue Lips is compelling is that it seduces the listener sufficient to simply accept Schoolboy Q on his personal phrases. He stays an basically non-public determine at the same time as he talks about elevating his youngsters, arguing with the mom of his youngsters, or boasting about his whips and exploits. “A person imagined to have scars,” he raps on “Time Killers.” For him, it’s all we have to know.
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