Schoolboy Q - Oxymoron (Discussion Thread)

[Okka]

I can honestly say I've been checking for him since '08 when he punked 40 Glocc but I didn't really start bumping him until 2011ish when he dropped Setbacks

after seeing him live a few times that also made me fuck with the music more, actually going to his show on the 6th here in New Haven 

What happened? "Ezell" is one of my favorite older songs from Q.

[Will_B]

#1 on iTunes with an average rating of 4.5/5 as well  

guess all iTunes users are biased than a motherfucker too right? lol

Just shows how the casual listener knows nothing about music


All these reviews of 4/5 - 4.5/5........so if Illmatic is your 5/5 .....this albums just a bit less good

Damn. Schoolboy Q  :odropped a 'nearly Illmatic' type album

I better start ghost riding his dick

says someone who judged albums after listening 2 songs on youtube  - how ironic 

That's judged not to listen to

Here's something that will really shock you: if I see a trailer for a film and don't like the look of it...I don't watch the film 

u just contradicted yourself  cuz so in such a case u should keep ur mouth shut do not discuss album u did not listen then or maybe u talking about movie and how it is based upon trailers 

LMAO I was asked about an album and I said it sounded wack from what I'd heard


Way to go catching feelings over this tho 

[ICHI THE KILLER]

^^^^^^^^^^^^
and than you went on and on with Nicc that Lamars album is better 

catching feeling hahaha im not u and nicc showed that ur opinion is actually quite irrelevant something similar to infinite's i would say 

[Will_B]

Ok so if I said that....





I could also tell you Kendricks album is better after just 2 tracks of Schoolboy Q. Hell I could tell you that after the intro

[Black Excellence]

http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/reviews/id.2230/title.schoolboy-q-oxymoron

[Black Excellence]

#1 on iTunes with an average rating of 4.5/5 as well  

guess all iTunes users are biased than a motherfucker too right? lol

if dude was signed to duck down or e one records do you honestly think he would've gotten these kinda ratings ?

YES tde is still a indy record label u think all of this happened over night tde represent the much needed change in hip hop black hippy has been grinding since 2005 now its time for the payoff
wait till kendrick ab-soul jay rock and sza drop next

get back to my uncles musc and stfu already

this is real music fuck all that cars hoes and bling bling bullshit

before u talk anymore shit on tde know your info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Dawg_Entertainment

and not only that, dude been rappin' since 2010 ? oh hell naw !!! dude stay too drugged up he's too slurrish for me to each is own though.

[Blood$]

^ shit, negro that's all you had to say!   

[Ghost Drebin]

After listening, I like a few of the songs, but I have to agree with OG Classic.  That slurry xanax and lean flow gets really old.  Not all that impressed with the album.  6.5/10

[Blood$]

LA Times:

One of the year's most anticipated hip-hop releases, Schoolboy Q's "Oxymoron" lives up to its buzz. Both heavy with bass and filled with memorable hooks, Q's long-gestating major label debut is tight in length and rich with intent. "Oxymoron" arrives in the wake of fellow Black Hippy member Kendrick Lamar's Grammy album of the year nominated "Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City." That's a lot of pressure for anyone's major label debut, but Schoolboy Q meets those expectations. "Oxymoron" presents 12 bass-heavy tracks upon which the artist born Quincy Hanley explores his neighborhood, his hedonism and his rough-and-tumble early life hawking Oxycontin tablets on street corners near his 51st Street and Hoover neighborhood. ("I can get a hundred of them, make three Gs," he explains at one point.)
It's a powerful album with big beats and lyrics that focus on hard truths through a fog of synthetic opiates, crime, cough syrup, chronic and paranoia. "If God won't help me this gun will, I swear I'm gonna find my way," he raps desperately on "Blind Threats." The Pharrell-produced "Los Awesome" features a "backyard full of Crips, county blues, barbecues" on a celebration of all things gangsta. One of the album's best mergers sees Q join Odd Future founder Tyler, the Creator and longtime L.A. rapper Kurupt for "The Purge."

The seven-minute centerpiece "Prescription/Oxymoron" is the big payoff: a harrowing snapshot of a man "stuck in this body high" of prescription pills, slipping in and out of consciousness while his child tries to wake him. This is not an album to give your teenage kid without a companion conversation about the dangers of drugs. But after the disclaimer, sit down and wonder on the miraculous ways in which musical talent can germinate amid such a landscape and grow to create work filled with boundless promise.

[Black Excellence]

^ shit, negro that's all you had to say!   

this new generation sucks and have no standards at all. dudes can come out and kiss each other on the lips, wear dresses, be a c.o., have no skills on the mic, etc. and it's accepted. smdh.

[Blood$]

^ shit, negro that's all you had to say!   

this new generation sucks and have no standards at all. dudes can come out and kiss each other on the lips, wear dresses, be a c.o., have no skills on the mic, etc. and it's accepted. smdh.

I agree, thankfully that isn't TDE's game plan 

[Black Excellence]

 

[Chamillitary Click]

I've decided to fade out anyone whose hating on the sound of the album because clearly it isn't for you. This is the same type of music Schoolboy has always produced.

Prescription Drugs is my shit. About to pop a Percocet to that shit.

[Blood$]

Complex Review:

There’s something like a renaissance, we’ve been told, in Los Angeles hip-hop right now. The success of good kid, m.A.A.d. city sparked renewed interest in hip-hop’s second-oldest metropolis. ScHoolboy Q is its most evident benefactor. He's racked up enough praise (and pre-sales) to suggest he’s the lunar counterpart to Lamar’s red-hot sun, refracting the light of his friend and labelmate, the beaming light of success illuminating all the cracks and crevices in Q's gruff persona.

Q’s major label debut album Oxymoron—really, his third major project since TDE began to gather national attention—comes out today. It’s a good record, closer in approach to the song-oriented Setbacks than the abstract, jam-packed Habits & Contradictions. Oxymoron shows flashes of brilliance, and the best overall songwriting of ScHoolboy’s career. The elusiveness of style that makes Q an intriguing character is also ultimately a limitation, and one that he shares with his city, as it attempts to shrug off the weight of three decades of hip-hop history. Unlike so many other Angelenos, though, Q seems completely unconcerned.

Q has renounced gang banging in favor of music, but still roots his worldview and music in that milieu. So where does ScHoolboy Q fit in? What does it mean to be a gangster rapper in Los Angeles in 2014?

With Game, we’d already experienced gangster rap as a museum piece, a formal exercise to be executed according to its various rules and restrictions. (What else was Doctor’s Advocate but a tribute to 2001?) Los Angeles didn’t disappear in the era leading up to good kid, of course. Nipsey Hussle arrived, the visual mold of Snoop Dogg reborn over “Funky Worm” synthesizers and impeccable street credibility—Los Angeles personified, history’s echo, modernized and referential. Meanwhile, outside of gangster rap, Dom Kennedy eased onto the scene with a distinctive flow and humble ambitions. History lessons had no place at his barbecue.

The latter two are key figures in L.A.’s current revival—certainly, Nipsey’s drawn more attention on a national level in the last six months than he had in the previous two years. But the artists who have had the biggest impact neatly avoided being boxed in by archetype. Because in L.A., it’s not just gangs, but gangster rap itself, that has a long history in the popular imagination.

Kendrick's approach kept the setting and inspirations—his story is steeped in references to Tupac, while his music samples Ice Cube's "Bird in the Hand," features MC Eiht—but his style draws on gangster rap while ignoring its template. He neither avoided it, nor was he boxed in by its limitations; he zoomed in on a specific point of view, grounded it in autobiography, and told a story that wrestled with that legacy. Part of his approach suggests Kendrick was of but apart from street rap; his music channels the gut-wrenching immediacy of Lex Luger on “m.A.A.d. City” but only for a moment—as a tonal reference. Kendrick doesn’t follow street rap’s rules; he isn’t ignorant of them, but he critiques their implications, looks at the same subjects from a different angle. In contrast, Q, a former Crip leader and Oxycontin dealer, has a more traditional street-rap narrative style.

In L.A., that's a lot of history to have to shrug off. Q's fellow Compton rapper YG—whose Def Jam debut drops next month—averts history with production from L.A.-based DJ Mustard, who has managed to commandeer strip clubs and dance floors with a set rhythmic framework. But TDE's world is still Kendrick's, and being the crew's gangster rap scion sets Q slightly adrift. Musically, he's not aiming at the clubs. And while his music is of the streets, it doesn't seek the visceral adrenaline rush of street rap's vanguard. His bars are full of references to violence and hedonism, but presented in a left-of-center manner, from a guy who is less of a gangster superhero and more of a gangster eccentric, hidden behind circular shades, a trench coat, and a floppy hat.

From a creative point of view, Oxymoron is a slimmer record than 2012’s Habits & Contradictions. That album was packed with ideas—each track its own universe, wordy and skeletal. This was a place of disjointed atmosphere, of abstracted moods, of unpredictability and shadow. Setbacks had capital "S" Songs—the sexual bump of "Fantasy," the regal banger "Kamikaze," the West Coast throwback "WHat's THa Word." It was, in parts, pretty—"LigHt Years AHead (Sky HigH)" had a comforting immediacy. Habits & Contradictions was more about the twisting wordplay, intricacy, a lack of resolution, dissonance.

Much like Setbacks, Oxymoron trades density for songfulness. First were the lead singles, album highlights like "Collard Greens" and "Man of the Year." One would hesitate to call them "hits," at least off the bat; rather than taking a more direct route, their catchiness sidles up to you to remind you of their presence when you least expect it. These are the most straightforward cuts on the album. ScHoolboy is a gangster who avoids easy pigeon-holing. When you think you've got him pegged, he evades your definition with a puckish growl. The album's best beat is perhaps ScHoolboy's most enveloping song to date: "Studio," a BJ the Chicago Kid-assisted cut that should do as much for BJ as TDE has already done for Jhene Aiko. Like a sequel to "Fantasy," the song has a sensuality that's all the more unexpected coming from a gruff gangster like Q.

ScHoolboy is a gangster who avoids easy pigeon-holing. When you think you've got him pegged, he evades your definition with a puckish growl.

While there was nothing so evidently pop on Habits & Contradictions, the trade-off is one of content. Lyrically, ScHoolboy often goes through what is expected, walking a fine line between creativity and cliche. Quotables don't exactly abound on this record; instead, he fills in the lines on many tracks, even some of the cuts with strong songwriting. Have you ever wondered what a rapper does at the club? "Hell Of A Night" will fill you in; it does so with an especially moving beat, one that captures the emotional importance we tend to place on weekend escapism, and incorporates an EDM-referencing build-up that shouldn't work. Q pulls it off; but if you're hoping to hear a revelation about who ScHoolboy is, or what a gangster eccentric might do differently, you'll end up disappointed.

On "What They Want," the way his lines can wash over a listener is especially striking when contrasted with a punchline-laden guest verse from 2 Chainz. In fairness, it's one of Chainz's stronger verses, full of memorable imagery. Other tracks don't seem to suffer quite as much; "Gangsta" and "Blind Threats" have the kind of mystique-generating space between meaning and sound that energizes the bulk of Habits & Contradictions. "Break the Bank," meanwhile, is the best conflation of song and the aesthetic on the record, balanced in harmony.

The album's apex, lyrically, is "Hoover Street," a career highlight. Autobiographical, a narrative about the roots of addiction (he watches his uncle's addictive behaviour, a few tracks before wrestling with his own), it is clear that he's got something to say, something he communicates in a subtly artful manner. It's no genre exercise, nor is it a decorative expression of artfulness. Instead, it uses the concrete to address the abstract. ScHoolboy might not be a good kid, but he can tell a story with just as much power as Kendrick. He does something similar on "Prescription," a numbing descent into the cotton-y listlessness of addiction. Its emotional punch is rooted in the addict's withdrawal from society, the depletion of motivation in the face of the overwhelming need for a fix.

"The Purge" is one of the album's more striking moments, for also drawing attention to what the real sound of Los Angeles has been in recent years. Gangsters are now living in a world diverse enough to include Odd Future's scab-picking realness. Kurupt—already a rapper who bridged lyrical abstraction and hypermasculine gangster shit, appears for a familiarly foreboding moment of Tyler, The Creator-style bleakness. The song's lineup says something about Los Angeles, about history, and about what it's like to really rap your ass off. Like ScHoolboy's personality and his art, it ducks being pinned down and grins.

http://www.complex.com/music/2014/02/schoolboy-q-oxymoron-review?utm_campaign=complexmag+socialflow+02+2014&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

[Will_B]

Review Summary: Don't believe the hype train

I should stop reading the blogs, really. I should stop getting swept up in the hype of any artist affiliated with a big name and hoping, despite my better judgment and already formed opinion, they will do anything more than what I expect. I kind of blame Earl Sweatshirt for everyone’s inflated expectations of the second-in-line of the numerous hip-hop ‘groups’ of individual artists who ostensibly represent a collective. It happened with A$AP Ferg and it’s happening now with ScHoolboy Q, even though 2012’s Habits and Contradictions was unspectacular.

It’s my own fault for thinking he could change my mind. I tried to fall in love with his persona even though I didn’t think it was anything bigger than ‘the dude who wears bucket hats.’ I heard “Collard Greens,” with Kendrick Lamar’s terrible verse he probably found in a 15-year-old’s Spanish notebook with a bunch of penises and ‘jajaja’ etchings around it, and couldn’t figure out what I wasn’t hearing. I listened to Habits again but felt worn out when second track “There He Go” was by far the best he’s ever made. Maybe my problem is I tried, actively tried, to like him.

The problem is: there’s really no concept of who Schoolboy Q is. Even on the album cover he is obscured by a white ski mask which manages to hide everything- including his race. He has a gangster edge- a pill pusher from Hoover Street, which is closest thing to a personality he offers- but at the same time he’s a dad. Sometimes he’s ‘Puffy,’ the weed head who gets high in the studio, and others he’s some sort of sex god who, like so many others, indulges himself from the rear of women. Out of the booth he’s a normal looking guy with a bucket hat and a goatee. His daughter is manipulated into contextualizing her father with interjections like “my daddy says you’re a nigga” and “*** rap, my daddy a gangsta,” indicative of his two irreconcilable sides and his tendency to tread into unappealing themes.

Apparently this is all intentional: a representation of Q’s Oxymoronic status as a father to a young girl who also parties heartily and hears the calls of the streets in the back of his mind. However, this is presented incredibly vaguely, alluded to but never said flat out. Only on the disjointed centerpiece “Prescription/Oxymoron” do we get a glimpse of the overarching narrative. Before the track breaks, Quincy Hanley has passed out on the couch- he has overindulged on medication. His daughter’s voice rings through the empty space trying to wake him, the beat switches and he is reborn: “I just stopped selling crack today!” The exclamation feels hollow, though, because on “Man of the Year” he has girls dancing for him during a drug binge. Any potential lessons learned are left behind in a matter of a few songs.

The way these themes are rolled together for effect is awkward. The thrust of the album is this gangster life he wants to leave behind but is obviously hung up on and he brings in themes of fatherhood to create artificial conflict. His inner contradiction is obscured by party anthems and traditionally ‘gangster’ guest stars (Kurupt, Jay Rock, Raekwon). In fact, without his daughter’s orations, there is no semblance of narrative or meaning behind Oxymoron. This could be because Q’s storytelling ability is lacking, look no further than the bungled story of his uncle “Hoover Street” for how not to weave a narrative, but also because his inner turmoil sounds forced when spoken on record. It’s not entirely correct to compare Oxymoron to Good Kid m.a.a.d. City but give Kendrick Lamar credit for thoroughly exploring street life from someone who has left it all behind. Schoolboy, no matter what he tries making himself believe, clearly hasn’t left the streets behind and convincing the listener otherwise is impossible.

Reading these reiterations about theme and whatnot is dull and repetitious, but so is Oxymoron. Worse, though, it isn’t limited to theme. Hooks are run into the ground, songs are extended for just one chorus too long and beats are looped until they start grinding. The word “gangsta” is said 32 times on the opener alone. The replay value is just about non-existent. Each song is fairly flawed in some way or another, that some are good enough to overcome their faults speaks to the quality of the guests. Tyler, the Creator’s voice fits perfectly on “The Purge,” 2 Chainz livens up “What They Want” and Raekwon’s “Blind Threatz” verse is the best on the album.

So this is Schoolboy Q’s coming out party: an incomplete album with a brainy yet underdeveloped concept and a corrupted concept of the man behind the ski mask. The singles are shiny and probably hooked a lot of new fans, but the real substance is a contradictory mess. The image of a walking contradiction, a drug addict father, is hard to sell and Q is too underdeveloped, he started rapping seriously in 2010, to articulate his true feelings. What comes of this experiment/appeal to the masses is an overlong slog with enough shine to pull you in but a tangled mess beneath the bright veneer.

2/5

http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/61148/ScHoolboy-Q-Oxymoron/