Schoolboy Q is the most promising foot soldier in Kendrick Lamar's Black Hippy crew, a small circle of talented rappers currently reinventing West Coast hip-hop, but he's more than that. His second full-length statement, Habits & Contradictions, is a sumptuously produced and deeply enjoyable hour-plus slab of weed-clouded rap, but it's more than that. I've spent the past four days immersed in it, trying to resolve its conflicting impulses and ferret out all of its weird corners, and the only thing I can say for certain is that, while listening to it, I feel pulled completely into someone else's center of gravity, which is maybe the most gratifying listener's sensation there is.
The record's first layer is sheer sound: Habits & Contradictions is full of plush, inviting, high-thread-count production, the kind that pulls you toward fat headphones and a chair. Like Kendrick Lamar's Section.80, there is a woozy drag to the drums and a thick, clotted feel to the sounds surrounding them. It shares a metabolic rate with Houston screw music, but the album's chilly mood is closer to the heron'-gray-skies gloom of RZA and Mobb Deep. In fact, when Mobb Deep affiliate the Alchemist shows up halfway through Habits on "My Homie", he feels right at home.
Habits & Contradictions is, accordingly, a dark and moody listen, but it never bogs down in momentum or succumbs to despair. "There He Go" flips a sample of Portland trio Menomena's brittle "Wet and Rusting" into a hard-hitting anthem. "Druggys Wit Hoes Again", with its gabbling bursts of vocal samples and bone-jarring snare kicks, is a prime slab of Bay Area gangsta music. Even when everything slows to a crawl, there are small sounds tucked in everywhere, enlivening the darkness: the spaghetti-western guitar twangs on "Sacrilegious", or the heavy-breathing Portishead drum break of "Raymond 1969".
It helps that Schoolboy is an odd, genuinely unpredictable presence who sometimes seems to be rapping entirely for his own amusement. There's audible dryness in his voice as he drunkenly croons the off-key hook, "House fulla money/ Tub fulla bitches," on "How We Feeling", and you can hear he's holding the words in air quotes, as if he's just trying the words on, since they're the Sorts of Things One Says in Rap Songs. On "Nightmare on Fig St.", he teases the opening "Ball so hard" bars of "Niggas in Paris" for no obvious reason, and then launches into sharply worded threats ("The landlord, turn your lieutenant into a tenant"), head-turning non sequiturs ("We drive to pussy more than we do to church/ No AC but the heater WOOOORK!") and a riot of demented ad-libs.
This lily-pad hopping means that it takes a while for the buried emotion in Habits to surface. Schoolboy raps in a wearily flat voice that evokes Prodigy's, and his lyrics deal with all the dark stuff of gangsta rap: poverty, violence, drugs, hopelessness. But his music has none of gangsta rap's implacable, survival-at-all-costs forward motion. Schoolboy's music is dank with the lousy weather of disappointment, with human-sized failures. When he tells us about selling oxycontin with a lifelong friend who sold him out, he doesn't sound like murderous Vengeance Incarnate; he just sounds hurt. His tangled past as a set leader of the Hoover Crips, meanwhile, leaks out in small bits. "Contradictions in my thoughts, and I just execute my feelings," he mutters on "2 Raw", and it hints effectively at an unspoken well of remorse.
Schoolboy Q has little of Black Hippy alpha Kendrick Lamar's gloomy-paladin aura, or his rap-Hamlet charisma. But it's worth noting that, at least right now, Schoolboy is making stronger music than Kendrick. Habits & Contradictions sounds comfortable in its skin, at home its own quiet strangeness, in a way that Section.80 never manages. It's better-paced. He's probably not going to be a break-out star, but it's hard to imagine that there will be many more original or satisfying rap long-players this year.
