Two years into Black Hippy’s mainstream rap takeover the efficacy of TDE’s hit factory is still a marvel to watch. As a group, pensive Compton good guy Kendrick Lamar, gang-affiliated L.A. street rap classicist Jay Rock, suburban psychotropic-loving conspiracy theorist Ab-Soul and drug dealing party animal Schoolboy Q unite to offer a panoramic view of Southern Californian inner city rot. In-house production teams Digi+Phonics and THC buoy the rhymes in excitingly quirky sonics, while gifted recording engineer Mixed By Ali keeps it all sounding winningly crisp and plush. The team has crafted over half a dozen albums together in just four years, and at this juncture, you can almost tell ahead of time what you’re going to get coming into a new TDE project. Although Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city revealed a Dickensian eye for storytelling and a knack for radio-savvy singles that didn’t wander too far off the plot—and sold a million copies in the process—the mechanics of his sound didn’t change much. You could easily slide “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” somewhere into Q’s Habits and Contradictions or Soul’s Control System without a bumpy transition. Consistency breeds familiarity, but as Schoolboy Q releases his Interscope debut Oxymoron, the precarious followup to his brother-in-arms’ mainstream windfall, the axiom sometimes proves a liability.
Schoolboy Q specializes in hairpin turns from cautionary street tales and remorseful reflection into wanton bacchanal, and Oxymoron is essentially a volleyball match between his warring proclivities. Opener “Gangsta” kicks off with Q coldly admonishing a street worker for thinking pneumonia gets her the day off, but after the raucous set-repping “Los Awesome”, “Collard Greens” drags us to the club for elite liver putrefaction. Then it’s back to the block for a few until “Studio” pops up pining for affection after a stressful day of recording. Oxymoron punctuates its seriousness of purpose with stress-free jingles, like a rap game The Who Sell Out, but it skirts falling apart because Q has cut a figure that seems equally at home throwing back shots and bagging up rocks. His skill set is varied enough to sell a terse, hypnotic vamp like “Collard Greens” off of personality alone, effect a snarling menace bouncing crack dealer bromides off 2 Chainz on “What They Want”, and then methodically juggle cadences and syllables relating the story of an uncle’s drug-addled downfall on “Hoover Street”. Q’s wildman delivery does most of the heavy lifting on the slighter material here, but you see the true depth of his songwriting talents in detail obsessed verses on “Break the Bank”, where he lets slip where the pills were stashed back when he sold, and “Prescription/Oxymoron” where Q, holed up at home munching prescription pills, catalogs all the calls he ignores as he hurtles toward an overdose (“My phone rang, rang and rang and rang/ If you ain’t sellin’ drugs, then I don’t hear a thing”). Thing is, these crack storytelling twists are occasionally drowned in formalist gangsta rap boilerplate.
Oxymoron is painfully aware of its place in the pantheon of hardcore West Coast rap, from the guest list, which calls in vets like slick-tongued Oakland pimp Suga Free and Dogg Pound wordsmith Kurupt alongside Odd Future magnate Tyler, the Creator, New York mafioso rap architect Raekwon and Atlanta trap court jester 2 Chainz to accentuate the commonalities between two generations of drug trafficking goon rap, to its struggle to imbue druggy levity and horned-up bedroom dispatches with a hardened, streetwise edge. Q is never less than engaging in this juggling act (though the brattier numbers can grate, like “Los Awesome”, which sounds like mid-2000s T.I. getting his hands on some quality speed), but he can come off sounding more interested in ticking off his wiseguy bona fides than introducing the person underneath. His 2012 independent album Habits and Contradictions made a much better go of it, from “My Homie”’s wounded story of a friend who turned out to be an embedded undercover cop to “My Hatin’ Joint”, which pulled off the song-for-the-ladies trope with a comically petty air of vindictiveness, to “Oxy Music”, which blueprints Oxymoron’s drug using drug dealer conceit with much more gripping imagery. Oxymoron is gruff and goofy in all the right places, and enticingly lush as one could expect from a TDE project (for instance: the pogoing drums and plinking keys of “Collard Greens”, the perpetually melting synth Tyler suspends over Q and Kurupt on “The Purge”, Pharrell’s keys on “Los Awesome”, equal parts EDM debauchery and arcade overdrive). But a whiff of formula makes for an experience that coolly whisks along on rails where it should be bounding off them.
Q shines the most when he’s able to reconcile his hustler past with his rap star present rather than mining each separately. “Hell of a Night” showcases a trap-house hybrid from DJ Dahi, fresh off Drake’s “Worst Behaviour”, and Q cuts loose, partying hard because he’s lived hard enough to deserve it (“I ain’t minding if the world stops/ We been living up in hell’s shop”). “Break the Bank” and the Chromatics-sampling “Man of the Year” follow suit in affixing the happy ending to Oxymoron’s war stories while serving up the album’s most memorable hooks. The quality that sold the gangsta rap classics Q clearly studied in the process of making this album was an ability to tease triumph out of the mouth of adversity, and Oxymoron really takes off when the streak of songs that close the album proper stumbles onto the equation. Small wonder that the majority of its singles are culled from there.
Oxymoron is a victory in that Q’s sound has made the jump to the majors fully intact in an era where major label debuts often take a chop shop approach to assembly. Interscope’s trust in TDE saves the album from the awkward test tube collaborations that bog down many of its peers, but Oxymoron’s doubling down on a reliable formula makes for a relatively risk-averse listen. We don’t find out much about Q’s character or capabilities that we didn’t already know coming in, and a few of the tried and true song tropes here deliver diminishing returns. There isn’t a bad song in the bunch, but you get the sense that three albums in, Q’s readymade sense of what a Schoolboy Q album should sound like is as much a safety net prohibiting outright failure as it is a hindrance to true progression.
