“Gang shit, I invented that, huh?” asks Schoolboy Q on “Pop,” a track from Blue Lips, his first album in nearly five years. It’s clearly an overstatement. But give the former Hoover Street Crip credit: Back in the early 2010s, he fused the open-eared, genre-less sensibility of Tumblr rap with vintage L.A. gangsta flows in classic moments like “Hands on the Wheel” and “Druggys Wit Hoes Again.” Along with Vince Staples, Boogie and others, Q marked a clear break from the city’s G-funk identity, even as he paid homage in collaborations with the likes of Tha Dogg Pound and Suga Free. Still, he’s an enigma. Paired with Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock — the famed Black Hippy quartet at the center of Top Dawg Entertainment — Schoolboy Q has long seemed like the hooded thug quietly nursing a brew in the corner of the room, only to startle his friends with an energetic, hair-raising party chant.
Q has promulgated that sense of mystery and danger through much of his catalogue, whether donning a ski mask for 2014’s Oxymoron or titling his 2016 album Blank Face. The latter, which shifted between taut, noir-ish cop funk and percussive turn-up anthems, remains a highlight of the rapper’s career. After the disappointing 2019 album Crash Talk steered too heavily in the latter sonic direction, Q went on an unexpectedly long hiatus, only occasionally resurfacing with loosies like 2022’s excellent “Soccer Dad.” Thankfully, Blue Lips returns to the dynamic stylings of Blank Face, albeit with a few important twists. And with Lamar having departed TDE to form his pgLang imprint, it represents a moment when listeners can fully appreciate Q for his singular ability to craft compelling, thought-provoking gems without resorting to comparisons between the two. (SZA, of course, is now TDE’s main breadwinner.)
One of those twists arrives early in the nearly hourlong Blue Lips with “Blueslides,” a title seemingly inspired by Mac Miller’s 2011 album, Blue Slide Park. The late Pittsburgh rapper became a key figure in L.A.’s hip-hop scene before he died in 2018. An iconic Mass Appeal cover from 2013 depicted Miller walking barefoot alongside Q on train tracks in a hauntingly lovely and innocent image. “Lost a homeboy to the drugs/Man I ain’t trying to go backwards,” Q raps on “Blueslides.” “When I realized that his mama hurt/And think was it worth it/Man I gotta shake this shit/Wake up and move with a purpose.”
When Q leaked “Blueslides” several days before the release of Blue Lips along with a handful of other cuts, fans speculated that the 39-year-old rapper was depressed. (“Bitch, I am not sad,” he hilariously responded during a pre-release event. “Look, I rap about my life … so I come off sad sometimes. But bitch, I’m rich as fuck!”) They needn’t have worried. For every confessional moment like “Cooties,” there are three or four teeth-baring mashers like “Pop,” where he flexes alongside an animated Rico Nasty, and “Back N Love,” where Devin Malik chants “Back in love with this shit” over and over. The music, crafted by TDE regulars like TaeBeast and JLBS as well as several others like CardoGotWings, Alchemist, and Childish Major, juts between the kind of soulful live-band arrangements and wordless vocal arias typical of the TDE catalogue and brusque, bass-riddled attacks like “Yeern 101.” Then there’s “Foux,” an incredible pairing with Ab-Soul set over UK jungle rhythms. “Marijuana, hydro, pussy, hoe, ass, titties,” Q chants near its end.
Blue Lips is stocked with samples that feel both 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 era of L.A. street poetry. “My mom stay working late/She taught me how to be great/My superhero’s a woman,” Q raps on the latter. Yet his personality remains out of focus. It’s not just the way he clips his bars like he’s twisting off a knot on a twomp sack. It’s also his raspy voice that he can soften or harden at will. It’s the way he spits out “God/Credit/Bless/Love/The Realist” in a staccato assault. Most importantly, it’s how his oscillating raps contrast with the frequently dreamlike production that makes Blue Lips feel like an inebriated haze.
Part of why Blue Lips is compelling is that it seduces the listener enough to accept Schoolboy Q on his own terms. He remains an essentially private figure even as he talks about raising his kids, arguing with the mother of his children, or boasting about his whips and exploits. “A man supposed to have scars,” he raps on “Time Killers.” For him, it’s all we need to know.
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Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.