Schoolboy Q rides in on the wave of The New West— the recent resurgence of the Southern California rap scene that’s seen MCs from the historic hip-hop slums of South Central Los Angeles dropping their weapons in order to flaunt their intelligence over complex, spacey beats. Yet Schoolboy is still inextricably linked to The Old West— the gun-totin’ gangsta-rap frontier that guys like N.W.A. pioneered and guys like The Game continue to emulate. Similar to his metaphorical musical ancestors, Schoolboy Q grew up as a member of the Hoover Crips 52 gang, although he claims he maintained a relatively peaceful mindset in comparison to his peers.
While Schoolboy Q is definitely as intelligent as his New South Central peers, his rough, gangster upbringing leaks through on Habits & Contradictions, the follow-up album to his debut Setbacks.
There’s the Throne-mocking “Nightmare On Figg St,” where Schoolboy twists ‘Ye and Jay’s high-society boasts into poverty-stricken, gang-influenced threats. There’s an undeniable presence of a history of pain and struggle in Schoolboy Q’s snarly voice on that track especially, as he delivers rhymes like “Let’s bake coke and cook crack / Fuck the sheriffs, the gang unit / Fuck crash / Pimp hoes or wring ya bread, she love tracks” over a menacing beat.
While many of South Central’s elders would have left violent remarks like those to standalone, Schoolboy Q understands what he’s up to. The album also contains tracks like the self-reflective “Sacrilegious,” in which Schoolboy delivers lines like: “Marinatin’ in Satan sweat / take a sip of this Holy Water / Hopin’ God still keeps me blessed / with a dark shield for my armor.” Lines like this exhibit a self-aware poeticism that makes Habits & Contradictions more than just a straightforward street album.
At seventeen tracks, the album is surprisingly spare on guest features. However, the guest artists are carefully plucked from Schoolboy Q’s loyal crew— not assembled for purely commercial purposes. Schoolboy enlists his Black Hippy groupmates Jay Rock, Kendrick Lamar and Ab Soul for various verses (Ab Soul for “Druggys Wit Hoes Again,” the follow-up to Setbacks‘ standout track “Druggys Wit Hoes”) and also offers fellow Angeleno Dom Kennedy a guest spot. Other esteemed guests include Coloradan duo No Concept on “Gangsta In Designer,” and a dirty yet soulful verse from R&B beauty Jhene Aiko.
Perhaps the most high-profile guest feature on Habits & Contradictions comes from The New East, in the form of Harlem’s latest success story A$AP Rocky. The self-proclaimed Pretty Motherfucker appears on “Hands On The Wheel,” a drugged-up track that borrows its prominent sample from Kid Cudi’s drugged-up “Pursuit of Happiness.” Rocky speeds up his signature syrup-soaked flow for the verse, which offers an accurate display of the skills found on last year’s impressive LiveLoveA$AP mixtape.
Habits & Contradictions is a street album for an era that’s all but forgotten what rappers without yachtloads of wealth sound like. It’s filled with drugs and guns— Schoolboy’s Habits, presumably, yet also numerous self-reflective Contradictions. While most albums of this nature will leave you feeling as if you’ve briefly escaped to the decadent land of the self-made 1%, Schoolboy’s sophomore effort offers the type of brutal honesty that’ll leave you to question and confront your own reality. Plus, of course, the beats are really good and Schoolboy Q knows how to rap.
