After his highly anticipated Blank Face LP dropped just days ago, boasting features from the likes of Anderson .Paak, Kanye West, Tha Dogg Pound and more, German born and South Central raised rapper ScHoolboy Q has now opened up about the process and the struggles behind his latest project.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Q began by explaining the distaste he has for the fame he found after breaking it in the hip-hop world. “I thought rap was just, you make this album, you do the shows here and there, and then that’s it, But it’s a lot of press, it’s a lot of shows, it’s a lot of pressure.”
ScHoolboy Q later went on to detail the fight he had with music itself, driven by the guilt he had surrounding his family life following the release of his acclaimed Oxymoron album in 2014,
“My mind was set on leaving rap,” Q explained, “I didn’t tell nobody. No label was rushing me or nothing like that; they pretty much let me do what I want to do when I want to do it. I was just never gonna give ’em an album.”
Luckily for us, he came up with a solution by taking work home and cutting back to the basics,
“I miss so much of my daughter’s life,” he explained. “It seems like I’m putting my music and my fans before my family…I decided to put a studio in the house. That way I don’t have to leave. I cut back on a lot of press, cut back on a lot of shows.”
With emotions high, it was no wonder ScHoolboy Q found his frustrations released when it came to the studio time. In what he describes as “depressed rap”, his beginning sessions were extremely emotional, “I told myself, stop crying like a little bitch and do what you love to do.”
Despite these early sessions sounding like what could be some incredibly moving material, Q maintains that none of it made the final cut of Blank Face, and that “Y’all are never hearing them records,” adding, “It was like a confession thing. I didn’t want people to hear me like that; that depression doesn’t last. A few months, and then it was over.”
“I made money,” he continued, “at this point, it’s not about money. It’s more so about me being happy and doing what I want to do, fulfilling my daughter’s dreams and helping her get to a certain point in life.”
While he sounds like he’s back on track, and anyone who has listened to Blank Face should attest that the quality of his work hasn’t suffered even a little bit, Rolling Stone guessed that he spoke “as if he’s convincing himself that his rap career is the right course to take,” and Q’s closing statement certainly makes it seem that way. “I signed up for this shit. I can’t be crying like a little bitch. Just get over it … do what you gotta do.”
Read the full Rolling Stone interview here
Where ScHoolboy Q goes from here is anyone’s guess, but with the release of a new Black Hippy remix of his Kanye-featuring THat Part with his fellow running mates in that crew in Ab-Soul, Jay Rock and Kendrick Lamar, it doesn’t look as if he’ll be slowing down any time soon.
Image: LPR