The press cycle for ScHoolboy Q's upcoming, highly anticipated album, Oxymoron, is beginning to ramp up: The TDE rapper recently shared the artwork for the project and released the video for "Man of the Year" earlier this month. Today, he stopped by Hot 97's Morning Show to talk with hosts Peter Rosenberg and Cipha Sounds about the album and his life.
It's a great, truly candid interview that starts out with Q giving a detailed portrait of what it was like joining a gang and gang banging in LA. Rosenberg asks pointed questions and receives honest answers. Q talks about the callousness of it: "Once you adapt to all that, you get numb. You start laughing," and he distances himself from it, explaining that eventually he couldn't justify doing it while having a daughter. "It's embarrassing for me to even really be talking about it in detail," he says.
It's important because that tension's at the heart of his new album, which has a picture of his daughter on the cover. The oxymoron he's talking about? "Whatever it is that I'm talking about on my album [that's] negative, it's always for a good cause: my daughter."
Later in the interview, he discusses the challenge of coming up behind Kendrick Lamar, particularly given the long promotional cycle for good kid M.a.a.D. city. He explained that the members of TDE don't interfere much in each other's work but that he does pay attention to what Kendrick's doing:
You have to listen to the level of competition. If you want to beat the best, you have to study what the best is doing. That's like saying I didn't study Jay and Nas. Or Big and Pac. Yes, I study Kendrick because he is one of the heavy hitters in the game.
Other fun facts about TDE? Kendrick picks the track order for all of Q's releases; Ab-Soul thinks that the people rapping are the ones who all wrote the best essays in school; Q's GPA in high school was 3.3. Oh, and they're way closer than most groups of affiliated rappers you can think of:
Roc-a-Fella, Bad Boy, none of them niggas had the bond like us. Maybe Wu-Tang. That's probably it. We came up, we was sharing food, sleeping on the same couch ... I'm hoping that I make it to the couch before Ab-Soul make it to the couch so I can sleep ... So like our bond is way different. I don't call Kendrick on shit and say congratulations. That's just weird. He don't call me and say congratulations.
Elsewhere, Q talked about the genius of Doggystyle, his female fanbase and his lean habit, revealing that Interscope was considering sending him to rehab at one point. These days?
That's still my side bitch. I ain't gonna lie. I don't fuck with her like I used to. I quit for a year, but then I relapsed. I'm not going to sit here and lie. But I don't buy it. It's like weed smoking homie that's always got the blunt but never's got the weed. That's how it is.
Check the whole thing out above. Oxymoron is out February 25.
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