After much anticipation, ScHoolboy Q's (don't forget to capitalized the H!) major label debut album, Oxymoron, is finally in stores. The self-proclaimed "Man of the Year" is having a hell of week. For starters, his album is projected to sell between 150,000 and 160,000 copies which is enough for it to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart. (Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d. city sold 242,000 it's first week, it debuted at No. 2 behind Taylor Swift's Red).
ScHoolboy has been on a press blitz performing on late night, performing on shows like Conan and The Arsenio Hall Show and he's been profiled by everyone from Complex to Myspace to LA Weekly. All the profiles are worth reading (especially the Complex one!), a profile in Grantland written by Amos Barshad had an especially revealing tidbit about the making of Oxymoron.
On Oxymoron, Q had to compromise for the first time. He’d planned on only one radio-friendly song on the album, jamming the rest of the track list with his raw goods. But Interscope demanded three singles before he could get the green light — which, perhaps, is why it’s taken more than two years since Habits & Contradictions for Oxymoron to see release....“I mean, I still wrote the songs, so of course I still like them,” he says. “But this is what I signed up for. Major artists don’t just sign a deal to keep doing independent shit. [Maybe] I thought I was just gonna be able to slip through the cracks. It didn’t work like that.”
So there you have it: It's 2014 and major labels are still making artists make "radio-friendly" songs just because. But it hardly seems to matter in ScHoolboy's case, the album has been reviewed well by critics so far; it currently has an 80 on Metacritic based on 24 reviews. And I can't stop bumping "Gangsta," "Hoover Street" and "Prescription/Oxymoron," so there's that. Still, if you feel like Complex's David Drake and think "an emptiness haunts parts of the album" then that might be your answer why.
[via Grantland]
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