ScHoolboy Q Stops By The Hot 97 Morning Show To Talk About His Gang Past, TDE's Bond and His High School GPA

""Roc-a-Fella, Bad Boy, none of them n****s had the bond like us."

January 23, 2014

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:

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:

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?

Check the whole thing out above. Oxymoron is out February 25.