The aboriginal time Schoolboy Q met his labelmate Kendrick Lamar, he says, "I couldn't accept he wasn't big yet." It was 2006, and Q had just started alive with the apprentice Top Dawg Entertainment. Eight years later, Kendrick's success has fabricated TDE the hottest aggregation in hip-hop – and Q is next in line.
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The night afore his major-label debut, Oxymoron, is certified as the Number One anthology in the country, Q is air-conditioned in a chic auberge allowance on Manhattan's Lower East Side, killing time afore a sold-out show. The 27-year-old Los Angeles rapper has bought out the accomplished attic for his crew, but appropriate now he's abandoned except for a babysitter who introduces himself as Bear. "Everything's so ablaze now," Q says, puffing on a ambrosial blunt. "I capital my anthology to complete dark. It's my past, present, approaching life, all of it."
Oxymoron is arranged with adrenaline-soaked tales of Q's come-up in South Central L.A., area he became a associate of the 52 Hoover Crips. "When you're a kid, everybody's nice to you – you don't apperceive who's a Crip and who's a Blood," says Q. "Then you hit seven or eight years old and alpha acquainted they amusement you a little altered now. You just acclimate to it and live."
Q was a acute kid, but apprenticeship didn't absorption him. "I knew academy was brainless back the fifth grade," he says. "The accessible academy arrangement in L.A. is fucked up. I cheated my accomplished way through, from elementary to top school. I didn't apprentice annihilation that mattered. You're cogent me about Christopher Columbus? What the fuck is that traveling to do? How can I survive tomorrow?"
He put added accomplishment into sports, cartoon absorption from academy scouts during four years of top academy varsity baseball (shortstop and additional base) and eventually arena some academy football. He was aswell a austere hip-hop fan, benign East Coast acts like Nas, Jay Z, Cam'ron and State Property. "I would canal academy if my CD was aching up or I couldn't get batteries," he says. "I wasn't aggravating to get on the bus and not be alert to music."
It wasn't until afterwards that Q got austere about authoritative his own music. In the meantime, the cull of artery activity was stronger. "Shit, you're built-in into it," he says. "Whether you apperceive you're in it or not." Even afterwards bond up with TDE, he was authoritative acceptable money active Oxycontin pills, and accompanying aggressive his own addiction issues – a disconnected activity he recounts on the new album's arresting affecting centerpiece, "Prescription/Oxymoron." "I went through my ups and downs," he says now. "School athlete, drug-dealing biologic user, assemblage member, plan a acceptable job – I done did it all. Rap was the endure resort for me."
Q was the final associate of TDE's amount four-man roster, abutting Kendrick, tripped-out cabal addict Ab-Soul and accustomed Blood associate Jay Rock. Afterwards a assignment as Kendrick's hypeman, Q followed him to a collective accord with Interscope Records about 2012. "Then I was in the game, and bits just kept traveling good," he says. "Up, up, up and up."
Now that he's fabricated it, he's not planning on slowing down any time soon. "Kendrick's, like, a pop star," he says. "I wish to draft up to that next, next level." Q says he's just now extensive the affectionate of acclaim area humans admit him on the street. "People attending at me and accumulate walking – but you can acquaint they apperceive who I am," he says, ashing his edger on a coffee table as he gets up and active out for tonight's gig. "I wish them to bug me. It's gonna be a sad day if they don't."
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