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Schoolboy Q Is Following in the Footsteps of Giants
On Blue Lips, he rummages through decades of Black American history.
In the early ‘60s, as prestige media shadowed the burgeoning Black radical movement, and citizens in “polite” society looked on with clutched purse and furrowed brow at men like Malcolm X, poetry oozed out of the wound cut by the 1965 Watts Rebellion. For Quincy Hanley, who hasn’t released an album in five years, returning to the business of being Schoolboy Q full time means leaning into the freedom of expression his fearless body of work allots while stopping to assess how a reputation (and the attendant expectation) for unruliness can inhibit growth. Sometimes that purpose is flexing on and chiding you — one quality Blue Lips and Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers share is the sense that, having been away for years, the artist must cause a commotion, as the defense of Ye in “Blueslides” and a line about AIDS in “Thank God” seem to want to, and as K. Dot’s “N95” and “Auntie Diaries” managed — and sometimes it’s how the demands of his own career create strain in a relationship.
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