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. The Watts Writers Workshop capitalized on the influx of attention by cultivating inner-city literary heroes like the Watts Prophets, who recorded a pair of influential spoken-word albums that became key points in the cultural chain reaction that spawned hip-hop. Thirty years later, successors like 2Pac and Ice Cube proved that rap music could fit the same challenging ideas into compact packages, stashing leftish politics inside the Trojan horse of G-funk. But it took another generation for moral objections to the slang and subject matter of poets from this milieu to erode, for politicians who once saw rappers as adversaries to seek their council, for Kendrick Lamar to be able to take a meeting with Barack Obama. Blue Lips, the sixth album from Kendrick’s erstwhile labelmate Schoolboy Q, grapples brilliantly with the discomfiting duty of street raconteurs to speak candidly and convincingly to a life they’ve moved mountains to escape.
Born in Germany to army parents but raised in Hoover Crip territory in South Central, Schoolboy Q pulls from a life many of his listeners only hear about secondhand. Like his forebears and theirs, rapping was a means to reorient his trajectory. His artistic ambitions flourished in the wake of a felony home-invasion charge. Though music is a path out of criminality, it keeps his mind on the streets. The audience lives vicariously through chilling tales of Oxycontin sales and drive-bys; the coarser the lyric, the giddier the response. When the records lighten up, fans complain. The mannered singles that populate 2014’s Oxymoron and 2019’s CrasH Talk often seat them near the bottom of Q album rankings, a consensus the artist agrees with. While the new album goes to great lengths to document the rapper’s versatility, it pauses to express that playing everyone’s diabolical id can wear on him. As Q recently admitted, before shows he screams and punches walls to put himself in the state the fans want to experience him in: “I’m a quiet dude, really … When I get around people sometimes I get into a shell.â€
Blue Lips splashes around the vastness of this duality. The album is, like its author, sneakily astute and world traveled but every bit as willing to be your proverbial huckleberry, to pump out shouty vocals and hi-fi beats to rage to. After an airy intro, Q stomps into “Pop,†a crunchy blues and proto-metal romp co-starring Rico Nasty, as if possessed by a capricious spirit: “I’m snatching niggas’ wave caps off, gang tats off / Fuck yo set, hat get soakеd / Spilled that yolk, Figg Side / Fuck that boy, we smokе that boy / Chase ’em down, do that boy, we left that boy.†Q is quick to explain that he never got into the more violent aspects of gang life, to point out that it’s not all about the wildest bits we read about, but he wields the steely callousness of the hardened killer as a literary device.
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. Piercing gangsta rap’s kayfabe to ponder the strain it creates, Blue Lips maps out cycles of pain and distress, facing the fears the money can’t assuage. Creating distance between himself and his stories makes their cruelty seem pointed, and casts Q’s catalogue as a rowdy relative to earlier works of deliberate ultraviolence like Amiri Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus.†Is there a method to the murder bars, or does Q just want us to know he’s one of the most gifted rhymers out right now? Two things can be true.
Yes, burn your top tens and demolish your Mt. Rushmores. Schoolboy Q is the total package, and has been since the days of playing second fiddle in TDE’s Black Hippy, a rap collective with hearty three-dimensional characters who, due to the pathologically competitive mind of the rap fan, have long been crammed into the quadripartite personality conventions of Ninja Turtles and boy bands: the poet, the elder, the gangbanger, the sapiosexual. The gift in the apparent demise of a Black Hippy album is getting to see Kendrick, Jay Rock, Q, and Ab-Soul not as foils buttressing another’s shortcomings, but as drivers capable of navigating any lane.
To this aim, Blue Lips wears many hats. It’s brimming with rare boasts owed in part to Q’s growing interest in golf, whose rustic scenes and lengthy silences must offer priceless contrast to one who yawks. But in the quiet moments it seems uneasy in its prosperity, as if Q feels a lingering pinch of shock that the journey from football prospect to house arrest to rap charts panned out. “How you made it up out of Figg?†the mournful “Blueslides†asks. “It’s like he musta knew magic.†By this point — track four — you have an idea of the answer, having heard him prattling about like a burglar in “Pop,†firing double-timed syllables on “Thank God 4 Me,†and adopting a flow for “Blueslides†that brakes on the way to the conclusion of each line, as if it is a chore to finish the sentence: “I done broke down so many times, next time, it gon’ catch me / I done helped out so many people, they took me for granted / I done lost out on so much shit tryna live to your standards / I done made problems my problems, now I barely can breathe.â€
Even when the record isn’t plumbing the depths of the soul, it’s moving with a sense of purpose. 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. Having spent three straight studio albums radically adjusting the balance between obvious singles and tight, macabre storytelling, Q zips between incredible beats and unnerving rhymes, forcing less conventional song structures without losing urgency. “Yeern 101,†the single, doesn’t have a chorus; “Movie†pulls the rug after a bubbly hook from Q, turning its booming West Coast thump over to L.A. rapper AzChike.
Blue Lips ignores much of the logic currently governing mainstream rap releases: It’s not stuffed with remakes, and the guests seem like friends and not cross-branding opportunities. Like its contemporaries, the album is almost imposingly long, serving 18 tracks in just under an hour. But tantalizing detours like the song fragments at the top of “Movie†and “Lost Times†make you ache for a longer track list. The album works best as an argument for the multifaceted mind of the artist. There are moments where it seems to meander — “First†enters manosphere territory (“I was the first one fuckin’ that bitch / I was the first one hittin’ that shitâ€) until it gets swept up in a psychedelic coda where common sense returns — but it’s almost too curious to drag for more than a minute or two.
Following Blue Lips out past the gooey, embryonic, instant-vintage trap soul we expect from TDE and into its trail of interests and references, you notice a twofold sense of place, a feel for an experience of a city but also a notion of where it sits in the overarching order of unflinching art depicting the Black experience. Slivers of Gil Scott-Heron, Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin, and the Watts Prophets pepper this commentary on the intersections of race, wealth, and mental health. On the surface, Blue Lips is saying Schoolboy Q can find the pocket in any genre. Beneath it, he is rummaging through decades of Black American history and identifying common threads — “Pain!†— while working out how to get free from the sociological binds that make the Prophets’ 1971 opus, Rappin’ Black in a White World, feel relevant over half a century later. Blue Lips relishes being able to make enough people enough money to share Q’s creativity with the world and maintain a nice house and an understanding of the next year’s expenses. But the beating heart of the album is a sense that people are only ever as noble as the opportunities laid out for them. Schoolboy Q seems to have found his groove in golf and strategic inaccessibility, but thankfully for us, he finds just as much release in screaming himself hoarse playing the villain.