Hearing something truly original is a music geek’s greatest high, but it has a rough comedown: the realization that, once what’s new wears out, there’s nothing else quite like it to obsess over. For those of us who’ve played Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city into submission, there’s always a constellation of influences and collaborators to chart, but there’s nowhere to turn for so much of what makes Kendrick unique: a knack for mimicking the best and caricaturing the worst of two decades of rap; a shape-shifting sense of perspective that rejects boilerplate-rap narcissism in favour of self-probing, ventriloquism, and flights of abstraction; and a fluency in the narratives that propel songs, consolidate albums, inhibit individuals, define generations. Want more of that? You’ll have to wait for the next album.
Until then, try something even better than a substitute: Schoolboy Q’s Habits & Contradictions. Schoolboy Q, real name Quincy Matthew Hanley, is Kendrick’s fellow member in the L.A. rap collective Black Hippy. Technically, he’s Kendrick’s closest competitor; stylistically, he’s Kendrick’s polar opposite. Where Kendrick is socially-minded, coolly candid, and irrepressibly idealistic, Schoolboy’s trapped in his head, puffed up on hot air, lodged in the drug-marinated moment. Kendrick tells stories; Schoolboy clowns around.
Kendrick homes in on the ‘Real’; Schoolboy gets ‘Druggy wit Hoes Again’. Kendrick’s album is intercut with his parents’ voicemails, a one-way conversation tethering him to family, tradition, and security. Schoolboy? He prefers ‘Sexting’.
Whenever Kendrick’s and Schoolboy’s antithetical approaches converge on the same subject, Schoolboy always holds his own. Take ‘Hands on the Wheel’, the most seductive—and sinister—of Schoolboy’s many drug anthems. Egged on by A$AP Rocky, rap’s reigning champion of shallowness, Schoolboy shamelessly admits to an awful lot of questionable activities, plus one unquestionably awful one (drunk driving). Where Kendrick’s ‘Swimming Pools (Drank)’ could press pause on the drunken present to meditate on family history and the schizophrenic mindset of an addict, Schoolboy’s appetite is unwilling to negotiate: ‘Let’s get stupid high, to where I can’t reply / Love smokin’ dope, I won’t compromise.’
The album’s most surprising moments transmute these superhuman habits into human contradictions, perforating Schoolboy’s blown-up alpha-male persona with pinpricks of real life. On ‘Blessed’, a ballad that revolves around the death of a friend’s son, Schoolboy struggles to console his friend with something more meaningful than money, weed, or empty platitudes. Kendrick, in a motivational-speaker-grade guest verse, preaches redemption, but all Schoolboy can honestly offer is his condolences. When Schoolboy unites this inner realist with his outer party animal, he writes the album’s best track, ‘There He Go’. A day in the life of Q, exuberantly recited over a shimmering piano loop, it’s ‘Empire State of Mind’ for the 99%, or anyone whose 99 problems comprise the chequered fortunes of daily life: betting on
a basketball game and losing, evading your hook-up’s boyfriend then realizing he’s a fan, worrying about money but scrounging enough to swag out your two-year-old daughter. Rapping at his show-offy best, Schoolboy modulates his timbre back and forth between a gritty growl and a hyperventilating, helium-high falsetto. By the time he gets to the hook, he’s breathless, flabbergasted, sounding almost incredulous: ‘THERE HE GO?! SCHOOL! BOY! THERE HE GO?!?’ Even he can’t believe he’s this good.
If you liked… good kid, m.A.A.d city by Kendrick Lamar
