Tuesday, February 25, 2014

album review: 'oxymoron' by schoolboy q

So the Grammys are a joke.

It's amazing how few people actually know this, because they take it shockingly seriously for an award show that really has never earned the clout of a show like the Academy Awards. Now we metal fans have known the Grammys are a joke for years, because the metal and hard rock awards have never gone to the best acts in the genre or even the critically acclaimed ones, or, to put it another way, Evanescence, Linkin Park, Slipknot and Korn have more Grammys than Dream Theater, Nightwish, Queens of The Stone Age, or Ayreon. I know progressive metal is rarely well-reviewed, well, anywhere, but there's something wrong with that.

Well, a few weeks ago, the hip-hop community who don't remember Will Smith, Young MC and Chris Brown having more Grammys than Public Enemy or De La Soul or 2Pac or Biggie Smalls got pretty damn angry that Macklemore won best Rap Album of the year over Kendrick Lamar's star-making album of 2012, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. And as much as I like The Heist, it's not better than Kendrick Lamar, who is probably the biggest genuine talent to come out of rap music in a while. The man is smart, nuanced, has a great ability to switch things up and vary his flow, and he's currently signed to Aftermath and is working with Eminem so if he handles his career well, he'll be fine. The fun fact is that, like most rappers who get famous, Kendrick is using his newfound success to give some of his friends a popular boost.

And now we come to Schoolboy Q, fellow member of Black Hippy and gangsta rapper in his own right. I first became familiar with the guy off of his first full-length album Setbacks - and honestly, while it was good enough, I wasn't blown away. Schoolboy Q had a flexible, versatile flow but there were a lot of sloppy rhymes and not enough original content to impress me much or differentiate him from any other gangsta rapper. His socially-conscious, more mature songs were always the best on the album, but there was a lot of weed rap and brag rap that wasn't all that engaging and stuff I'd heard plenty of times before. Fortunately, his technique got a lot better on the follow-up Habits & Contradictions, an entire album set on exploring the inherent contradictions in gangsta lifestyle and Schoolboy Q himself. The album is dark and moody, but it never really loses momentum, most of the beats are surprisingly strong, Schoolboy Q brings a dark viciousness to his delivery, and all of his guest stars deliver. What's even better is how it works on two levels: if you want crass, hard-hitting gangsta rap, you'll find it, but if you look in the right spots, you'll find a surprisingly mature record lurking beneath it that trusts the audience enough not to spell out its insight - and while I won't say the album is precisely great, I've definitely heard worse gangsta rap albums in my life.

And I have to admit, I was more than a little interested about what he'd deliver with Oxymoron, his major label debut and apparently a record where Schoolboy Q had a lot more creative control and flexibility. He stressed that he was sticking with his gangsta image and that gave me mixed feelings. On the one hand, gangsta rap has a certain visceral appeal as a power fantasy and Schoolboy Q is smart enough not to frame himself as a role model by any means. On the other hand, we've had gangsta rap for over twenty years at this point and he was already retreading old ground on his last album, albeit doing it well, so what new material was Schoolboy Q going to bring to the table?

Well, to my pleasant surprise, Schoolboy Q does manage to bring a bit of fresh paint to the West Coast gangsta rap subgenre, and indeed, your ability to enjoy this record is going to completely depend on how much of the drugs/sex/violence power fantasy that you can take, the majority of it completely without irony. That being said, if you're familiar with the genre, Schoolboy Q is a worthy contender and he does bring some pretty solid insight and nuance on a record that does have some banging tracks - even though I'd argue he doesn't quite do it enough, especially coming off Habits & Contradictions. In other words, it's a very good album, but not quite a great one or a classic of the genre.

So let's start with Schoolboy Q himself, who proves to have quite the emotional range on this record, bouncing between hard-spitting gangsta and smoother, funkier rapper with considerable ease. It helps he has buckets of charisma and his flow remains his best asset, although I'm still divided how serious I should take him, because sometimes his delivery can get a little cartoonish. It reminds me of T.I.'s flow on his darker, more sly tracks, where it's never really harsh but it doesn't need to be to have that darkness. In terms of gangsta rap, it arguably takes the best of both sides, having the dark energy and vitriol but never quite crossing the line to brutish threatening. 

And it helps that most of his guest stars got the picture. Kendrick Lamar spits a decent multilingual verse on 'Collard Greens' (kind of funny considering he doesn't even smoke), Tyler The Creator and Kurrupt bring some menace to 'The Purge', and Raekwon and Suga Free bring some old-school flavour and pretty damn solid lines to their respective tracks. The only person who feels out of place is 2 Chainz (and even he's not that bad here), who tries to balance his luxury rap with token mentions of hustling cocaine, but Schoolboy Q blows him out of the water in flow, energy, and content.

But 2 Chainz's presence on this album is indicative of a bigger issue, and that takes us to the instrumentation - which has more trap elements than I'd like, but it at least better fits the darker tone and Schoolboy Q is only referencing luxury rap tropes ironically at best. At their best, the beats call back to some grimy, mid-to-late 90s g-funk - which makes it kind of frustrating that Pharrell's flashy, fuzzy production on 'Los Awesome' is such a poor fit with the rest of the album, when normally his production is a lot tighter. But outside of Mike Will Made It continuing to show that he's one of the worst producers working today, I dug a lot of the beats on this album, the highlight for me being 'Hell Of A Night', with the ghostly backing vocals, the steel drums on the chorus, and the quickness of the bass. What impressed me most was the texture and the atmosphere, especially on the darker, more introspective tracks like 'Hoover Street', 'Prescription-Oxymoron', 'Blind Threats', and 'His & Her Fiend' - it's bleak and grimy and incredibly immersive, and even through I'm not really a fan of trap percussion, it didn't hurt the overall ambiance of the songs for me. Unfortunately, the weaker tracks do feel a little watered down, and don't quite stick with me in the same way, as they sound like they're trying to fuse old-school grimy g-funk with more futuristic modern trap, and it doesn't quite work.

But now we have to talk about lyrics and themes, and right from the beginning, I liked the idea that Schoolboy Q was trying to pursue with this album. The title follows loosely from Habits & Contradictions, because Oxymoron has an interesting dichotomy: how Schoolboy Q is hustling and selling drugs and saying/doing terrible things because he has to support his daughter. In other words, doing bad things with a good intent, and whenever this album taps into that deeper level of insight, either through passing shots taken at Lil Wayne (who seems to be doing whatever he's doing just because he can) on the opener or snide dismissal of brand names in luxury rap on 'The Purge' or genuine moral dilemmas playing out on one of the album's best tracks in 'Blind Threats'. Of course, Oxymoron has a double meaning, also referring to Oxycotin, a drug that he both used to sell (in order to support his family, coming back to the main theme) and to which he got addicted. And the artistic framing on these tracks is great, as he paints the very dark picture of doing all this because he has to support his family and is not a role model by any stretch of the mind, which makes him a more likable character. 

And I just wish the album went further in this direction. Now don't get me wrong, Schoolboy Q puts enough of a fresh spin on gangsta cliches to never feel like he's copying the rappers of the past, but I feel the serious angle and deeper themes were a little neglected in favour of tracks covering a lot of similar ground. Furthermore, Schoolboy Q doesn't really upend those west-coast gangsta cliches: we get our songs about weed, club sex, selling drugs, being violent, and gang activity - and I hate to be crass, but I've seen this all before. As I've said, gangsta rap's been around for twenty years, and Schoolboy Q never quite brings enough slick wordplay or insight to elevate that material past the cliches, at least not consistently.

And that's where I stand on Schoolboy Q and on Oxymoron: it's a good, reasonably intelligent gangsta rap record that is trying to work on two levels: have the rough-riding hard-edged gangsta material, but then play it off by saying he knows it's wrong and he's doing it for his family. That's a tough balance to pull off, and through a good chunk of this record, he holds it, but there are points that ring a little hollow and disingenuous to me, and that's a little frustrating. That being said, I did like this album and I'm giving it a 7/10, as this record is definitely worth your time, especially if you've a fan of west-coast gangsta rap. Schoolboy Q might not have made a classic with Oxymoron, but he did make a solid, frequently enjoyable, and often insightful record - check it out.

No comments:

Post a Comment