ScHoolboy Q

One of the most dynamic and revealing voices in contemporary hip-hop, ScHoolboy Q chronicles a turbulent life marked by street life and vices, with subjects such as fame, fatherhood, and sobriety also related with his ever-changing flows. He came up with fellow South Central L.A. native Kendrick Lamar and the Black Hippy collective, and charted with Setbacks (2011) and Habits & Contradictions (2012), his first two albums for Top Dawg Entertainment. ScHoolboy Q soon broke through to become one of the most prominent artists of the mid- to late 2010s. He placed Oxymoron (2014), Blank Face LP (2016), and CrasH Talk (2019) at or near the top of multiple Billboard charts; scored Top 40 hits as a collaborator on tracks headlined by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis ("White Walls") and Tinashe ("2 On"); and earned five Grammy nominations, including two for Best Rap Album. Q returned the next decade with the intensely measured and emotionally complex Blue Lips (2024). ScHoolboy Q was born Quincy Hanley in 1986. He was writing rhymes by age 16, but didn't think of rap as an area of focus until he began working with Kendrick Lamar and Top Dawg Entertainment around 2006. Lamar formed the Black Hippy collective with ScHoolboy along with Jay Rock and Ab-Soul, and the Top Dawg label signed the artist. After his 2008 debut mixtape, ScHoolboy Turned HustlA, his Gangster & Soul mixtape landed in 2009, and Top Dawg released his official debut, Setbacks, in 2011. In 2012, Top Dawg announced it had signed a joint venture deal with Interscope and Aftermath, which saw Lamar's debut get a full release. Later that year, ScHoolboy Q announced he was recording his third album and would be the second member of Black Hippy to benefit from the deal. After a series of mysterious tweets in 2013, Q announced that the release would be called Oxymoron, but nearly a year passed before the dark and abstract album -- which featured a whole host of guest producers and vocalists -- was released in February 2014. Nevertheless, it debuted at number one on the Bi