But that doesn’t mean he can’t live.īorn Quincy Matthew Hanley in 1986, on a military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, Q grew up in South Central LA, connecting with Top Dawg and forming the Black Hippy collective with Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, and Ab-Soul in the late 2000s. “You know what I’m saying? That’s why I try to stay away from sad music at this point in my life.
“Many nights I cry,” he told Apple Music in 2019. But like Snoop Dogg before him, the underlying note in Q’s music is a kind of hard-won fun, the resilience of someone who knows darkness but keeps swaggering toward the light. A descendent of gangsta tradition, he can be rough (“Break the Bank”), he can be funny (“There He Go”), and he can be bracingly introspective (“Blessed”). Alongside Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, and the rest of the Top Dawg Entertainment crew, ScHoolboy Q has become one of the definitive voices of 2010s rap.
