REVIEW: ScHoolboy Q’s Blank Face LP Mastered Art of Telling a Story

Album: Blank Face LP. Artist: ScHoolboy Q. Label: Interscope/Top Dawg Entertainment. Released: July 8^th, 2016. Genre: Hip-Hop/Rap. Price: $12.99.

ScHoolboy Q’s days of drug dealing and gangbanging are behind him but his legacy will forever be wrapped in a blue bandana. “Groovy Q” has been a Hoover St. Crip his entire life and always will be. Blank Face LP throws the audience into the back seat of ScHoolboy Q’s ride as an accomplice to the robbery that put him in jail years ago.

Don’t let the bucket hat and shades fool you. The clouds of marijuana that entrench ScHoolboy Q may give off a stoner vibe but he will always be a gangster at heart. He shows it on this album. Blank Face LP is darker and grimier then anything he has ever put out.

His last feature full-length album Oxymoron was his rendition of the history of the Crips and L.A. gang culture. The album was overall shaped by his family life, especially his daughter, and the effects of his prescription pill addiction. The album was well received. Its many highs and lows left the audience feeling as if they too were going through withdrawals. ScHoolboy Q will always get a one hundred percent in lyrics and flow any day. He has a way where he forces the listener to experience every word through his enunciation and ever-alternating rhyme schemes. Blank Face LP kept it painstakingly real and in your face.

It was almost like an Oxymoron reunion on Blank Face LP. Q handpicked go-to producers like Nez and Rio, Cardo, Sounwave along with recent collaborators The Alchemist, Tyler the Creator and Swizz Beats. He also dabbled with the biggest trap producers to this date: Metro Boomin and Southside. While all these producers sound almost entirely different ScHoolboy Q’s uncensored, stripped down, gritty lyrics are the integral link between each song.

ScHoolboy Q also requested a particular list of features including the always-outspoken Kanye West and legendary East Coast spitter Jadakiss. Houston’s own E-40 even had a wildly fun verse, rhyming adlibs and all on the song “Dope Dealer.” Dr. Dre and Aftermath’s newest signee Anderson .Paak also had made it on the album title song, “Blank Face.”

ScHoolboy Q’s Blank Face LP has mastered the art of telling a story through strategically sequencing songs. In the beginning cuts like “Torch” and “Lord Have Mercy,” introduce a hungry drug dealer and his friends living in the hood. Their only focus is making it getting paid. The idea of a robbery is introduced Q calls to his alter ego “Groovy Tony,” who unlike Q did not want to go through with it.

Later in the album we get to experience the robbery on songs like “Ride Out,” where the lacerating hi hats emulate the shots of an uzi over gory horns and heavy bass. The song also features fellow Crip and Long Beach spitter Vince Staples. As the tempo increases for the celebration of a successful robbery appear in “WHateva U Want,” “By Any Means.”

The up tempo songs give the listener a needed break from the heavy bass and hard snares of the gangbanging lifestyle. We get to sit shotgun with ScHoolboy Q as he’s driving down Hoover St. with the homies. Even the rambunctious production by Tyler the Creator on “Big Body” are necessary pieces to bridging scenes during the highs and lows of Q’s life.

After him and his homeboys finally get caught by the police. Songs like “Black Thought,” questions if the mixture of the hood mentality and marijuana were the sole factor for his decisions. The swagger that emits early on in the album is followed by a decrescendo for an introspection of “Groovy Tony.”

There was a little controversy a couple weeks before the release. In an interview on Hot 97 with Peter Rosenberg, Q noted how he originally didn’t want the Miguel and Justine Skye feature on the song “Overtime.” He said it was a “bootleg” of his Oxymoron club banger, “Studio.” He felt that the label was heavy handed on the decision for its placement on the album. Oxymoron seemed more single driven. Blank Face’s “Overtime” is haunting and atmospheric sound something not commonly mixed into radio play.

Overall ScHoolboy Q’s four-year hiatus since Oxymoron has proved that he grew as an artist while putting together a solid 2016 summer classic.