Biography

Mixing bud smokers' anthems with socially conscious numbers, rapper ScHoolboy Q quickly went from mixtapes to Top Ten albums. The South Central L.A. rapper became serious about his music in the mid-2000s, when he started working closely with Kendrick Lamar as both a member of the Black Hippy collective and as a Top Dawg Entertainment signee. His 2011 studio debut, Setbacks, charted and drew some attention, and in 2014, Q teamed with Interscope for his third album, Oxymoron, which debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. The years that followed brought guest appearances on tracks for Freddie Gibbs, Anderson .Paak, Gorillaz, and many others, as well as more chart success with albums like 2019's CrasH Talk, which peaked at the number three position. 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 Kendrick Lamar and Top Dawg Entertainment around 2006. Lamar would form the Black Hippy collective with ScHoolboy along with Jay Rock and Ab-Soul, and the Top Dawg label would sign 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 Billboard 200 and pushed the single "Studio" into the Top 40. A worldwide tour took up most of 2015, and 2016 saw the "That Part" single drop as a preview of that year's album, Blank Face LP, which debuted at number two. In 2017, he appeared on the Calvin Harris collaborative track "Cash Out" with PartyNextDoor and DRAM, as well as on "Bahamas" with A$AP Mob and "Lil Story" with Gucci Mane. In 2018, he linked up with 2 Chainz and Saudi for the track "X" from the TDE-curated Black Panther soundtrack. Another contribution to a film soon followed, landing ScHoolboy on the Creed 2 soundtrack with 2 Chainz and Mike WiLL Made-It on "Kill 'Em with Success." Three years after Blank Face, he returned his focus to his solo material on "Numb Numb Juice," the lead single from fifth studio album CrasH Talk. CrasH Talk was released in April of 2019 and featured guest appearances from Ty Dolla $ign, Lil Baby, Kid Cudi, 21 Savage, and other recognizable names of commercial rap. The album made it to the upper levels of the Billboard charts, just as Q's last two efforts had. In July of 2020, he appeared on Gorillaz song "Pac-Man," and also made guest appearances that year on songs with Roc Marciano, the Alchemist, and Conway the Machine. In 2021, he showed up on tracks by NEZ and Childish Major. ~ David Jeffries & Rich Wilson, Rovi