ScHoolboy Q Disappoints On 'CrasH Talk'

The gangster plays golf.

Courtesy of Top Dawg Entertainment/Interscope Records.

After a slim 40 minutes of CrasH Talk, the gangsta rap connoisseur crosses his hands behind his head, blows out smoke, and minuses post-coitally: “Wow, just wow. Bad chunk. Tough thing. A dark, psychedelic masterpiece. The entry alone will push people in front of their heads. You have to get in first, that’s bulky, that’s brave, a scarlet portrait of South Central, gang star in the spirit of Ghostface Killah, leagued with the refinement of …” - and a minute of brain-burnt buzz later - “Blank Face LP, wow. You have to hear it again. Ah yes, CrasH Talk, hmm, yes, hmm, very cool, yes. Actually, it’s already cool. Yes. Hmmh.” Sense crisis alarm.

The recent development of Schoolboy Q’s discography reminds a little of Top Dawg-Kompagnon Kendrick’s. His latest solo, DAMN, seemed, with all the quality, like the meatballs with fried potatoes, which were just in heavy demand after the nouvelle cuisine of To Pimp a Butterfly. At the same time, Blank Face LP still impresses after those years (I’m just saying: hard-hitting, gloomy, psycho, scarlet, ghost of Ghostface, etc.), precisely because it is overlong and full of ideas, and that’s why it only opens up with time.

CrasH Talk, on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction and attaches importance to the fact that you know what is going on after 40 slim minutes. “Hood legend, ah / chef boiled it, ah”: Once “Gang Gang” and the beef steak is ready in less than two and a half minutes. As usual, it was beautifully bloody and with a particular spice.

In its raw attitude and focus, the album is significantly more oriented towards Oxymoron than on the widely rolled-out, playful beat monsters of the direct predecessor: “Gang Gang,” “Numb Numb Juice,” and “5200” are trap according to pure teaching, which makes an effort not to strain the amusement of the matter through redundant overlength. This works wonderfully with the examples mentioned because the beats roll forward without experiments and Schoolboy Q with them.

In terms of innovation, no one here is looking at the Oscar, that’s for sure. Question to the connoisseur: can you be seriously angry with this charming gentleman for it? “Who that ni**a in that candy glow?” - he still has the laconic tone and dry humor. In addition, his flow has lost nothing of characteristic swagger. Be it the phone book, or, since this picture has seen its best years on several levels, its own Facebook feed, or, since this picture does not get fresher either: What the man raps for “tales” is strictly speaking, as unchanged inimitably cool as he gives it.

Undoubtedly, he has eaten the attitude that N.W.A. told our grandfathers about, and it comes back from his tongue exceptionally elegantly. Voice variations, flow, energy, and everything else are always a class of their own. Q can also be the trapper as well as the storyteller, the latter a strength that is especially evident in the final track “Attention”: The text begins with a surprised Quincy at the Grammys, JAY-Z, Nas, Alchemist, all as they are there, recognize him as one of their own. But the thoughts slide off, back to the lead years, in which the hail of bullets still come like cloudbursts and suddenly go again as if they followed the laws of nature. They shape the texts of the passionate golfer to this day.

Please, how? The always-informed connoisseur coughs vigorously thrice: “But if you can believe me, I got out of the GQ.” The gang star rapper is, the magazine knew to report in a recent feature, almost daily on the green. Not that Schoolboy Q would make a secret of his passion for such a patrician pastime: “Nigga gotta hit the golf course to get a peace of mind,” it says on “CrasH.” “And now that’s why you want to open such a rancid reality barrel, huh?” the connoisseur poisons back.

Not at all, but unfortunately, this provides the perfect hanger to eliminate the fact that a CrasH Talk about death is not entirely satisfactory and that the Conaisseur also knows precisely what I mean, the stupid sow. It continues in “CrasH”: “Got my daughter that mansion / gave my mother that million,” the grass is green, and the ball is punched. In addition, it is a thoroughly satisfying beat from Boi-1da, fully satisfying in the sense of 3+.

That’s why the connoisseur in his smoke swaths always prefers the past great deeds before CrasH Talk in doubt: There is a difference between arrived and arrived, between redeemed and saturated, to talk to the suit wearers of the majors at eye level and to play golf with them. The snot and Schoolboy Q’s hunger evaporates too often without leaving a significant trace. An example is Travis Scott’s hook on “CHopstix,” which essentially consists of a repetition of this word. He repeats this with a beautiful melody. You can’t complain. He does well what he does there but doesn’t do much.

Of 14 tracks, only three scratch the three and a half minutes; the rest is sometimes significantly shorter. Whether Q and producers have deliberately left things out of creativity or left out of creativity, sometimes less, sometimes all the more, they also arise after the fifth or tenth round. Brutally said, you can put the tracks apart from the highlights mentioned above in the categories ‘quite good…’ and ‘…but what’s the point?’ to divide.

“Drunk feat. 6LACK” is a very good song, pleasantly melancholic without great depth; the latter also delivers the album’s best feature here, but this is annoyingly short. Somewhere between the categories, it says “Lies feat. Ty Dolla $ign & YG,” whose loose-flaky-poppy-summer cliché beat, on the one hand, does not fit into the other dark sound image but still somehow goes through as a West Coast lowrider reminiscence. YG doesn’t bother with his part when he’s there, and how the voice of Ty Dolla $ign sounds, you’ve forgotten when he takes a breath.

“Black Folk” feels like “Tales” is not quite as good, not bad, but nothing more. The same applies to “Die Wit Em,” which complements the mass of the more complex tracks of the album with its redundancy and the ideal beat. Strangely impassiveness pulls “Dangerous feat. Kid Cudi” over one and, with all due respect for his art, raises the question of how much Cudi gets for humming a little on the instrumental.

On the one hand, the effect goes toward the annoying “Floating feat. 21 Savage,” which looks like the clamoring horror parody of a 21 Savage track. The beat relates to Metro Boomin’s atmospheric masterpieces, like a children’s keyboard to a Steinway. Q abruptly changes from the deep registers copied by his guest into an annoying quack, and when 21 Savage double-time raps, he sounds like he’s stumbling down a staircase. On the other hand, there is “Water feat. Lil Baby” with probably the stupidest but catchiest hook of 2019: “Yeah, I got that water, yeah, I got that water (that H2O).”

He is now hardly visible in the smoke but reveals his position again by vigorous coughing, and now has to decide regarding CrasH Talk, which he does not like at all. “Well, you can already hear that. Q, you know, he’s a supple dude. He lives for the gang hit, and he loves golfing. Kind of cool, but somehow also sh*t. But you have to treat yourself to that. Of course, you can also leave it. But I once heard a story about a farmer whose son breaks his leg, and the farmer only says, good, bad, who knows? This goes somehow further and still has a moral. I’ll tell you when I can think of it again.”

Five years later, he did and came back harder with BLUE LIPS.