Both incredibly successful hip-hop artists who have been thriving in the music industry for over a decade, Kendrick Lamar and ScHoolboy Q have been at each other’s side since the beginning. And now, as Q prepares to roll out his sixth studio album, his first in four years, he is taking the time to reflect on how much Lamar has meant to him.
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On Sunday (September 3), the BackOnFigg podcast released a new interview with Q, where he speaks about his friendship with Lamar, referring to him by his old nickname K-Dot.
“Dot taught me… Dot taught me so much, bro,” Q told BackOnFigg hosts T-Rell, Smac, and Heather Sanders. “Dot… Dot gave me… Dot gave me so much confidence. Dot made me a rapper. This shit make me want to cry right now… Dot saved my life. I owe a lot to Dot.”
As the story goes, when Lamar was ascending through the ranks of hip-hop in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Q served as his on-stage hype man, while occasionally writing and performing raps on the side. Q spoke more about this era of his life with BackOnFigg, emphasizing how much Lamar helped catapult his career.
While pursuing rap outside of being a hype man, Q would land a deal with Top Dawg Entertainment, the same record label Lamar was signed to. However, before he could even put out his debut album Setbacks (2011), which Lamar delivered two separate feature verses for, higher-ups at TDE would discuss dropping Q from the label, as they didn’t feel he was dedicated enough to his craft. Lamar put these discussions to a stop though.
“Dot saved me,” Q said. “Dot made me his hype man. He would tell me to come to the studio all the time… I was like his lil’ sidekick.”
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Before the interview, Q had touched on this situation plenty of times before and did so the most thoroughly back in 2014 in an interview with Crack Magazine, just months removed from the release of his breakout third LP, Oxymoron.
“In, like, 2010, when I was Kendrick’s hype man, I started making some money. I mean, I was only making $200 a show, but I was motivated,” he said. “And Kendrick put me in the spotlight with him, every time we came out he’d introduce me, like ‘Yo, this is Schoolboy Q!’ And then we rocked a couple of songs together and shit.”
Currently, Q is working on his next full-length project, which is expected to arrive at some point this year. However, while the BackOnFigg show did report that the LP was “coming very very soon” back in June, Q told them in this recent conversation that he doesn’t like to rush his albums, and that his real-life experiences guide his decision-making in terms of releases.
“When it comes to music, I don’t look at it as like, ‘Oh, you have to drop every year.’ I’m like, no, your favorite rapper has to drop every year because he needs chilli,” he said. “I do what I want because I move off peace, I move off my experiences. As a[n] artist, if I bring nothing to the table that comes from my life, I don’t feel I should put it out.”
Photo by Frank Hoensch/Redferns
