ScHoolboy Q: Show Preview
If you're not heading down the Peninsula on Friday night to see Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube represent the heyday of West Coast gangsta rap, there's a contemporary analog right in the city. Its thug-life mainstay is Los Angeles rapper
ScHoolboy Q, whose clamorous second album,
Oxymoron, featuring turns from Kendrick Lamar and other Black Hippy affiliates, elaborates a blunted street-smart worldview with a lingering edge of introspective intelligence. The 26-year-old siren
Jhené Aiko, also from Los Angeles, reflects Q's So-Cal narrative by calmer and sweeter means; she finally released her solo debut,
Souled Out, this year after more than a decade on the scene. Headlining is
The Weeknd, a brooder from Ontario with a honeyed voice and fiercely loose morals. His manicured insouciance, on display most recently on last year's debut full-length
Kiss Land, completes the bill's primer of expanded, evolved G-funk attitude.
— Daniel Levin Becker
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