The rappers on TDE didn’t always have it this good. On Tuesday, the rising rap label released Schoolboy Q‘s Oxymoron, their second major-label release in under two years, but Kendrick Lamar remembers the days that the crew spent in the studio wishing that they can get to this point.
“We don’t get too many albums out on this side of town, so when you got a crazy album like Q and the fact that it’s from over here. You gotta respect it from everywhere,” Kendrick said when he surprisingly phoned into Power 106 in Los Angeles on Tuesday to congratulate his fellow Black Hippy MC on the new release.
Kendrick, whose 2012 good kid, m.A.A.d city album is hailed as a modern-day rap classic by a number of critics, champions Schoolboy’s Oxymoron as a “crazy, classic gangsta rap album.”
Oxymoron immediately hit #1 on iTunes and thus far looks to have an impressive first week of sales.
Hearing how far Q has come, makes Lamar remember their humble beginnings. “Thinking back to when we were all in the studio, planning these strategies out, starving together and really waiting for the day to come, for my album to drop, for his album to drop. Now it came and it’s like n—as really, really put in the work and dedication, so I’m proud from the jump,” he said. “When I first met Q, he wasn’t rappin’. He was on some other stuff.”
“Kendrick, he took me on tour with him and I was his hype man,” Q recalled. “He blessed me… putting me in the light and now I’m here.”
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