How did ScHoolboy Q get his rap name?
Born Quincy Matthew Hanley in Los Angeles in 1986, ScHoolboy Q is today an award-winning hip-hop artist celebrated for his thoughtful, delicate balance of raw street realism with his trademark sharp wit that transcends the usual trappings of urban humour, all underscored with great emotional depth.
As fans and students of the school of hip-hop will know, ScHoolboy Q burst on the scene as a key member of the West Coast collective Black Hippy, which also featured young future stars Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, and Ab-Soul.
While the collective never actually created any albums together, they were frequent collaborators to each other’s individual project’s, with a familiarity so warm and informal they often wouldn’t even credit one another as guest vocalists or featured artists.
In this scene, the approaches to names – evidently – varied from member to member. Kendrick Lamar is, actually, Kendrick Lamar’s name; well, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, to be totally accurate. And unsurprisingly, Ab-Soul is not on the passport, but rather, the considerably less rock and roll Herbert Anthony Stevens IV. Jay Rock as a birth name has more wiggle room, and it is closer to his real name than that of Ab-Soul’s, to be fair: Johnny Reed McKinzie Jr. We kinda see what you did there!
As for ScHoolboy Q, now that’s one of the most random names not just out of the Black Hippy collective, but across mainstream hip-hop. If you’re wondering where he could have possibly gotten it from, you’re actually not alone. In an interview with NPR in 2014, the interviewer asked this immortal question. Q, even.
“My name comes from a pimp named Schoolboy, from my block,” the rapper explained. “Yeah, he’s a pimp. Well, used to be a pimp. He from my hood, too, he from Hoover. That’s part of my name.”
“But what my name really came from was from me having a 3.3 in high school in GPA but I was all into all this shit, you get what I’m saying?” he continued. “I was still an athlete, but my mom worked nights and when she would go to work at night, I would leave. Cause this was bout time we moved across the street so my grandma really wasn’t monitoring me like that.”
ScHoolboy Q was exposed early on in his life to contemporary LA gang culture, an intense environment which has shaped both his music and wider worldview since. As a teenager, he joined the 52 Hoover Gangster Crips. “I was gang-banging at 12. I was a Hoover Crip. My homies were doing it and I wanted to do it. I can’t really explain that. I didn’t get into it with another hood or anything like that. I was just following the leader,” he explained in a separate interview.
And in 2007, he was arrested for home invasion and sentenced to a six month jail sentence, half of which was completed under house arrest. It wasn’t until he turned 21 that he started to take a career in music seriously, something he has commented on as a means of expressing himself. With sex acclaimed studio albums and five Grammy nominations, it is clearly a very good form of expression.