JULY 2019 — 49Beginning with his second album,
2012’s Habits & Contradictions, Q
- wearing bucket hats and tie-dye,
rhyming over Portishead samples –
reimagined what gangsta rap could
look and sound like. If other rappers
needed shotgun blasts and air horns
to add extra energy, all Q needed to
do was shout “YAWK YAWK YAWK!”
The tremendous success of 2014’s
Oxymoron spurred Q’s move into a
mansion in Calabasas, one of those
LA subdivisions that come complete
with neighbours like Kanye and
Drake. He even began personally
homeschooling his daughter. It was
the good life, until it wasn’t.
“Being in the house so damn
much can drive you crazy,” Q says.
“Golf taught me patience, and you
need that in the music industry,
because this shit is evil.”
Setting up at the tee, he gets
into position. No one will mistake
him for his favourite golfers (Tony
Finau, Rickie Fowler), but it’s
been only a year. His swing is still
Kendrick and Jay Rock convinced
him it wasn’t. Darkness set in.
“I’d be in the house smoking
weed, just waiting to go to the
studio every day. That’s not a good
life. That brings on depression,” Q
says, “It’s toxic for your kid, too.”
There was also the risk of the
ostensibly unthinkable. In the
past two years alone, accidental
overdoses resulted in the untimely
demises of Lil Peep and Q’s close
friend and collaborator Mac Miller,
the latter of whom he still has a
hard time talking about. It was a
tough couple of years.
Enter the game of kings and
the Calabasas Country Club.
Between the fresh air, the equally
meditative and maddening
aspects of the sport and the club’s
apparently laissez-faire approach
to his penchant for lighting up on
the back nine, Q was immediately
sold. He augmented his new
obsession with boxing workouts,
intermittent fasting (he’ll eat only
between noon and 8pm) and daily
morning sessions of Call Of Duty
(“Videogames saved my life, too”).
But it was ultimately golf that
parted the psychic clouds, allowing
him to lighten up and make the
music that he actually wanted
to make. Cue Crash Talk, his
third major label album, which
features Travis Scott and Kid Cudi
and brings both sides of Q into
harmony: the ferocious bullet-
holes-in-your-coupe-gangsta-rap
assassin and the hedonistic, gonzo
one-man party with an innate pop
sensibility. It’s Q as killer and lover,
reckless shit-talker and responsible
father, grown up gangsta and
aspiring scratch golfer.
After another shanked drive on
eight – Adrian assures me this is
an off day for Q – the group reaches
the ninth hole, a final chance
for redemption. Q assumes the
position and locks over that dimpled
teardrop – and just like that, it’s
effortless. Steel to ball to the fairway,
a magisterial drive that would be
the envy of every periodontist at the
club. A pure shot with an iron, a chip
onto the green, and an eight-foot
putt later, he’s made par.
“Yes, I’m back!” Q pumps his
fists and whoops and exuberantly
gives pounds to Adrian and me.
“I’m back now!”a little stiff, but it’s powerful. He
thwacks the ball 220 yards in the
air, rounding into form.
“People don’t give a fuck about
you,” he adds, “All they want is
music and to see you living the
rapper life.”
For Q, living the rapper life
started interfering with the business
of rapping. The last time I saw him,
in 2014, he downed two Styrofoam
cups full of promethazine and Sprite
before 2am – a daily occurrence
during his darkest stretches in the
middle of the decade. He’s disclosed
previous issues with Xanax and
Percocet, too.
He released Blank Face in 2016
to substantial acclaim, toured it
and headed straight back into the
studio once that was over, but he
wasn’t feeling right. He estimates
that he had made and discarded
two full albums (“They were trash”)
and completed a third, which he
briefly concluded was ready for
consumption before labelmates