Song of the year-Hell Of A Night by Schoolboy Q produced by DJ Dahi

by Dan-O

Every important boxer, important enough to have every other boxer wanting to fight them, had someone they just flat out didn’t want to fight. Sugar Ray Robinson ended his career with one hundred and seventy three wins but he did NOT want to fight Tony Zale. Sugar Ray Leonard captivated an entire generation and tricked Marvin Hagler out of his greatest moment BUT he didn’t want any part of Aaron “The Hawk” Pryor. Pryor walked around shouting with an entourage shouting hype, looking so powerfully confidently high off of cocaine that he would destroy anyone. The light welterweight from Cincinnati was a hurricane of hard punches from unseen angles and no matter how many times he shouted for Sugar Ray (usually in a post fight victory interview) Leonard wanted nothing to do with him. While The Hawk will never be remembered by the kind of accolades that Sugar Ray II will be remembered with, he’s one of those haunting figures. If you’ve seen him fight you’ll never forget it. Schoolboy Q is much more The Hawk than Old Dirty Bastard.

Hell Of A Night comes off Schoolboy’s sophomore album Oxymoron (since he doesn’t consider 2011’s Setbacks official). It builds on the power of Habits & Contradictions with disgusting imagery, violent gang stories, drug addled depression and bangers growled from the diaphragm (sometimes all happening at the same time). Q has voice alteration capability that I can only manage to compare to Aaron Pryor who left legendary opponents wondering where his punches were coming from. Q seems to have a thousand varations of his hoarse interjection flow that can make the saddest story of violence or child neglect as exciting as the most provocative brag. On a superb album this is the song I always click on first. Part of the credit is due to DJ Dahi for producing a beat epic enough to be the theme song for March Madness or the NBA Playoffs but the other half goes to a lyricist who I sometimes refer too as Wario. Meaning that if you consider Kendrick Lamar the Mario of the TDE crew than Schoolboy Q is his Wario, seemingly cackling his way through the life of a super-villain on every song.Schoolboy may never be THE guy in rap; next to people like Ye, Jay, and Ross(or even Kendrick) but at the very least he’ll be like The Hawk and I’ll always remember him yelling YAK! YAK! the way I remember Pryor pointing his lead glove at his opponent before the match and holding it until the bell rung.