The Los Angeles rapper has lived a lot of life in his 27 years. “I call myself All-American,” he says. “I done been an athlete, a gang member, drug dealer. I done been a kid that was kind of living on the fortunate side when my mama was starting to do good, and I was hustling just to hustle because, dude, my homies was doing it, you get what I’m saying? But then I ended up actually really needing to hustle. And out of all that s— I done did, I had a job — worked a job for two years. I worked at the railroad. Go to jail, get a strike. All this s— happened before I was even 21.” And then he started rapping.

ScHoolboy Q has released two mixtapes and, just this week, his major label debut — but he says he’s got two more albums all planned out. As a part of Top Dawg Entertainment, the company that gave rise to critical phenom Kendrick Lamar, ScHoolboy Q has played the role of the hard-boiled cut up. With Oxymoron, he says he wanted to make “a gangster rap L.A. dark album from a good student’s point of view.” When we sat down with him, the night before he performed brand new songs from the album, he spoke thoughtfully about addiction (his own and his uncle’s), why he used to think rappers were fake and how he grew up.