Schoolboy Q Took Five Years Off From Music Because He Made So Much Money From Golf — But There Was A Downside, Too

It should come as no secret by now that Schoolboy Q loves golf. He’s talked before about how the sport helped him learn about himself as a person and he even partnered with 2K Games for the rollout for PGA Tour 2K21, appearing in the game’s launch trailer and performing at the game’s launch party in Los Angeles.

However, rap fans may not appreciate his love for the game as much when they learn it was one of the main reasons for the five-year gap between his last two albums, 2019’s Crash Talk and the newly released Blue Lips. Appearing on Lil Yachty’s podcast A Safe Space, Q recalled how he got into golf via a bet, but ended up making so much from his secondary career, it basically funded his hiatus from rap. “I don’t kick it in the studio no more,” he said after joking that his “studio budget is silly.”

“I was able to relax for five years,” he said. “I made a lot of money off rap, but golf helped me a lot.”

It should be no secret either that music is… not the most lucrative career. For every multi-millionaire, there are dozens of artists grinding to make ends meet — and for every one of them, there are even more whose dreams never make it past local stages in dive bars [raises hand]. So for Q, having some level of celebrity — and the perseverance to polish his game to serious levels — golf turned out to be a blessing for the South Central rapper because of endorsement deals.

Unfortunately, there was also a dark side: He says he fell back from endorsements and appearances because of racialized disrespect he experienced, such as being asked to wear grills to appear “more Black.”

You can watch the full interview above.