Ten Years of a Blank Face, ScHoolboy Q Plays the Hollywood Palladium

ScHoolboy Q is bringing Blank Face LP back to Sunset Boulevard. The rapper plays the Hollywood Palladium on Friday, October 9, a show that was already sold out when the tour was announced in August, and returns for a second Los Angeles night at the Novo downtown on Monday, October 12, according to the tour routing published by The Source.

Both nights belong to the 10 Years of Blank Face LP tour, which opened October 1 at the Tabernacle in Atlanta and runs through Brooklyn, Washington, Anaheim and San Diego before it reaches Los Angeles. The anniversary shows will bring the album back to the stage alongside selections from across his catalog, according to tour details Interscope Capitol shared with BroadwayWorld.

A Record From Hoover Street

Blank Face LP arrived in July 2016 as his fourth studio album. It debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 74,000 units, kept out of the top spot by Drake’s Views, and opened at No. 1 on the Top Album Sales chart, Billboard reported that week. It went on to earn RIAA gold certification and a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album, and its single “THat Part,” with Kanye West, was nominated for Best Rap Performance. The guest list also included Anderson .Paak, Jadakiss, Vince Staples, Miguel and SZA.

It is a Los Angeles record through and through. Pitchfork’s review called him a South Central native and heard “spoken-word verses painting a past on Hoover Street.” Rolling Stone noted that the song “John Muir” is named for his junior high school, and wrote that his 2014 major label debut, Oxymoron, had marked him as “the most street MC in L.A.’s Black Hippy rap collective,” the crew whose breakout star was Kendrick Lamar. Most of the beats came from Digi+Phonics, the collective’s go-to production team.

The album also arrived after a stretch of doubt. Oxymoron had debuted at No. 1, and the fame that followed wore on him. “When you go out, you gotta have a security guard,” he told Rolling Stone in July 2016. “You gotta take 1,000 pictures before you even enter the place that you’re trying to enjoy yourself at.” He was blunt about where that had left him. “My mind was set on leaving rap,” he said.

A Room With History

He stayed, and the catalog kept growing. BroadwayWorld traces it from Setbacks in 2011 and Habits & Contradictions in 2012 through CrasH Talk in 2019 and BLUE LIPS in 2024. Grimy Goods, the Los Angeles music site, summed up his place in the genre in its weekly concert guide. “The TDE veteran has spent over a decade carving out a darker, more menacing corner of West Coast hip-hop.”

The Palladium has hosted big nights for a long time. Frank Sinatra opened the room with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in 1940, Billboard reported in 2008, when Jay-Z played a sold out show to reopen the 4,000 capacity venue after more than a year of renovations. The same room hosted a sold out punk night on October 1, covered in Where They Cut Their Teeth, Social Distortion Brings Born to Kill to the Hollywood Palladium.

Friday will be a busy night in Hollywood. LAist’s weekly guide lists the Palladium show alongside Mac DeMarco at the Hollywood Bowl, covered in Home Songs Under the Shell, Mac DeMarco Headlines the Hollywood Bowl, and Blonde Redhead at the Bellwether. Anyone shut out of the Palladium still has Monday at the Novo, the last Los Angeles stop before the tour heads to Phoenix, Oakland and Las Vegas.