Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor, the young rapper’s debut,
is now recognizable as probably the best hiphop album of last year. It
was an amazing confluence of major-label muscle (in terms of its strong
radio and MTV push and its superstar guest list) and the sort of
aggressive creativity too often relegated to releases with much smaller
budgets and less visibility.
Like his professed MC idol, Nas (Lupe cites It Was Written as his favorite rap album of all time), Lupe employs a stylish but
somewhat conservative flow, one that does shining service to his great
lyrical ability but that also exists well within the boundaries of
hiphop tradition. This means that, if he continues to produce excellent
work, Lupe can be an important and enduring voice in hiphop, but it
also means he might not elicit the same kind of excitement as MCs past
and present who offer a more startlingly new voice and cadence (read:
Snoop Dogg, Method Man, Lil Wayne, et al.).
Also like Nas, Lupe grew up in the hood but was never, by all
accounts, an active agent of criminality, which puts him nominally
outside the preferred narrative for today’s rap superstars. In some
ways, this places him in a position of greater artistic challenge, as
he cannot simply extol/amplify his self and story in the mode of Jay-Z
or T.I., but rather has to find conceptual angles from which to
approach mainstream rap’s primary thematic obsessions. On
“Daydreamin’,” Food & Liquor‘s second and superior single,
he pilots a giant automaton built out of the components of his hood
youth; he is as much a thematic ventriloquist as Nas rapping from the
point of view of a gun.
Food & Liquor‘s remarkably subtle zombie-themed “The
Cool” opens with the reanimation of a dead criminal who is adorned,
inside his casket, with the trappings of his hood-rich lifestyle
(Swisher Sweets, his chain, a bullet in his chest) and literally
drowned in Hennessy. By the track’s conclusion, its undead protagonist
finds himself at gunpoint after an attempt at resuming his criminal
tract, facing the very weapon by which he was slain, now in the hands
of younger thugs. Despite the song’s somewhat paradoxically
going-for-self chorus, the implication is clear—the blindly
self-satisfying criminal life yields a vicious circle of degradation
and death. Beyond the literally sociological, however, it is easy to
imagine Lupe’s cautionary zombie tale as a statement on the arc of
modern hiphop, and the potential cultural dead ends of the mainstream’s
love affair with the most soulless black stereotypes available.
Throughout his debut, Lupe manages to tread lightly and carry big
ideas in the gold-fronted world of modern popular rap music. This
artistic stratagem is well reflected in the relentless lyrical darts of
“The Emperor’s Soundtrack”: “I dream my chain became a loose noose that
was used to hang us/So now, my insane brain, my 32 teeth and two feet
creep like it’s Elm Street.”
Ultimately, Lupe is positioned, perhaps more than anyone else today,
to effect massive, positive artistic change in the hiphop mainstream.
For better or worse, he has the most star-making allies a rapper could
hope for—Kanye, Pharrell, and Jay-Z. And as he is only one record
deep, he has not yet been ghettoized in the minds of the rap-loving
public. Peers like Common and Talib Kweli are great MCs, but they have
also, to varying degrees, been permanently consecrated in the mausoleum
of “conscious” rappers, relegated to a different lane than true
mainstream heavyweight contenders, easy for much of the music’s fan
base to ignore.
Food & Liquor is, despite its overly voluminous
intro/outro and a quality-sagging middle third, an excellent record on
all fronts—critically adored, industry honored (via the
ever-questionable Grammys), and artistically heroic. His forthcoming
sophomore record, The Cool (scheduled for a Halloween
release), promises both potentially amazing artistic conceit (Lupe has
repeatedly stated his desire to reunite Pink Floyd to guest on the
record) and a well-threaded thematic through line (he has described it
as an extension of the characters and themes put forth on the song of
the same title). Here’s hoping Lupe can parlay his potential into a
victory, not only for himself but for hiphop. 