The latest entry in my weekly column at Refined Hype. This week: Lupe Fiasco, and his genre-bending debut, "Food & Liquor".
Hip-hop fans can get so engrossed with geography - east coast, west coast, dirty south - they often forget to look at their maps and remember that there is a place with no ‘coast’ that produces some damn good hip-hop too; the Midwest.
It’s almost out of the question to write a column about Lupe Fiasco without mentioning Kanye West, so I’m just going to do it right away and say that both hail from that often overlooked city in the Midwest, Chicago. But there’s much more to the connection than just location.
On top of the fact that West featured Fiasco on his 2006 track, “Touch the Sky”, both rappers released debut albums that brought on an original, diverse style to hip-hop. On “The College Dropout” in 2004, West rapped about themes such as career pressure, academic discontent, and surgical procedures; not your usual hip-hop banter. This type of thought and culture change paved the way for a rapper like Lupe Fiasco to break out. He did just that with “Food and Liquor” in September 2006.
Although it was released only a few years ago, Fiasco’s album is one of the most eclectic and profound rap albums of the past decade. Lupe is nothing like a traditional rap star, and “Food and Liquor” is nothing like a traditional rap album. Without making much use of the usual imagery that finds it way into hip-hop, Fiasco reflects on the personal and the political, and reminds fans of everything hip-hop can be.
There are so many solid tracks on this album, including "Sunshine", “Kick Push” "The Cool" and, “Daydreamin’”, that it’s nearly impossible to figure which is the best.
On its face, the first single “Kick Push”, is a track about skateboarding, but below the surface, Fiasco deals with themes of adolescence that makes it truly unique. Over smooth, jazzy horn samples, Fiasco tells the story of a kid learning to ride a skateboard as a metaphor for struggling to find one's way in life and love. You can feel the raw and personal emotion and Lupe’s love for skating as he raps: “He said, 'I would marry you/But I'm engaged to these aerials and varials/And I don't think this board is strong enough to carry two'".
Fiasco worked with producer’s such as Jay-Z, The Neptunes, Kanye West, and Mike Shinoda on the album, so it’s no wonder why so many of the beats are fantastic. “I Gotcha”, produced by Pharrell Williams has the best beat on the album, and some of Lupe’s cleverest lines. Pharrell drops in the perfect mix of percussion, piano and electric pop as Fiasco raps: They call me Lupe, I'll be your new day/They wanna smell like me they want My bouquet/But they can’t they, they accented like the UK/Turn that dude Lupe to Pepe Le Peu spray.”
“Daydreamin’”, which featured singer Jill Scott, won a Grammy for Best Urban/Alternative Song, and is my personal favorite track on the album. The beat is mostly a loop of tripped out sounds, but Scott shows off her wide range of vocal skills throughout. Scott has one of the most underrated singing voices around, and she is the perfect compliment to Fiasco’s ferocious rhymes on the track.
As shown on “Touch the Sky”, Lupe Fiasco and Kanye West have great chemistry, and the duo proves it once again on, “The Cool”. Produced by West, the track is easily the strangest on the album, but also one of the most inventive.
Fiasco uses the clichéd thug-life tale, but turns it on its head by instilling a satirical awareness to the story about a gangster who rises from the grave, zombied out, to take revenge on a world that put him in a premature grave. Fiasco plays narrator as he raps: “Suit jacket pocket held his baby daughter's picture/Right next to it one of his man's stuck a swisher/He had a notion as he laid there soaking/Saw that the latch was broken, he kicked his casket open.”
If Chicago is the little brother to New York, then we’ll call Lupe Fiasco the sharp-tongued cousin. Either way, “Food and Liquor” is album like no other, and is definitely a classic.
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