Plug One

Lupe Fiasco
Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool
Atlantic

Lupe Fiasco isn’t above recycling ideas. If Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor had a tone reminiscent of Kanye West’s Late Registration, then Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool opens with “Go-Go Gadget Flow,” a bounce rap with a title similar to Gnarls Barkley’s “Go-Go Gadget Gospel.” Even the cover art looks like Thrice’s artwork for The Alchemy Index Vols. I & II, which was released over a month before The Cool. For all of his brazen originality, which he demonstrates on The Cool in spades, Lupe sometimes has difficulty thinking outside of the box.

It is possible to enjoy The Cool without having to pick apart its central concept, a moralistic tragedy about a fledging MC selling his soul to the devil for success. It takes a close listen reveal that these songs aren’t necessarily coming from Lupe himself, but a third character he has created: Michael Young History, a.k.a. the Cool. On “The Coolest” he makes clear the Cool’s descent into a deal with the Streets. “She said she’d give me greatness/Status/Placement over the others/My face would grace covers of the magazines of the hustlers/Paper the likes of which that I had never seen/Her eyes glow green with the logo of our dreams,” he raps. Subsequent cuts such as “Superstar,” a somewhat pretentious arena rap that oddly grows more appealing with repeated plays, subtly twist Lupe’s themes on fame to reflect the Cool’s increasingly distorted perspective. As the Cool collapses in a hail of bullets (“The Die”), loses his soul to the Streets’ master the Game (“Put You on Game”), and turns into a zombie (“Fighters”), Lupe walks a thin line between full-blown conceptualism and accessible, personal songwriting with remarkable skill.

The music, mostly produced Soundtrakk, reflects Lupe’s ambitions to make hip-hop that rocks on a scale similar to Coldplay and Radiohead. (On “Hello/Goodbye,” a breakbeat track produced by UNKLE, Lupe even sing-raps in a flat, nasally vocal similar to Tool’s Maynard Patrick Keenan.) The keyboard notes are watery and amorphous; “Paris, Tokyo” even approaches the softness of contemporary jazz. That Soundtrakk would take his cues from Coldplay’s piano cheese testifies to the cross-cultural appeal of the latter’s soothing, comforting sounds. Still, a funky guitar lick or some noisy dissonance would be nice. However, when compared with his overwrought, string-laden miasmas on Food & Liquor, Soundtrakk actually shows some restraint. Despite its sickly sweet grooves, “Paris, Tokyo” is a nice breezy song about love and international travel. The haunting, “Intruder Alert” could have been made during the early 90s, the era of kitchen-sink dramas such as 2Pac’s gangsta rap ballad “Brenda’s Got a Baby, as Lupe rhymes about a woman recovering from rape.

The Cool is a bravely ambitious album, but it’s not a great one. It often threatens to tumble from the weight of its bombast. “Little Weapon,” a song Patrick Stump from Fall Out Boy produces with a heavy emphasis on pounding percussion and glittery xylophone effects, brings surprising life to The Cool’s lumbering prog hip-hop. For the most part, that sort of lightness is sorely lacking here, even if The Cool’s overwhelming portentousness yields some small rewards such as “Superstar” and “Gotta Eat,” the latter an effective ode to the code of the Streets.

Above all, The Cool reflects the danger of being a deliberate strategist who sacrifices little to raw naturalism. (See the self-proclamatory “Dumb It Down” for proof.) To be fair, hip-hop stars tend to be too aware of their supposed superiority, and all too ready to proclaim whatever they do as a masterpiece or a classic. Contrary to most of his peers, Lupe is truly a vivid and fascinating MC and, sometimes, an innovative theorist. The only thing holding him back is self-consciousness.

Lupe Fiasco
Food & Liquor
Atlantic

The term “backpacker” has become a pejorative. Originally used to describe early 90s rap groups like Black Moon and Lords of the Underground, who rocked backpacks in “Who Got the Props”-era publicity stills, it is now used as code for hopelessly “underground” artists who seem angrily out of touch with current trends. Lupe Fiasco may be the most popular MC in recent memory to embrace the insult. Near the end of the video for “Daydreamin’” the Chicagoan hops onto a skateboard, a gleaming cream-colored backpack casually swinging from his left shoulder. That an artist as sleek and cool as Lupe Fiasco could be regarded by some rap fans as a nerd (along with Kanye West, whose high-school years were more Ferris Bueller’s Day Off than Weird Science) speaks considerably to the increasingly limited roles African-Americans can successfully adopt.

On Food & Liquor Lupe aka Lupin III is painfully conscious of his otherness, a skateboarding, drug-and-alcohol free Muslim amidst a generation of self-proclaimed crack rappers. His insecurities, which he masks as universal truths, fuel an album that is not only fresh and exciting, but hectoring and heavy-handed. It bears resemblance to West’s Late Registration, with sweeping orchestral strings typical of a Hollywood movie score. Newcomer Gemini (an R&B artist on Lupe’s boutique imprint 1st and 15th), Sarah Green and Jill Scott pepper the choruses with plaintively heartfelt vocals, making for songs as soul-searing testimony. Sometimes the formula works: On the graceful anthem “Kick, Push,” Soundtrakk’s weighty backdrop turns Lupe’s narrative of growing up as a skateboard kid into a profound tour de force. Elsewhere, as with “Sunshine,” the same producer proves too overwhelming.

With the stage set for performance as consciousness-raising, Lupe’s verses often feel weighted down, even when he’s tossing off rhymes as deft as the third verse on “Just Might Be OK,” where he describes the
mind state of a young thug in Westside Chicago. “I’m cool/ I don’t foretell bests/I ain’t the nicest MC/I ain’t Cornel West/I’m Cornel Westside/Chi-Town Rivera/Malcolm eXorcise the demons/Gangsta leanin’/Who traded in his kufi for a new era/Chose a .44 over a motherboard/I ain’t accredited, institute graduate/I ain’t from Nazareth/My conception wasn’t immaculate/I didn’t master no calculus/A good addition to the rap audience/I backflipped on the mattress they slept on me on,” he raps.

If only a few of the songs are standouts (like “Kick, Push” and “I Gotcha”), then none of Food & Liquor is truly disappointing. Lupe’s raps are consistently amazing, from the U.S. government-indicting “American Terrorist” to the hip-hop lament “Hurt Me Soul.” Food & Liquor’s ambitious scope nearly overshadows him, but his dexterous wordplay shines through.