New Lupe Fiasco Interview (Complex)

[Lazar]

On the Chicago MC's first album, "Food and Liquor" he told the story of a hustler's life, and death. Now that character is resurrected and joined by two more for Lupe's more concept driven follow-up, "The Cool." In the outtakes from our December/January interview, Lupe does his best at describing each character (we tried to understand) but you just may have to buy the album to really get his drift.

By Richard "Treats" Dryden
Photograph by Fredrik Skogkvist

Complex: You had a song on your first album called "The Cool". Tell me about the concept behind it.
Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, it was produced by Kanye West and it was about a hustler who gets killed and comes back to life and digs his way out of his own grave and then goes back to like the neighborhood that he grew up in and eventually winds up, at the end of the song, getting robbed by the same gun that he got shot with by some little kid. So it's very macabre, very dark but I always wanted to do that record, to tell that story of somebody who comes back to life, that kind of manifested itself into "The Cool". And "The Cool" went on to be like the inspiration for the next album. I thought that storyline, that kind of macabreness, that kind of spookiness, you know, leant itself to be even deeper, to be just like one part of a whole kind of storyline. So I put a little bit more thought into it and kind of expanded on it.

C: So would you say that this album is darker than your first?
Lupe Fiasco: Oh yeah, it's much darker just on the strength of the situation that I'm in, in life right now is kind of a happy period. It's a lot of success but it came with a lot of sacrifice and having my pops pass away and just recently having an aunty pass away and then having a friend pass away, Stack Bundles, a rapper in New York who got murdered out here and then to also have my partner get locked up, to get 44 years, all that stuff came along with the situation. It made the setting for me a more darker because I'm a little bit sad.

C: Did all of that happen between albums?
Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, it happened towards the end of Food and Liquor, kind of towards the end of the promotion for that, like the whole time we were recording Food and Liquor, we were on trial and you know, going through the motions of court with my partner and my father was in and out the hospital during the whole situation.

C: Do you vent about those specific issues directly on this album?
Lupe Fiasco: Yeah actually I do. I think I probably tell them through the story of "The Cool". As far as the resurrection, you know, it's kind of like a reach that I would love to have my father back or I would love to have my partner out of jail which, hopefully he'll be getting out soon. I wish that process was actually real and could actually take place.

C: When you mention that macabre kind of feel to the album or even to that song in general, a few movies come to mind like "From Hell" or "Jack the Ripper". Do those also tie into those songs or is that the feeling that you're trying to bring to it?
Lupe Fiasco: I think in a certain way. It's a little bit more serious, you know in this approach as opposed to the first album where everything was a bit more playful and I think that comes directly from just the mood that the album is in.

C: People, at least I thought the idea of Food and Liquor, was going to be something that like blurs the line between so called conscious rap and the street or just like for hustlers and rap nerds.
Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, this album is more street, I get to tell my street story through these characters. In "The Cool", there's another character, and to go back, talking about the maturity and the whole thing, it actually comes from like being cool. You know, the clothes that I think are cool and things of that nature but a lot of the stuff comes from that. Like I think, you know, button-up shirts with the collar up, safari shirts are cool, you know, and this is cool and that's cool but as far as the street story and stuff, I build up these characters to tell these stories. Like there's three main characters: The Street, The Game, and The Cool. The Street is the actual personification of the street, you know, if the street was a walking, talking person, what would it look like? It would look like this. Then The Game, is the personification of the game, the hustler's game, the pimp's game, the Mack's game, the prostitute's game, you know and what would she look like? The Cool, to me he has two levels: there's the real, kind of Fonzie ["Happy Days"] cool and then there's the kind of destructive, chasing the cool?trying to be cool in the streets, you know, I'm cool because I got a gun, I'm cool because I sell drugs so that character is represented in two ways. He's represented on both sides, he's represented as this fresh, young, cool, fly, money-getting type of dude who everybody likes and then he's represented also, on the other side as this zombie with a rotting, dead hand who freshly digs his self out the grave.

C: Oh, so this is that character from the first album making a second appearance?
Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

C: Do you think that characters like that, they try too hard? That they don't actually see that quote, unquote coolness in them? That they have it naturally but they do all these other things whether it's like hustling in the streets or trying to deal with fast money, that they're trying too hard to achieve that cool when they already have it.
Lupe Fiasco: I don't know, some people already possess it. I think it's the arguments to be had or the discussions to be had about it. Is it something that is just in you and it's from your environment or is it something that you're born with because I know, there are two type of people that are cool to me in the world, like the coolest people were the nerds in high school. You know after high school, all those people who were nerds and you they got the coolest jobs with the coolest type of people, they could do the coolest things, they could build a computer from scratch, as opposed to all the popular people in school, now they're in the service industry, they're working in retail, the stuff they do isn't cool, or even they fell into the whim of the streets, you know they fell off into doing drugs or whatever or when they were doing drugs in high school, now they're the uncool people. Now they got ten kids and all types of other stuff as opposed to focusing so I think they were chasing that cool in high school and they'll be represented by the hustler freshly dug out the grave, rotting hand and the whole thing as opposed to the other type of cool person who was the nerd at one point, who kind of stuck to his goals and when he got out of high school, his life blossomed, he could relate to more people, a kind of all-around nice guy

C: Right. What about The Game? Can you describe that character?
Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, The Game, he's a very dapper, he has dice for eyes and he had bullets for teeth. Actually there was a cipher for BET with Papoose and Styles P and the verse that I kicked was actually the physical description of The Game. "The game as the belly of a beast/ blunts for fingers and hollow tips for teeth/ wire taps for ears/ Nike airs for feet/ blaspheme for cribs?/ a system for a heart/ and rap music for beats" etc, etc, etc. So I put as much physical, as much as that stuff as I could into him so he breathes crack smoke. If you go back and listen to that song, every kind of line that's in that song is some physical characteristic. They're all real characters, like Kadeem Hardeson actually plays The Cool, and there's a few other actors, a few people out of Hollywood that we cast to actually play the other characters as well, so they're actually real people.

C: Sort of like interludes on the album with those people's voices?
Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, actually the way the album is structured is that story because I didn't want to get to heavy into it, like I put a lot of thought into from behind the scenes so from me like trying to explain it, it may come out kind of complex because it is. It's a deep storyline. It'll probably be a little bit more easy to follow on the album once everything's done and all the songs are down and people see the characters but me trying to describe is like, wow, because there's a lot that goes into it. On the album, I didn't want to get hammered down into just doing a full concept album because to me full concept albums have their flaws because you're chasing, trying to tell a story and you might not even know how to end it. So you might just do something just to end it and it might be kind of wacky or whatever. So what I did, I just focused on five records, and tried to tell that story in five records and some of them I direct, actual line for line, word for word what the character would say and some of them I'm more abstract, describing the character or describing the influence of the character. But it's [the story] over like 5 or 6 records plus the album has records like "Superstar" or me just talking about what happened in the past year and just rapping to be a rapper or whatever but it's 5 stories that I like directly focus on the storyline of "The Cool."

C: I think having those interludes will help explain those songs because you know sometimes like when you get so wrapped up in a song you may have to go back and listen to it.
Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, it's so much, we're going to tell it across so many different mediums like we're doing a vintage radio show, kind of like the throwback Vincent Price, "War of the Worlds" kind of situation for it. Like there's toys, there's all kinds of craziness for it, where the story is going to get told on as many levels as possible, and the music is just like one of those mediums. There's a comic book, that's just one of the mediums that you can get it and feel it on another level, like you can read it or you can listen to it as a story then you can listen to it as music then you can actually play with it as a toy, you can actually wear it as a shirt.

C: Cool.

Source: www.complex.com

[funkkid]

nice interview