Lupe Fiasco’s Exit Stategy

Most artists don't consider premature retirement until after they've made it big — really big. But Lupe Fiasco isn't most artists. His first album, 2006's Food & Liquor, earned excellent reviews, a trio of Grammy nominations and sales that remain just shy of gold status, and his entertainingly scattershot new disc, The Cool, seems likely to build on this success. Still, he says he expects that his next recording will be his last.

Why? "It's more the rigmarole of the music business," he says. "The accolades are fine, the critical acclaim is fine, and everything is welcomed with open arms. But there's always the premise of the Big Brother Record Company doing you bad over your shoulder. And the only way to really kind of escape that is to stop for a period of time. I will still perform, I will still create. But the music will be in a different format. It wouldn't be in a CD. It's like, if you want to hear the next Lupe Fiasco album, you've got to come out and see a show on his thirty-city tour, because he's going to perform the new album, and it's all live." He likes the idea of fans checking out his work "the same way people had to listen to music in the 1400s and 1500s. They had to get dressed and go out and hear it once and really appreciate it — where everyone is really quiet, listening to every word. I guess I'm kind of a romantic in that sense."

Such renaissance fantasies only hint at the idiosyncrasies that season The Cool, an effort that mates ambitious arrangements and beats with lyrics that kill cliches on contact. Several songs on the album feature a trio of figures with emblematic monikers: the Streets, the Game and the title character, "a hustler supreme who sold more dope than anybody, made more money than anybody, had more power than anybody, wreaked more havoc than anybody," Fiasco notes. "He's represented as this rotting corpse with a rotting right hand. They won't let him into heaven or hell, so he's forced to walk the earth after his death and had to dig out of his own grave."

These conceptual aspects are interspersed with material that merges social consciousness with a sensibility that's often as loopy as it is Lupe. "Intruder Alert" is built upon a series of deeply felt vignettes about a rape victim learning to trust again, a drug addict and a destitute father trying to sneak his daughter into the country even though he knows she'll be branded as an illegal. In contrast, "Gotta Eat" is a bizarre pro-nutrition narrative in which the protagonist, a killer cheeseburger, spits out lines like, "When niggas gotta eat, that's when shit gets greasy." Then there's "Dumb It Down," which addresses the stigma against brainy hip-hop: "You going over niggas' heads, Lu (dumb it down)/They telling me that they don't feel you (dumb it down)/We ain't graduate from school, nigga (dumb it down)/Them big words ain't cool, nigga (dumb it down)."

Fiasco stresses that "Dumb It Down" is about more than attacking his naysayers. "It's as personal as people telling me, 'Lupe, your music's too smart,'" he concedes, "but it's also about the pseudo-man who's behind the scenes pushing buttons. Someone who's like, 'They're starting to think smart is cool. Dumb it down. You're giving them too much information. You're messing up this little thing we've had going for the last few hundred years. You need to relax a little bit.' It's as big as that — as direct and as indirect as both of those things. But I like that. I always like to leave my music open for the most complete and the most ridiculous interpretations possible. I think that's what gives it some of its life."

From the beginning, Fiasco has been nurtured on contradictions. Born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, he came of age in a dodgy portion of Chicago. "I grew up around prostitutes and drug dealers — finding drug needles and bags of dope and crooked police," he says. "But then there's the other side, where there were artists and musicians and sculptors and painters and comic books — that whole world. And it was always together. It was like I was always in both. And I guess it's still playing out as far as how that's going to affect me within the music and my career."