February 2008

LUPE FIASCO
TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL

Homework by: John Patterson

2007 never looked like it was going to be Lupe Fiasco’s year. During the recording of The Cool, his father died, the supportive, indulgent parent who introduced Lupe to hip hop by pumping NWA and the Geto Boys in the car as an initially unimpressed baby Lupe squirmed in horror and embarrassment at the music’s violence and vulgarity. If that wasn’t bad enough, his mentor, hip hop mogul Charles Patton, was jailed for 44 years after being caught with heroin worth an estimated street-value of $1. Which is about as gangsterish as things have ever got for Lupe, a self-proclaimed “nerd” who grew up in an enlightened Chicago household liking “uncool things” like comic books, japanese anime, skateboarding, jazz, and even classical music. It took Nas’s It Was Written to persuade him that hip hop might offer him an avenue for expression (despite that early ambivalence toward gangsta rap), and strategic alliances with Jay-Z and fellow Chicagoan Kanye West to send him in the right direction. And that sense of direction and clearly stated vision have led us to The Cool, in which Fiasco stakes his place as a major player in the wave of smooth, artful, soulinflected hip hop that’s come out of the Windy City in the last few years.

As West showed on Late Registration by sampling Move On Up, recent Chicago hip hop takes great sustenance from the example of municipal musical impresario Curtis Mayfield, who believed in melody, polyrhythms and variety and opened up soul music with every new recording. Kanye West, Common and now Lupe Fiasco share Mayfield’s melodic sense, his social conscience and his refusal to confine himself within arbitrary genre limitations. While Kanye rounded out his College trilogy capably with Graduation (and stomped on his one-note rival 50 Cent), and Common released what many critics called “just another Common album” (hey, I’ll take that!), Fiasco’s The Cool proved that, two albums into his career he had found himself as an artist.

Mixing the smooth-jazz idealism of Common with the musical exuberance and fluid production we associate West (a producer first, a rapper second, as many have noted), and with more than a few nods to A Tribe Called Quest, The Cool is a smorgasbord of styles and collaborators. Unkle, Matthew Santos (on the single Superstar), Snoop Dog are aboard and soul diva Nikki Jean adds mellifluous vocal fills throughout, especially on the heartbreaking Hip Hop Saved My Life. Little Weapon is a bleak, noirish piece about child soldiers, high school shooters and street gangstas and Hello-Goodbye rumbles ominously in the brain for days. Fiasco is every inch the rapper that West isn’t, his flow and rhymes unspooling apparently effortlessly and always with mucho soul and brains. In the year of MIA, UGK and new albums from Wu Tang and Ghostface, The Cool stands out of its beauty, intelligence and, the title notwithstanding, its warmth.

The Cool is out now