The Exactly

It’s not often that an emcees drop names like Picasso, Nietzsche, Basquiat and Cornel West in conversation, but Lupe Fiasco is that dude.

His debut full-length, 2006’s Food and Liquor, was a dazzling display of technical acumen, and one of the most humble and honest hip-hop albums in a minute. It was a blast of fresh air and solidified his status as one of his generation’s most promising emcees. His follow-up, The Cool, is even more ambitious and tracks the arc of a character named The Cool. It’s part Nathaniel Hawthorne, part Jay-Z, and is probably the most experimental hip-hop release of the year. Here, Lupe explains the in and outs of his brilliant new album.

Rhapsody: The Cool is a concept album. Why go this route?
Lupe Fiasco: I wanted to tell another story, and I couldn’t really tell it as Lupe Fiasco. It wouldn’t have fit. I wanted to tell a story about the streets; I wanted to tell it vividly, and I wanted to tell it supernaturally. I wanted to tell the story of street life -- the downfalls and calls and temptations of the streets. And I wanted to do it in a way that hadn’t been done before, using these three evil muses: The Streets, The Cool and The Game.

How would you summarize the story?
The little boy from [Food and Liquor’s] “He Say, She Say”—which is where his story begins—grows up in a single-parent home without a father. He’s eventually out of the reach of his mother, and he’s raised by The Game and falls in love with The Streets. The Streets promises the boy worldly acclaim and success, and he becomes a big-time hustler. The boy gets set up, killed and he comes back to life as The Cool. It starts on the first album on “The Cool,” where he digs his way out of the grave. He goes back to the block and is robbed by these two kids (ironically, with the same gun that killed him), and they ask him, “Are you scared to die?” And he replies, “Hustler for death, no heaven for a gangster.” It kind of just ends, that’s it, no real solution. It’s more about the risks that we take and the songs that we make. The characters themselves are the [focus].

Did you do character sketches?
I did, but in my own weird way, via freestyles. A lot of these characters came from previous songs, so it was a matter of putting them in a new light and developing them further. And those initial songs were very direct, especially for The Streets and The Game. The song where they were introduced was “The Pills,” which broke down their physical characteristics. I took that and implanted them within these [new] stories.

I know you drop an allusion to Isaac Asimov on “Go Go Gadget Flow,” and “Streets of Fire” tracks an apocalyptic virus. It seems like you’ve been getting into sci-fi.
Yeah. “Streets of Fire” is pulled directly from the pages of [George Orwell's] 1984 -- more the mood of it. The second verse is talking about a disease, but there are all these questions about whether the disease is real. It’s the same rules as doublethink. Is there really a war or was it something that they created to keep the public in check? I injected those really basic structural ideas that were set up in 1984. I always love to have triple and quadruple meanings. I learned in the process [of making The Cool] how to do it on a macro level. I’ve always been able to do it with my rhymes, where a metaphor means many things, but that song represents AIDS, it represents the hysteria around coolness.

But “Streets of Fire” is really the story of The Streets, the breakdown of that particular character, that temptress. The Streets is a walking, talking temptress with dollar signs for eyes and tattoos of her dead boyfriends across her chest. She’s the age-old temptress who tempted everybody from King Tut to Al Capone. But that’s just the literal level. Figuratively, she’s the [real] streets. I represented her as a [female] because it goes back to a biblical story where Jesus asks God to show her the world, and God shows him the world in the form of a woman. She was a princess, she was beautiful. She had these long robes and jewelry. But as he got closer, he saw that she was ancient. Her eyes were sunk in, and she had a skeletal form. Her robe was tattered. Her jewelry was dull and looked fake. Don’t take everything for how it seems, you know.

One thing is that there is no such thing as absolute, not even absolute weather. It’s a false construct. But how much falseness do we chase? One thing that Nietzsche said was that we live in a world full of falseness. It’s weird to believe in the things we believe. To me, the dopest thing that [Nietzsche] ever said was we allow ourselves to be lied to every night, every time we go to sleep.

What’s the thesis for The Cool?
I always say this, but Cornel West is the driving force for me. He said that if you want to effect social change in the world, and make the world a better place, you have to make those things which are cool, uncool. You have to make it hip to be square. Some of the cool things in this world are the most self-destructive things. We chase the cool, as we chase status symbols, or living beyond our means to appease our vanity or appease other people, which is in itself a form of vanity.

So I said, 'Let me make The Cool this rotting hustler who everybody despises so much that he’s not even admitted to hell. He has to go through this very macabre struggle to dig himself out of his own grave. And he’s soaked in alcohol. Every time somebody poured out liquor in his memory, it soaked through to his grave. He’s laying there for eternity soaked in alcohol and memories and regrets. He can’t die. There’s no way to shake that. Let me dress it up, put it in the most macabre fashion possible, and label it as Cool. Subconsciously, maybe someone will look at it and think, "Damn, I don’t want to be like him.” That’s the consequences of the life he led. I wanted to take away the glamour.

Your album seems to suggest that this idea of cool, or hipness, infects people and pushes them towards destructiveness. As if it’s viral.
Definitely, but, at the same time, it’s a vaccine. It builds self-esteem. It creates comfort. It’s a double-edged sword. It speaks towards how I live my life, which is a nice mixture of chaos and order, a mix of the known and unknown, the things you can control and you can’t, but you have to embrace both of them. You can’t run away from what you can’t control, you have to accept it. I always inject that into my music and philosophy.

You said earlier that you created this tale in order to step away from yourself and tell a story. Do you think that hip-hop listeners obsessed with authenticity are willing to accept this artifice?
I don’t know … some are. Some people may not look at their own work as art, but I do. I look at MF Doom almost as if he’s Picasso. I look at the grotesqueness of what he does. It’s so out of the ordinary, that it becomes grotesque the way that some of Picasso’s paintings can be considered grotesque. To really stretch it, you look at Warhol or Basquiat, and they peed on their paintings to find the right color, oxidation or what have you. I look at that.

But that’s me on a deeper level. That’s Wasalu Jaco more than Lupe Fiasco, that’s the crazy little nerd who knows all the words to every "Voltron" cartoon and wants to know the meaning behind Mumrah. This is my entertainment. This is what piques my interest. Some people might just be entertainment. But a lot of people look at it just as deeply, or even deeper.

You’ve mentioned before that Tom Waits is an influence of yours. The only time I’ve ever met him was at a Mos Def concert and he was in front of me, dancing the entire time. It’s kinda strange to see a 60-year-old man dance at a hip-hop show, but especially Tom Waits. Have you met him?
[Laughs.] I’ve never met him, but I’m a huge fan. A very recent fan. I saw him perform when Conan O’Brian did a special from San Francisco, and Tom Waits came out and performed a few songs from his new album, Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. It was so fresh, classic and vintage, but it still relates. It was mysterious, romantic, exotic … everything that I look for in music. I went back and got all his albums.

I spoke with Rakim recently, and he cited you as his favorite new rapper. How does it feel to be recognized by a legend like Rakim?
It feels good. I feel respected, especially coming from Rakim. I’m a big fan. It feels real good.