Lupe Fiasco

Lupe Fiasco knows his hip-hop history; as a result, he's perhaps more self-aware and more self-consciously independent-minded than some of his peers. So while Jay-Z bemoans having to dumb down to double his dollars, Lupe flatly refuses to follow suit on the lead single of his second album, The Cool. "They're starting to think that smart is cool, Lu!" an alarmist, ostensibly white, record label exec cries on "Dumb It Down," while in another chorus, he's taunted by a thug rapper.

Lupe prides himself on keeping his material challenging, even if it costs him some fans, but it's hardly inaccessible. Beats may take a backseat to his socially conscious narratives, but The Cool's production is ambitious and dramatic—albeit derivative at times. After a public service announcement of sorts and a curious street-soul interlude, the album kicks into gear with the impressively nimble verses of the Chicago-salute "Go Go Gadget Flow."

Meanwhile, single "Superstar" takes a potshot at the perils of celebrity culture. The beats are a little flat, but Lupe has no problem carrying the load with clever rhymes and his friendly, unforced flow. The track also brings one of the best guest turns, from singer Matthew Santos, who provides several memorable hooks on the album. Santos very well may have been made in a laboratory by record label scientists with access to the DNA of Maroon 5's Adam Levine; wherever he came from, he fits seamlessly into the material.

The mid-tempo love story "Paris, Tokyo" floats by peacefully, and the uptempo "Hi-Definition" benefits from an old-school beat with video game beeps and blips, as well as an surprisingly fresh appearance by Snoop Dogg. The horizon soon gets darker, as the album settles into a dramatic and powerful stretch including "Hip Hop Saved My Life," "Ntruder Alert" and "Streets on Fire."

2007 brought a lot of finger-wagging and teeth-gnashing about the influence of hip-hop—some deserved, much hysterical. For lovers and haters alike, The Cool ends the year on a high note for the genre, both musically and socially.

—Adam McKibbin
01.02.2008

Fully understanding the details of the concept spread across The Cool, first introduced on Food and Liquor's "He Say/She Say" and "The Cool," may only happen after pointing a Lupe Fiasco decoder ring toward Chicago during the vernal equinox, but the synopsis is simple: a fatherless boy is raised by supernatural characterizations of the streets (named the Streets, not to be confused with Mike Skinner) and the game (named the Game, not to be confused with Jayceon Taylor), squanders his potential, becomes motivated by greed, turns to dealing drugs, gets caught up on a few levels. A key piece to understanding the details is "Pills," an "I Gotcha" B-side that can also be found on some non-U.S. copies of Food and Liquor and the MTV2 My Block: Chicago compilation. Coming from an ambitious MC who is only on album two and considering retirement due to various forms of dissatisfaction -- including what the actual streets and the actual game have done to hip-hop -- The Cool has a kind of set-up that may provoke some involuntary tedium preparedness. Lupe incorporates the hyper-expressive, pincushion-sensitive male rock voice wherever it is feasible. (The appearances that come from female voices are much more affecting.) Ditto modern quasi-symphonic soft rock, sometimes toughened up by pensive, churning guitars. Ditto dramatics laid on so thickly that they tend to take a turn toward the acutely melodramatic -- and on this album, strings and other drama signifiers are nearly as integral as the beats beneath them. Even considering the over-abundance of elaboration on all fronts, it's a credit to Lupe that he has made an album that cannot be processed after one or two listens, and if you have the time, its inscrutability turns into mere complexity. (And it turns out that, at the very most, only a third of the album is conceptual, even though it looks and initially sounds like it.) He is one of the most clever artists around, and as far as telling stories with rhymes goes, he's way up there, best exemplified by "Hip-Hop Saved My Life" (a gripping story about a struggling rapper) and "Gotta Eat" (where Lupe's inspiration for metaphors is a cheeseburger, yet it is no more corny than Main Source's classic "Just a Friendly Game of Baseball"). For anyone opposed to their own perception of Lupe Fiasco -- the always-thinking, always-plotting, uptight moralist brainiac, for instance -- The Cool will sound like meandering, overblown prog-rap that is far less tolerable than Food and Liquor. For anyone sick of hearing MCs who boast about themselves (which is akin to taking a stance against R&B songs about love, but whatever), The Cool will sound like a major artistic triumph. It's somewhere in between. ~ Andy Kellman, All Music Guide