“Till I Get There” has a very retro piano chord beat with nostalgic tinkling (cue “lighthouse in dark, stormy night” simile) care of Needlz. Which isn’t to say that Lupe’s totally flushed his indie cred.
It’s hard not to see some of these tracks getting airplay, like “I Don’t Wanna Care Right Now” with its modern pop synth overload. It’s as if Lupe was suddenly aware that he has to compete with Drake – easily the Anti-Fiasco in his insular, self-obsessed boastfulness – so he got Trey Songz to sing the hook to “Out of My Head.” Skylar Grey’s chorus to “Words I Never Said” could have supported its own pop song in the same way that Rihanna’s hook on “Love the Way You Lie” could have (no surprise, Alex da Kid produced both). To make the pill easier to swallow, the package is surprisingly mainstream and even hookier than The Cool. As a result, the record features dark tracks like “Words I Never Said” (“ I really think the War on Terror is a bunch of bullshit/ Just an excuse to use up all your bullets“) and “Beautiful Lasers (2ways)” (“ Sometimes living in a world like this/ It’s pretty hard not to go insane“). And thinking of the macro-view is never not maddening. Often Fiasco raps conscious personal narratives (“Kick, Push,” “Hip Hop Saved My Life,” “Little Weapon”), but with Lasers, he’s shifted from the micro to a macro-view. To quote the man himself, “ That’s a backtrack/ And I ain’t tryin’ to backpack.”Īs a result, his flow as grown more aggressive – even, at times, angry – and with good reason. References to his dubious mainstream marketability? Double-check – but he repackages it for the new decade. Lupe Fiasco’s at risk of the same – Socially conscious lyrics? Check. That Bond movie, by the way, quickly takes a dive into terrible, transforming into a regrettable, embarrassing self-parody. In Lupe’s case, he reemerges with a new album, Lasers, in a world where it’s maybe a little more culturally acceptable to be a rapper who doesn’t rap about cooking drugs and shooting people. Except, of course, James Bond wasn’t releasing mixtapes or recording tracks for the New Moon soundtrack while being water-boarded. The return of Lupe Fiasco is a lot like the (pretty good) opening 20 minutes of Die Another Day, when James Bond gets imprisoned in North Korea for a year only to find that, in his absence, the world changed without him, and suddenly, a well-dressed sex addict seems a touch irrelevant in the face of the War on Terror.
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