Spin

Spin (stylized in all caps) is an American music magazine founded in 1985 by Bob Guccione Jr. In December 2012, the print edition discontinued, though was relaunched in August 2024 with Guccione Jr. returning as editor.Amato, Josh (May 29, 2024). "The Spin Magazine Relaunch and How Bob Guccione Jr Aims to Reclaim Music Journalism". MethodShop. The publication has provided coverage on the career of American rapper Lupe Fiasco. He was a featured cover story in their April 2006 edition, written by Jon Caramanica. Titled "Revenge of the Nerd," it refers to Fiasco's mixtape Fahrenheit 1/15 Part II: Revenge of the Nerds.
A notable moment was in 2012, when Fiasco's single "Bitch Bad" and its music video drew heavy critique from Spin, including the descriptors of "mansplaining" and "reckless social commentary." Fiasco took to Twitter to defend the video, and even encouraged a boycott of the magazine."Lupe Fiasco Takes on Spin Magazine Over 'Bitch Bad' Video Critique". XXL. August 24, 2012.
== Critical reception ==
Year	Album 	Rating	
2011	Lasers 	6/10 	
2012	Food & Liquor II:The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1	6/10 	
== Listicles ==
List 	Year	Work 	Rank	
"The 20 Best Singles of 2006" 	2006	"Kick, Push" 	 	
"Spin's 30 Must-Hear Albums of 2011" 	2011	Lasers 	 	
"The 101 Best Kanye West-Produced Songs That Don't Feature Kanye"	2015	Lupe Fiasco's The Cool 	 	
"The 50 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2015" 	2015	Tetsuo & Youth 	 	
"The 50 Best Hip-Hop Debut Albums Since 'Reasonable Doubt'" 	2016	Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor	 	
 	2016	 	 	
 	2016	 	 	
== Articles ==
=== 2006 ===
In the courtyard adjacent to Roberto Clemente High School, on Chicago's West Side, a small group of skateboarders are lazily running their way through a range of tricks. All over the concrete are twigs, stones, pieces of broken glass, but that doesn't stop them from traversing this less-than-perfect turf. And it doesn't stop Lupe Fiasco from selecting this spot as the location for his first video, "Kick, Push."
Depending on your angle, Lupe is either a rapper who skates or a skater who raps. These are strange worlds to reconcile, but the overlap is natural to him—he's good friends wit Kanye West and Jay-Z, and also has a design company, Righteous Kung Fu, that creates limited-edition decks.
Out here in the Clemente High courtyard, these skaters—black, white, brown—represent the middle ground that Lupe's hoping to colonize. He could easily be mistaken for one of the lanky kids who just got out of school. For all his garrulous presence—he's a fast-talking networker who's already secured a shoe deal with Reebok—Lupe cuts a modest figure. He's surprisingly slight, with narrow-rimmed glasses that emphasize the thinness of his face.
To make sure he captures the nuances of the scene, video director Christopher Adams has affixed a camera to the rear of his bicycle, and he's pedaling around, shooting B-roll footage.
"It's gonna be 'hood," he says to Lupe, who's grabbed a deck from one of the kids and is working on his ollies while figuring out how to outfit all the extras in the clip.
"Yeah," Lupe replies. "But slightly fly."
"When we grew up, we was poor," Lupe, 24, says of his formative years in the Madison Terrace housing complex. "We lived in the 'hood. Really bad 'hood. Prostitutes and drive-bys 'hood." Though most rappers might wear that rough start a a badge of pride or a shield of authenticity, Lupe sees it as the lens through which his outsider status is refracted.
"On every block, there was a gang," he remembers. "But on our block, the main street, there was nothing. It was almost like we had seats to watch the other blocks."
Lupe has tried to capture that feeling—the sense of spying on a foreboding world that surrounds you—with a trio of clever, dense mixtapes (the Fahrenheit 1/15 series). He's also appeared on "Touch the Sky," from Kanye West's Late Registration, and on the bonus edition of The Rising Tied, by Fort Minor (the hip-hop side project of Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda). His debut album, Food & Liquor, will be released by Atlantic and is co-executive produced by Jay-Z, who mentored Lupe after the rapper's business partner, Chilly, went to jail in 2003. Like records by Kanye or fellow skater Pharrell, Food & Liquor is thoroughly informed by hip-hop but is barely beholden to its prevailing ideals. The sound is there, lush and ornate, but the subject matter—video games, religion, entreaties to pour out the champagne—sets him apart.
Born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, to a chef mother and an engineer father who was also a Green Beret, Lupe became, at an early age, a conscientious objector to what was unfolding around him. "I Liked being in the house," he says, detailing days spent holed up listening to his dad's records. "Everything my friends was doing, I didn't do. I knew there was something bad about being out there." And hip-hop? No thanks. "The first time I heard N.W.A., my father was banging it in the car, and I was ducking down 'cause they was saying cuss words," he recalls. "At that age, I was listening to classical music and jazz. I wanted to build rocket ships."
After failed experiments with the clarinet ("inspired by Benny Goodman") and the piano, Lupe found he could best express himself through words. By the time he left high school, in 2000, his group, Da Pak, had signed with Epic. That deal was short-lived—but for Lupe, the group's party-and-bullshit lyrics had already begun to clash with his own beliefs. His parents were Muslim, and though Lupe's religious upbringing wasn't strict, it helped shape his worldview. He adhered to, or attempted to adhere to, a set of principles that included no drinking, no drugs, no cursing, and no premarital sex. His aversion to the street life was reinforced by the example of his older brother, who was a member of the infamous Chicago gang the Gangster Disciples. "I would hear gunshots and wait for my brother to come home," he says.
For all its liberating qualities, though, Lupe discovered that the very act of rapping could encourage the same cycles he'd been trying to avoid. "Something takes over you in the [studio vocal] booth, and it's like you're speaking to an invisible person," he says. "I call it the 'They.' 'They' and 'that' and 'him' and 'her'—since what you're saying has no specific direction, it has no substance coming out of your mouth. So you feel like you can say whatever."
Now Lupe treats hip-hop like a blood relative, something he loves in spite of itself—and himself. He won't listen to rap during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. His album-release party is being held in the daytime, at an art gallery. No alcohol will be served. He says he has three albums in him, tops: "I don't think I have that much to talk about that can be squeezed into a rap album. The other stuff can go in a dissertation, maybe, or on the front of a T-shirt."
For now, however, he hopes to effect change—on his own terms. "The people trying to inform were announcing themselves as an enemy of the status quo," he says of a prior generation of rap rabble-rousers. "My stuff is different, but it's in the same packaging as the status quo. I didn't come out as this preachy, I-know-everything, Malcolm X-reborn guy. I understand hypocrisy."
Still, he's having an impact. His mix-tape version of West's "Diamonds From Sierra Leone"—an intensely detailed rundown of materialism, big business, slave labor, and genocide, from American to Angola to Sierra Leone—is said to have inspired the official remix of the song, on which Kanye directly addresses what Lupe called "conflict diamonds."
"He works on so many levels—the grimy street level, the intelligent level, the rock level," says Fort Minor's Shinoda, who produced some of Lupe's debut. "he's whole unique."
The protagonist in the "Kick, Push" video is being played by Kiko, a stout kid with wide eyes, burnished brown skin, and a gentle demeanor. A talented skater, he's just gotten out of prison, and this is as close to a break as he's gotten lately.
As the schoolyard shoot winds down, Lupe collects the remaining crew—his now-free partner, Chilly; an Atlantic A&R man; and several hangers-on—and they take a convoy of cars over to Uprise, Chicago's best-known skate shop. Inside the emporium, which sits on a lonely strip of the ascendant Wicker Park neighborhood, Lupe tells Kiko to pick out whatever he needs—clothes, shoes, trucks, wheels—ostensibly to make sure he looks right for the rest of the shoot.
Something bigger is at play, though. "He has X's on his back," Lupe says. "if he forgave himself, if God forgave him, the system he's in and the color that's on his body is not going to forgive him. So it's like, let me make sure he's straight with the regular stuff, so he doesn't have to worry about that. Because what might he be able to do if he didn't have to worry about buying clothes?"
Still, Lupe the self-promoter is also in fine form. He's excitedly insisting that everyone at Uprise come out to represent the shop in the video, even if it means closing for a few hours. But as a humble Kiko collects his gear, his benefactor momentarily drops the swagger.
Ever smiling, Lupe quietly picks up the bill.
=== 2007 ===
1 JEANS "These are special Levi's from Japan called Flu, with all types of reflective doodads. I'm a big denim guy. Jeans are probably the only thing I'll wear more than once or twice. The most expensive pair of jeans I ever had were $1,100."
2 REEBOK JACKET "This is from my deal with Reebok — in the end, they only made one pair of Lupe shoes. I wore the jacket to a Nike party. Some of the Nike execs were there — they weren't feeling it."
3 KANYE WEST'S 30th BIRTHDAY INVITE "The party was at the Louis Vuitton store in New York. I doubt they'll let us back, though — there was mad theft. They left everything out on the shelves!"
4 GOYARD BAG "It's a very expensive bag [about $1,500]. There's probably underwear, socks, deodorant in there. This is for day trips, but it's odd because my day trips are like, 'I'm going to London for two days, I'll be back. I'm just gonna take the Goyard.' "
5 CAMOUFLAGE BOOK "This is the most comprehensive study of camouflage ever; it's called Disruptive Pattern Material. It was written by a friend of mine, designer Hardy Blechman, who has a clothing line called Maharishi. I probably have about $10,000 worth of his clothes in a box somewhere."
6 WEE NINJA DOLL "That's made by my homies who have a company called Shawnimals. Now they're doing a video game called Ninjatown for the Nintendo DS. I wear a miniature one on my belt."
7 SKATEBOARD DECK "This is the deck that inspired the cover of my debut, Food & Liquor. [The basement of this house] is the only place I skate around here. I made holes in the walls."
8 LYRIC BOOKS "These are all my rhymes from high school; this is one of my earliest ones. This is gold right here, gold! I used to collect words and phrases, like 'butter knife,' 'subterranean,' 'psychedelic.' "
9 SWORD "My father taught me that you have to treat a sword like a person. It has a soul. That's the [Japanese] way. Some kids were playing with my sword and disgraced it, so I bent it. It's dead. I was gonna bury it, but I didn't want to just put it in the Dumpster!"
10 KEEPSAKES "This is my box of memories. Here's an old BlackBerry, my high school ID, my first checking-account card. When I got my first record deal, there was $3,000 in it. Now there's $20 in it. I still keep it, just in case I need that $20."Modell, Josh (November 15, 2007). "Lupe Fiasco". Spin.
== Gallery ==
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File:Lupe Fiasco Spin 2007.jpg
== References ==
Category:2006 interviews
Category:2007 interviews
Category:Magazines