2-Cent Sessions

2-Cent Sessions is a remixed lecture series presented by 2-Cent Entertainment. On August 1, 2012, Lupe Fiasco was interviewed by New Orleans record producer Mannie Fresh at the Xavier University Ballroom. The two discuss how Fiasco chose his stage name, industry politics, and the future of Hip Hop. Following Fresh's thirty-minute interview with the Chicagoan, the song "Bitch Bad" began to play. This segued into the panel discussion, where the rest of the speakers joined them onstage, including Mia X, Dr. Walter Kimbrough, Dr. Rashida Govan, and David Dennis Jr. They engaged in discourse surrounding the word "bitch."Boyles, Brian (August 2, 2012). "Lupe, Mannie and Mia Talk 'Bitches' at 2-Cent Session". OffBeat Magazine.
In a recap by Uproxx, they remarked, "It's always an adventure when Lupe gets interviewed and the crowd was buzzing about what exactly to expect from him on stage. Well the Lupe that was on-stage was candid, honest and totally void of any statements that cry for attention. He was reverent about New Orleans Hip-Hop and incredibly humble. And when it came to talking about 'Bitch Bad' and its impact, he seemed sincere about his attempt to affect change in the community. People always have plenty bad to say about Lu, but I only have compliments on his involvement at Xavier."Dennis Jr., David (August 11, 2012). "Event Recap: 2-Cent Sessions with Lupe Fiasco at Xavier University". Uproxx. Archived from the original on August 13, 2012.
== Gallery ==
File:2-Cent Sessions (Lupe Fiasco).jpg|Promotional poster
File:2-Cent Sessions (Lupe Fiasco) (2).jpg|Promotional poster
File:2-Cent TV - August 6 2012.jpg|Photo by Cfreedom Photography
File:2-Cent TV - August 6 2012 (2).jpg|Photo by Cfreedom Photography
File:2-Cent TV - August 6 2012 (3).jpg|Photo by Cfreedom Photography
File:2-Cent TV - August 6 2012 (4).jpg|Photo by Cfreedom Photography
File:2-Cent TV - August 6 2012 (5).jpg|Photo by Cfreedom Photography
File:2-Cent TV - August 6 2012 (6).jpg|Photo by Cfreedom Photography
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File:2-Cent TV - August 6 2012 (8).jpg
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== Transcript ==
Our first 2-cent session features @LupeFiasco, interviewed by @MannieFresh, in front of a live audience at Xavier University.
Mannie Fresh	Big brother.
Lupe Fiasco 	What up, boy?
Mannie Fresh	First of all, let me commend you on having the guts to keep it true to yourself, man, and all of us as fans or whatever for standing up for what you believe in. You know, because.
Lupe Fiasco 	Thank you, man. Appreciate being hosted by New Orleans' finest and Mr. Mannie Fresh, appreciate your work through the years. Rocking and a-rollin' and controlling. How you do? So appreciate you, brother.
(to the audience) What's up y'all, what's going on? Yes, what's up?
Mannie Fresh	So let me get right into it. Can you define your name for us? What would be your definition of Lupe Fiasco?
Lupe Fiasco 	Oh man, that's just uh, flair you know. It's actually a mistake, too, 'cause I thought 'fiasco' meant something else and then it was too late because the plugs were already printed, you know what I'm saying. Just gotta run with it.
But it really came from what we felt, rappers had to have first and last names. That was cool. Nas Escobar, Biggie Smalls. And he was Frank White. And I was like oh, we gotta have like a real name with the last name, too? So Lupe Fiasco Fiasco came from The Firm album, "Firm Fiasco" they have a song and that came from there. And then the Lupe came from—my name is Wasalu, and I used to be Little Lu. And I had a homie in school named Lupe, who was like the big homie. Literally the big homie's big, six foot Colombian dude and I was like yo, I'mma take your name, I'mma be Lupe Fiasco. Lady said it at a talent show, and it was like "oh, well, that's me."
Mannie Fresh	So a fiasco can be cool.
Lupe Fiasco 	Yeah, yes, it's means something terrible, though. It also means like whine or something like that.
Mannie Fresh	Yeah, but you wear it so well, dude. It fits you so well, you make it something incredible.
Lupe Fiasco 	Indeed.
Mannie Fresh	So let me ask you this: with you being on a major labor and all, being an artist, do you feel like sometimes your creativity gets challenged? When you want to go one way and the label want to go another way? Or do you feel like you, I guess as the artist, get to do what you want to do?
Lupe Fiasco 	It's always a compromise. Even when I do what I want to do, they take it out of me on the backend. It's like "oh, okay, you can do whatever you want. But we're not gonna really pay for the videos." So you know, they leverage it on you how they do, how they get down at the end of the day. It's about control at the end of the day. They don't really necessarily care what you make, what kind of music it is, the most positive, the most negative, the wackest or the dopest. They just want to make sure that they got control over it to a certain extent. So I could say like yeah, they let me do whatever I want, but then I pay for it on the other side. Pay for it, somehow they find a way to, whether it be like "oh you wanted your advance, well guess what? No."
Mannie Fresh	Feel you, I feel you. So would you say right now in your career that you've done your song? And what I mean by your song, the song that you would define yourself by, that you would say like this is my heart, this is my soul, this is my everything? Like I've done this song and it's one song that says that. Have you done that yet, or is that a future song?
Lupe Fiasco 	Um, I think I've touched at. 'Cause there's two lanes with me. There's the pure artistic lane, why I just rap for the love of rapping. And then there's this commercial Lupe Fiasco lane where you have your limitations, and you have your fans. And to me, that's still a limitation because you're still trying to please audience and make people happy or piss people off or whatever. But for me on the pure side, I'm always just trying to, in a pursuit, to create the ultimate song for me. And so I think like touching at it in songs like "Double Burger with Cheese" off the Friend of the People mixtape was something that was like, that was close. "Failure" was close. There's another record on a new album called "Form Follows Function" that's close. And then I'm starting to come up with the ideas for the record after Food and liquor II and start building that. I got a bunch of tracks, but I'm still trying to build the ideas. And that whole record is me trying to do a whole album out of it, you know I'm saying? And see if I can do that. But I've touched it a little bit.
"And He Gets the Girl," shouts at the homie who did the remake. That's definitely like one of those records while I sit back and like yeah, I've touched the bottom of heaven, with the rapper's heaven, a little bit. And as you know, none of those on—well, except for "Form Follows Function"—was on any album. It was just like for the love on a mixtape, for free, thrown out on the internet kind of a thing.
Mannie Fresh	Makes sense.
Lupe Fiasco 	Yeah.
Mannie Fresh	So, the state that hip-hop is in right now. Would you say that this is kind of… I guess the way I can explain this, I would say my generation and growing up hip-hop taught us so much. We had pro-Black, we had the storyteller, we had the bling bling, we had the gangster rap. And it's so many categories, would you say the state right now that hip-hop is in, is it still there? Do we have that right now?
Lupe Fiasco 	Um, you know. And it's a good segue, too, 'cause building on that idea that there's two lanes. So there's me as the pure artist and then with no commercial expectation of any sort, and then there's the commercial Lupe Fiasco kind of experience. You have that same kind of duality in hip-hop. I think there's like the culture of Hip Hop which is Crazy Legs, Big Daddy Kane, and rap dudes who paint on the train stations in Paris to the dudes who DJ competitions in Japan. Like that just, that everything that is Hip Hop from the good, the bad, the ugly, everything else.
And then I think you got the commercial side of Hip Hop, everything that you hear on a radio, everything that's for sale, so to speak. And I think that today there's a very, very substantial lack of substance in the commercial side of it. Which even affects some of the cultural side of it, too, because they are one and the same. So I definitely think like I will bump into people, like DJs and different people who literally had life-changing situations where they say "man, I learned about Five Percenters from this rapper." From KRS-One, he just mentioned, I started to study it before I know what I'm a Five Percenter or, you know, this particular rapper like you said it was in a commercial space that was more of a—how can I say it? It was just more of an even slate, everybody got a look. Whereas now it's just more about the vanity, the misogyny, the violence. You know, the Dope Dylan, the whole thing, that's kind of the only thing you hear when you turn on a radio just to oversexualize everything. Everything is just kind of like, and it all sounds the same. So I think it's pretty much right now it's like, it's on repeat as nobody's really breaking out of the mold now.
Not to say that there aren't people coming, you know. You got like Kendrick Lamars and the Blues and the Danny Browns and you know the Dee-1s even, who are kind of pushing the envelope—and people like them—who are kind of pushing the envelope but that is yet to be seen in the commercial space in a big, big way. So on a commercial arena, right now, is very vanilla. But a bad vanilla.
Mannie Fresh	Yeah. So let's say, fast-forward twenty years from now. Do you still see Hip Hop growing, or is it done?
Lupe Fiasco 	On the cultural side, I see it growing, just like punk rock or speed metal or anywhere there's a cultural kind of off-shoot, a byproduct of a music. Jazz is still around, Blues is still around. You should walk through the French Quarter and see that Blues is still alive and well. With Hip Hop, I think we are like a crossroads, to be honest, where either we're just going to be. Either we're going to get overtaken the same way whatever that genre that's underneath the scenes right now bubbling that only a few people are on. That a few people are taking chances with. The same way that Hip Hop over took everything else, overtook punk music, overtook rock, overtook disco, overtook Blues, you know. I think that there's some under the surface that's kind of pulling all of that energy that hip-hop and using anymore and kind of taking what hip-hop used to be and refine it in our own way. And I think that, I hope that is not the case, but I feel like something's finna come that's gonna put hip-hop on the back burner and then hip-hop is gonna be the same way that we look at the Blues and the same way they would look at Jazz where we're just kind of like oh, it's there, but the people who really saying something is these dudes now. So, we'll see.
== References ==
Category:2012 interviews
Category:Panel discussions