Romesh Ranganathan: For the Love of Hip Hop

Romesh Ranganathan: For the Love of Hip Hop is a podcast on BBC Radio 2 and BBC Sounds, hosted by British comedian Romesh Ranganathan. He talked with American rapper Lupe Fiasco, titled "The One with Lupe Fiasco," which aired on April 16, 2022."Romesh Ranganathan (@romesh.ranganathan)". Facebook. April 15, 2022."The One with Lupe Fiasco". BBC. April 16, 2022. Archived from the original on April 15, 2022. In 2024, Fiasco made a second appearance, in promotion of Samurai (2024), which aired on July 20th."Lupe Fiasco". BBC. July 20, 2024.
== Transcript ==
Romesh Ranganathan 	But right now, it is time to welcome Lupe Fiasco to For the Love of Hip Hop. Obviously a renowned rapper, an increasingly respected professor, joined from everything he's picked up on his musical journey to teach university students in the U.S. all about this genre that we love. He's also released a new album called Samurai, which many rappers have gone online to talk about the level of lyricism that he's reaching on this album. We've got loads to catch up on, let's get right into this, it's Lupe Fiasco.
[Break. "I Gotcha" plays.] 	[Break. "I Gotcha" plays.]
Romesh Ranganathan 	I am delighted to say that I am joined by Lupe Fiasco. Lupe, how are you?
Lupe Fiasco 	I'm good, how's things?
Romesh Ranganathan 	Very good, thank you. It's great to speak to you. How is life going at the moment? You busy?
Lupe Fiasco 	Yeah, very busy. But good, you know, can't complain.
Romesh Ranganathan 	Good, good, good. Now I wanted to ask you, we're going to be talk about your new music very very shortly, but is it right you're doing some teaching in Rap Theory and Practice?
Lupe Fiasco 	Yeah, I teach at MIT. I've been teaching there for the past two years.
Romesh Ranganathan 	How did that come about?
Lupe Fiasco 	I've had a relationship with MIT for maybe… six years, or so. In different capacities, I was an artist in residence at one point and then just kind of an invited guest working on different projects. And then this latest thing was a two-year fellowship program which involved teaching and there's the talk of extending that even longer.
Romesh Ranganathan 	So what sort of things do you cover? I mean, I don't want you to give away anything for free, but what sort of stuff are you talking about?
Lupe Fiasco 	Um, so it's in the title, you know. The class is called Rap Theory and Practice, and we talk about standard models of rap. But then we get into the practice side of it. So they record a lot of raps, write a lot of raps, lot of different constrained writing exercises. History of rap, structure of rap, metaphor theory, all the layers and pieces and parts.
Romesh Ranganathan 	And do you study specific artists? Like do you look at artists with your class and go through what they're doing?
Lupe Fiasco 	There's a, I call him a professor. His name is Kevin Beechum, IR, he works at Rhymesayers and he is just like an encyclopedia when it comes to rap. Because of that, we cover tons of artists. We cover artists that I'm sure you haven't even heard of, because they might've had one verse on this one B-side way back in 1981, or something like that.
Romesh Ranganathan 	Yeah.
Lupe Fiasco 	But yeah, we cover a lot of artists. And then a lot of artists come to class and speak, too. I've had R.A. the Rugged Man come speak, I've had Trilla Jones IT come speak, so I've had like kind of high-end folks come through the class. And then I'm the teacher, so there's that. [Laughs.]
Romesh Ranganathan 	Alright, well let's hear a tune from one of the guest lecturers, R.A. the Rugged Man. This is "Definition of a Rap Flow."
["Definition of a Rap Flow" by R.A. the Rugged Man plays.]	["Definition of a Rap Flow" by R.A. the Rugged Man plays.]
Romesh Ranganathan 	This is "Definition of a Rap Flow" by R.A. the Rugged Man, who is one of the guest lecturers at Lupe Fiasco's MIT rap course. So your brand new album, Samurai. The way the album's come about, or the inspiration for the album is quite unusual, isn't it? So could you break that down for us? How it came about, what the album is about, exactly? Because I guess people wouldn't guess from the title how it came about.
Lupe Fiasco 	Yeah, so, I've been interested in doing a lot of portraiture. And this is actually something that I teach in the class. During the pandemic, I watched this Amy Winehouse documentary. And there was a line in the documentary where she left a voicemail on her manager's or producer's voicemail where she says, you know, "I keep coming up with these battle raps, so if you wanna have a battle rap-off, let's do it, 'cause I'm gonna kill you, 'cause I'm a samurai." And for me, it was that moment where it's like oh, oh, oh, that's dope. But what is that? What would that look like? What would that feel like, how does she learn battle rap. So it just became this like thing that started as a portrait. I'm a big fan of Amy Winehouse, fan of her writing styles, fan of her voice, fan of just her performance, skillsets, and everything. So just as a pure artist. And so I was like oh, yeah, now this gives me permission or reason to even go a little bit deeper. So it started as kind of one song—which is the song, "Samurai," which is the first record on the album. And then it kind of turned into like well, what if she did get into a battle? Or like yo, how does she learn how to rap? And those became like individual songs, and eventually it just kind of evolved into an album.
Romesh Ranganathan 	Are all the songs on the album you talking from the perspective of Amy Winehouse? Or is that more like a starting point and you've gone off into another direction?
Lupe Fiasco 	It's not direct at all, because it's not real. So it's not like an autobiography of Amy Winehouse, or anything like that. So there's liberties taken, in that sense, so it's a blend of different things. It's just kind of like she's the inspiration point and the kick-off point and I bring reference points, you know little things back to put her in the space. But it could be any artist, and I always say if I didn't tell you it was about Amy Winehouse, you wouldn't know who it was about. It could be about anybody, right? And that was kind of the point, the album kind of speaks to every artists' struggle and each individual song sees themselves in it. But at the same time, too, it's very abstract. Like a lot of my work is, so it is an abstract portrait.
Romesh Ranganathan 	Alright Lupe, well let's hear "Samurai" right now. This is "Samurai" by Lupe Fiasco.
["Samurai" by Lupe Fiasco plays.] 	["Samurai" by Lupe Fiasco plays.]
Romesh Ranganathan 	"Samurai" by Lupe Fiasco there, and I'm delighted to say I'm joined by the man himself. One of the things that sort of strikes me about Amy Winehouse that I would also say is true of you is the music and what she wanted to do came first and everything else came after. And that feels like a philosophy that you've kind of followed, in the way that you do your thing. You've almost shied away from trying to meet the audience's expectations, right?
Lupe Fiasco 	Well, I mean, not, not really. When I say not really, not to minimize it, but it's. I grew up, and when I say grew up, my years in the music business, since I was 19. Where it was coming fresh out of the underground, writing raps which were for a particular audience. It was for my homies, rapping metaphors back in school, so that's an audience, right? And then when you get into the music business, and I'm learning how to write songs, I'm writing them under the guidance of like A&Rs, and executive producers, and there's an audience in mind, there's a target audience in mind. And then I realized at a certain point, even if I made something that was completely impossible, which is zero audience in mind, people would still take it and kind of interpret it and project into it things that they wanted to see anyway. So at a certain point, and this was maybe around The Cool, it was more about like I'mma do fifty percent, and then you're gonna do your fifty percent as the audience. So no matter what I do, I could never get 100 percent of my message across to you. It's gonna get lost in translation, there's going to be noise, and you're gonna do your own kind of interpretation on the other side. But you train yourself to get to a point well what does it mean to not write for an audience? What does it mean to not write with a target demographic in mind, and just create? What does that sound like? So some of it you hear in Samurai, where it's like some of choruses, that's a first pass chorus and I'm not going back.
Romesh Ranganathan 	I think it's true to say like, followed on from what you said, on this album. So go back, "Cake" is an example, it's very much like you're not playing this music in the background, it takes an amount of interpretation and engaging with it fully, right?
Lupe Fiasco 	Yeah. I mean, even I experienced that driving around listening to the album. I was listening to it yesterday, and I forgot what song it was. Maybe "No. 1 Headband" or one of the other records and it was like oh, if you really wanna get this, you have to listen. Maybe it was "Til Eternity" which is like the last song and it was like, there's ambience to it. Like it can be an ambient just thing in the background but if you really wanted to engage, and understand it, you can't just passively listen. You have to actively listen. But that's what I would want you to do. I would want you to actively listen to certain things, but then also give you the option to just passively listen to the music and enjoy it just as this big sonic mash.
[Censored version of "Cake" by Lupe Fiasco plays.] 	[Censored version of "Cake" by Lupe Fiasco plays.]
Romesh Ranganathan 	"Cake" by Lupe Fiasco, this is For the Love of Hip Hop with me, Romesh Ranganathan, and I'm with the man himself, Lupe Fiasco. So Lupe, and I know we're pushed for time but I did want to ask you one more question. Obviously as your career's gone on, you're a lot of rappers' favorite rapper. When people talk about people delivering lyrics on a certain level, you're often the name that's touted. Now you've been in the industry for as long as you have, do you feel like you've achieved what you needed to achieve? Do you feel like you wanna keep pushing it? Is there something you feel like you've still got left to do or are you just putting music out and seeing what happens? Do you feel like you've got goals that you still want to get to?
Lupe Fiasco 	For me, the next thing was to push rap into the academic space. But there's a tradition of rappers popping up in certain institutions, and it seemed very sparse and rare. Where it's like I wanted that to be the norm. So you as a rapper when you kind of get through your album cycle or your career starts to taper or whatever kind of metric you set for yourself to kind of move to the next thing. That the academic space is a viable option. And I just want to make sure that we cement that and that becomes the thing for the next twenty years. So let's see Lil Baby teaching a class at Georgia Tech. You know, when he's done touring, so we'll see.
Romesh Ranganathan 	Okay, Lupe, thank you so much for your time, man. Is there a song in particular, any song that you might have looked at in particular during one of your classes that we could play on the show?
Lupe Fiasco 	Oh yeah, let's take it back to what we could consider the first commercially released hip hop record. which is King Tim and the Fatback Band, "Personality Jock." Let's play that, let's take it back, all the way to the beginning.
Romesh Ranganathan 	Fantastic. Lupe, as always, an absolute honor to talk to you, man. Thank you so much for Samurai, you continue to make great music. Appreciate your time, man, thank you.
Lupe Fiasco 	Thank you, Rom, good seeing you again too.
== References ==
Category:2022 interviews
Category:2024 interviews
Category:Podcasts