Chicago Tribune

*Lasers*This article is part of the Lasers era.Released: March 7, 2011
Label: 1st & 15th Entertainment / Atlantic RecordsCategory
*Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1*This article is part of the Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1 era.Released: September 25, 2012
Label: 1st & 15th Entertainment / Atlantic RecordsCategory

## ***Chicago Tribune***

### **Founder**

* James Kelly
* John E. Wheeler
* Joseph K. C. Forrest

### **Founded**

June 10, 1847; 176 years ago (1847-06-10)

### **Website**

chicagotribune.com

The ***Chicago Tribune*** is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, owned by Tribune Publishing. It was founded in 1847 by
James Kelly, John E. Wheeler, and Joseph K. C. Forrest. The publication has provided coverage on the musical career of American rapper Lupe Fiasco. In 2011, Greg Kot conducted an interview with Fiasco on his third studio album, *Lasers*. In 2012, it focused on his fourth studio album, *Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1*. In 2019, Darcel Rockett did an interview with Fiasco and his two sisters, Ayesha and Afrika, for the premiere of the martial arts docuseries *Beat n Path*.

## Article

### 2007

**On Takin' It to the Streets:**
"I think you've got a lot of people who want to represent and show the world that Islam is not just some Arab dude with a full gown and a long beard. I'm Muslim, and I'm standing right next to you. Islam comes in every form and every color."

### 2011

**Q: You created a 14-point "L.A.S.E.R.S." manifesto in 2009, which outlines what your career has been about: It's OK to be different and think differently, it's cool to be a misfit and swim against the tide. Did that directly inspire the album?**

A: It was an attempt to achieve some simplicity. "The Cool" was so complex and metaphorical that I felt a need for the message to be distilled and put 100 proof in your face. It was an attempt to make the album more pop, as in popular, as in something that people could relate to, whether you're Republican or Democrat, a member of the KKK or a Black Panther, a supporter of Barack Obama or Glenn Beck. The manifesto has core ideas that everyone can believe in, and I wanted it to be the starting point for a real serious conversation. Me being part of a multinational corporation was part of it too.

**Q: By approaching music as an outsider, as someone with non-mainstream ideas about politics and music, did that affect your relations with Atlantic while making "L.A.S.E.R.S."?**

A: Definitely. On a technical side I'm hamstrung, because I'm not a 360 artist (signed to a deal where the label gets income from touring and merchandise as well as sales of recorded music). That put me on a different priority list, a different budget to record the album, a different level of promotion. I'm not on the "A" list at Atlantic Records. There was a certain level of disbelief in the project. I was told "The Cool" wasn't a success. Like what planet are you on to say it wasn't a success? An album that sold 700,000 and got four Grammy nominations? That wasn't success? So what is a success? A No. 1 smash on the radio, I was told. But I don't know how to make those. I don't think anybody knows what that is. So now I get into breaking the cardinal rule, which Jay-Z told me early on was, "Don't chase radio." You fast forward to 2011 and it's let's chase radio. It becomes an interesting hypocrisy that affects how you write your songs, who you hire to sing hooks, who you hire to produce. I was literally told for "The Show Goes On" that I shouldn't rap too deep. I shouldn't be too lyrical. It just needs to be something easy on the eyes. Like a record company telling Picasso that we don't need these abstract interpretations of life, where people have to sit down and look at it and break it down. It was better to paint the Upper West Side lady and her poodle so everyone could look at it right away and understand what was going on. I felt like I was painting poodles. It's why in the first line of "The Show Goes On" I paraphrase Johnny Rotten at the Sex pistols' final show: "Have you ever had the feeling that you were being cheated."

**Q: How did you resolve the conflict with the label?**

A: I had to paint puppies, to be honest. But I threw in my own twist. One of the eyes of the puppy is a nine-headed deer, and there's some kind of mutation in the lady's hands. There is some subversiveness tucked in there. The album is still a collaboration. They had to give, I had to give, because they have to have some incentive to promote the record. So the first verse of "The Show Goes On" is about them, but the rest widens it out. There are tracks like "Words I Never Said" and "All Black Everything" where they let me do what I want, they didn't interfere. There was no pressure to create, no expectation to please someone. I'm comfortable and happy with the record as a whole, where before there was an imbalance. I hate this record, the process of making this record, and I love this record. What I had to go through was not fun, the ugliness I saw in people. But I love the manifesto, that the message got out, that fans protested for four hours in front of the label's New York headquarters and demanded attention.

**Q: The protest started with the fans, right?**

A: It started with a kid who had some grievances with the label and he wrote a petition, grammatical errors and all, calling for the release of my album. Like me, people were getting tired of being told the album is ready but it's not coming out. He got 30,000 signatures. It literally started as a joke on a hip-hop message board. "We should protest, ha ha ha." Then someone says, "If we did, what would we need?" Another person says, "We'll need permits." And somebody else pipes in, "I know where to get them." It snowballs into the Oct. 15 "Fiasco Friday."

**Q: That activist message is in "Words I Never Said." It's life imitating art, or art imitating life. Which came first, the song or the protest?**

A: The whole album, the mission for me was to get people to act. At the time of the protest, "Words I Never Said" wasn't recorded. But the message was out there with the manifesto. People got it. You take action if you see an injustice being done rather than sitting silent. I went back to the studio and did "Words" after that. People were saying to the protestors what about protesting against gun violence or poverty. And their response was that's what Lupe raps about. It was motivation for me to give them a song that can't be misinterpreted. Stare right at the neck of the detractors, challenge society, don't let them intimidate you into silence.

**Q: On the track, you criticize President Obama as well as right-wing commentators like Glenn Beck. Were you expecting to get some flak over that?**

A: I honestly thought I wouldn't. We shot a video for it, and once it gets more out there who knows what will happen. I think there is some basis for my complaint. I'm not throwing shots, I am a well thought-out guy. I'm trying to say something that has meaning, depth. I get more thumbs up and nods of approval from people who respect the fact that I speak my mind. I don't vote, but I pay taxes. My taxes help pay for a lot of these wars and this public school system. We all do. That gives me the right and the responsibility because our hands and money are in all of this. My taxes from performing on stage pay for some hell in another part of the world. I can't stay silent about that.

**Q: In the song "Beautiful Lasers" it sounds like someone is contemplating suicide. Is that about you?**

A: It's about me contemplating suicide, coming to grips with it. I was reading about Hunter S. Thompson and why he committed suicide, the Kurt Cobains, people in the same business as I am who actually carried it out. You have the corporation in your ear and you're living a public life, but you also have a private life and are thinking I don't want to be here. And it also refers to social suicide, where I would just leave, just not do music anymore. I came out of it literally not (caring about any of it). It was a constant set of demands: If you don't do this interview, you won't get coverage in this magazine. If you don't do this song, this album isn't happening. Saying that I didn't care became my therapy, my recovery. And I felt like I needed to document it. I felt like if I'm going through that, and I'm a normal person, I felt like other people must be contemplating this too because of similar pressures to do things they felt were wrong or against their better judgment. This is a very personal album about things playing out in a public space. My lack of enthusiasm for doing this event, or appearing on this TV network, or working with this person -- I didn't see it right away, but it was destroying me. I was going through this classic breakdown. It came out in "Beautiful Lasers." It's a very powerful, energetic song, and me screaming in it was therapy.

**Q: How close were you to feeling you could kill yourself?**

A: The idea of suicide was real. The danger came as I started to catch myself rationalizing it. For six, seven months I was questioning my faith and thinking about how would this affect my mom, my family. I only got out of it by talking freely to a few people about it. They let me take myself out of circulation for awhile. It was a secret set of friends. A couple people in particular who let me stow away and allowed me to be cut off from the universe for a while.

**Q: It sounds like you lost a piece of your soul. How do you get that back?**

A: The first song on the album is called "Letting Go." It's my declaration of independence from the clutches of the record industry, the blogs, the fans, the press, the lifestyle. It's me hanging over the side of a building. Remember in the "Juice" movie, the scene where Tupac is being held over the side of a building? I envisioned that in this song. There is a part of me that has been lost because of all this. I lost a damaged piece of me. And I got the rest of me back. We were performing parts of the record that the label was saying were not a hit, yet on stage people were hearing these songs and would go crazy in reaction to them. It made me realize that somebody is not telling the truth, and that things were going to be OK.

### 2012

**On *Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1*:**
"The bulk of this album speaks to how America hasn't changed. The great turning points in history, we romanticize them too much. The general arc of the way society works hasn't changed in terms of racism, class bias, oppression, happiness, joy, displacement, urban decay and urban renewal for decades. There are certain things we have to address, but have not really addressed for decades, really — youth violence in the city, for one. The same cycle of violence keeps happening in Oakland, Detroit, Miami, Houston, Chicago."

**On Twitter exchange with Chief Keef:**
"My first comments were to express concern about the incubators of violence. I was more distraught and concerned about what causes all this violence to happen in the first place. Many of my friends are gangsters. Some of my best friends in the music business are gangsta rappers. I'm not flinching at a gun in a video, or a song about selling crack. I talked about the same things in my older records. It's not like this is brand new. My concern, and what everyone's concern should be, is that the circumstances that create a culture like that haven't changed. There have been no real solutions. So why wouldn't you expect a new crop of music like this from all cities?

"The mimicking of the culture you see now, the style of the music, originated in Atlanta, imported from (Atlanta rappers such as) Waka Flocka and Gucci Mane. Where did that come from? Detroit, Oakland. It starts to go around the map. It's the same venting in the music, how it sounds, its attitude, the callousness and aggressiveness. Underneath, what's there? I'm afraid Chicago is becoming Detroit. I'm afraid Chicago is dying. There is some semblance that society is running as normal. But as soon as you go two blocks outside the downtown radius, it's a wasteland."

"You have people coming out of the city that carry the same DNA of progression, change and hope, which inspires musicians and poets to combat it, an opposing voice. It's always been like that in Chicago. My piece can be just as strong and aggressive (as the gangsta rap), and I put that on the album."

**On Howard Zinn:**
"Howard Zinn had a sense of humor, and he realized the unpopularity and the futility of some of his views. But he never backed away from the importance of what he was saying. He was saying, 'I am preaching at you. I am a teacher. I have no shame in doing that.' Some of the people we hold in highest regard in this society, whatever our background, whatever our experience, are preachers."

"The fact that we've been able to capture and repurpose some of the things that were meant to destroy us, or keep us out of the mainstream, is worth reflecting on. That's something we need to preach about too."

### 2019

**Q: Do you remember Samurai Sundays on Ch. 66?**

A: We were Samurai Sunday – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday – that was us. We were all the karate kids, we used to watch Samurai Sunday and then go into the yard and do all of the moves.

**Q: So, when "Karate Kid" came out, you were like ... ?**

A: For us, it was like, "We can do that." We would watch Samurai Sunday and say, Yeah, I can catch an arrow. A movie like "Karate Kid" still spoke volumes to us. It felt like one of the things we could relate to, because we were the karate kids. I remember being on the Red Line with a ninja sword on my back. That was when you could still take a ninja sword on the train back then.

**Q: Tell us more about your training as a kid?**

A: We trained at 63rd Street Beach and 35th and Michigan, I remember having to run barefoot in the snow about a quarter mile. That was conditioning your body. We used to run barefoot from the spot next door to Jackson Park. It didn't matter how old you were, we trained in the park, we trained in the Japanese Garden. It was a mandate in our house that once you were born, you studied the martial arts. Wasalu has taken that to the next level and just brought it to a larger audience – not in a commercial way but in a really heartfelt exhibition of our family tradition. It's kind of an homage to dad and out of all the children, he is the one who studied the art and continued on with the practice – from the samurai sword to Jiu Jitsu, Aikido – everything that was implanted in us, he continued it.

**Q: Was Sho'nuff misunderstood in the 1985 film "The Last Dragon?"**

A: No, he was a bully. He got what he deserved. But it does show that even bullies are able to attain "the glow."

**Q: The series also shows a need for people of color to be exposed to other cultures. Expound on that.**

A: That was the one thing my father was big on. We were the multicultural family. When he and my mom got married, they were converted to Islam, so we have that part of the culture to it, then the martial arts was a whole other Asian influence, he was also a musician (African drummer) so we had that aspect to it. He played the bagpipes – just a range of these different ideas and philosophies, flavors and tastes.

**Q: Your house must have been the happening spot?**

A: Yes. And it was all in the 'hood.

**Q: Best martial arts film ever made?**

A: "Blood Sport" with Jean-Claude Van Damme - Fiasco

"Enter the Dragon" - Ayesha Jaco

"Five Fingers of Death" - Afrika Jaco. (also their father's favorite)

**Q: What's next for you, Lupe?**

A: Maybe there's a season two in the works.

**Q: What's next, music-wise?**

A: I'm at a certain level of my craft where I'm just trying to incorporate new styles, learn new things, learn new conversations to have, learn new cultural products that I can put back into my music. It's less about selling records. I feel like I'm back in a sort of learning stage as an artist.

## Gallery

Photo by Chris Walker(L-R): Afrika Jaco, Lupe Fiasco, Ayesha Jaco
Photo by Brian Cassella
## References

1. ↑ Kot, Greg (March 1, 2011). "Lupe Fiasco Discusses the Making of 'L.A.S.E.R.S.': 'It Was Destroying Me'". *Chicago Tribune*. Archived from the original on March 5, 2011.
2. ↑ Kot, Greg (October 3, 2012). "Lupe Fiasco: 'I'm Afraid Chicago Is Dying'". *Chicago Tribune*.
3. ↑ Rockett, Darcel (July 3, 2019). "Lupe Fiasco Goes to China: Artist Reconnects with Martial Arts, Lessons Learned as a Youth in New Docu-series". *Chicago Tribune*.
4. ↑ "Lupe, Muslim Culture Hits Streets". *Chicago Tribune*. June 22, 2007.