Edited by Kali Robinson
August 20th, 2015
Racism, immigration, rape, child soldiers, and the military industrial complex: all topics Lupe Fiasco weaves into complex metaphors and channels through multiple characters in his 2007 album The Cool. Lupe’s magnum opus enjoyed notable success upon release, garnering generally positive reviews. Three years later, Kanye West released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to much greater critical acclaim. It earned an elusive 10/10 rating from Pitchfork, while The Cool received only an 8.1. While Lupe tells stories in the third-person, Kanye’s career album was unabashedly self-centered and introspective.
Why would critics and rap fans prefer a chart-topping sixty-eight minutes of auto-tuned braggadocio to Lupe’s sociopolitically charged triple and quadruple-entendres?
Most cite Lupe’s sometimes didactic and “preachy” tone and lyrics. Even in positive reviews, critics and fans like Sivu Nobongoza dubbed the rapper “Minister Lupe of the Nation of Pedantic Wack Rappers.” Contradictory Sivu.
So, how do listeners and critics hear Lupe's complex and substantive lyricism as "preachy", and in the same breath praise an album that’s all brag? I argue that Kanye’s album met with more critical acclaim delivering important messages and meaningful lyrical content through a strong first person voice that is more genuine than Lupe’s indirect narratives. In other words, Kanye is better for rapping about himself. While Fantasy seems to be entirely in first person singular, a majority of the lyrics are actually first person plural. By using himself as a metonym for a broad range of subjects and demographics, Kanye carries on Hip Hop tradition and avoids putting himself in an apparent position of teaching, averting Lupe’s preachy pitfalls. Furthermore, Fantasy's musically and popularly broad range of samples and features is much more dynamic, and appealing to Hip Hop heads and non-rap fans alike.
Fiasco and West’s different rapping identities and perspectives are especially apparent in Fantasy and The Cool because both include multiple voices. Kanye uses two personas to broaden the impact of his introspection, and Lupe raps through several characters in his album’s conceptual narrative.
- Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool
What makes The Cool a great album despite its condescending flavor is that Lupe backs up most of his claims. “Dumb it Down" features tricky flows like: “Now hear this, I’m earless/And I’m peerless, that means I’m eyeless/Which means I’m tearless, which means my iris/Resides where my ears is, which means I’m blinded/But I’mma find it, I can feel its nearness.”
In 12 seconds Lupe sets up and knocks down an extended synesthetic metaphor. He’s earless yet wants an audience. He’s peerless as in without comparison or counterpart, but also peer-less as in unable to see, and so on. “Little Weapon” examines recruitment of child soldiers in the third world and responsibility for it in the first, from African child rebel armies to American jihadist school shooters to violent video game players everywhere. “Intruder Alert” uses the overarching theme of intrusion to tie together three common but devastating circumstances of social alienation felt in America: rape, addiction, and immigration.
In 12 seconds Lupe sets up and knocks down an extended synesthetic metaphor. He’s earless yet wants an audience. He’s peerless as in without comparison or counterpart, but also peer-less as in unable to see, and so on. “Little Weapon” examines recruitment of child soldiers in the third world and responsibility for it in the first, from African child rebel armies to American jihadist school shooters to violent video game players everywhere. “Intruder Alert” uses the overarching theme of intrusion to tie together three common but devastating circumstances of social alienation felt in America: rape, addiction, and immigration.
Even fun songs on The Cool are intelligent. The radio hit “Superstar” comments on the meaning of celebrity, while “Hip Hop Saved My Life” details Slim Thug’s journey out of the ghetto with rap. All of these bright spots make the album a diverse, interactive, and thought-provoking listening experience. Unfortunately, much of his meaningful content is drowned out by Lupe’s distracting and off-putting choices of perspective. Instead of structuring the album into sections, he builds a nonsensical quasi-narrative with poorly formed characters. Instead of rapping about the childhood he spent in inner-city Chicago to make points about police brutality and government surveillance, he channels them through Orwellian anecdotes and avoids first-person pronouns at all costs, as in “Streets On Fire.” Unlike many rappers, Lupe lives up to his claims of greatness. Unfortunately, what he doesn’t say about himself is often louder.
In his 3rd-person approach to story telling, any amount of self-reflexive language Lupe attaches to his message comes off as awareness that he is teaching, that he knows something the listener doesn’t. Throughout The Cool, Fiasco tries to hide himself behind his various characters and anecdotes, and inevitably fails. Even when using different pronouns, separating yourself from your lyrics is impossible in popular music and especially in Hip Hop, in which the default subject is oneself. Lupe will therefore inescapably come off as condescending to some listeners. Mark Pytilk for Pitchfork Media was one of them: “There’s a fine line between respecting your listeners’ intelligence and mistaking your own vague allusions and abstrusities for some kind of coherent statement, and this time around, Lupe’s landed on the wrong side of that line.” No matter how important the subject, complex the lyricism, or smooth the rhymes, poor Lupe's didactic tendency will always leave a bitter taste in some critics’ mouths.
Perhaps the most overt example of this comes in the aforementioned “Dumb it Down,” a track dedicated to convincing his listeners that he won’t water-down his “conscious” messages at the behest of Atlantic’s A&Rs or sell out for record sales. Gemini, playing a frustrated Atlantic exec, shouts “You goin’ over niggas’ heads, Lu” and “Them big words ain’t cool, nigga” throughout the chorus. Lupe explicitly acknowledges that his songs are meaningful and smart, a sure-fire recipe for receiving accusations of didacticism. His model makes it nearly impossible not to sound condescending, and this track is almost deliberately smug. If The Cool is the “minefield of potential preachiness” Greg Kot claims it is in his review for the Chicago Tribune, “Dumb it Down” is equivalent to running through blindfolded.
Lupe scatters more fodder for criticism throughout “Hello/Goodbye (Uncool).” The apocalyptic, weather-themed track features moments that exude an off-putting “wake up sheeple!” mentality. “Lie to ourselves” and “We can all pretend that it’s better than it’s ever been” mostly sour the complex wordplay they punctuate. Even worse is the album’s introduction, “Baba Says Cool for Thought,” a single spoken word verse performed by Lupe’s sister, Ayesha Jaco. Here Lupe tries to expose that what’s considered cool is oftentimes quite toxic. Ayesha cites lynchings, hurricane Katrina, gentrification, drug dealing, and police brutality as atrocities that society sees or has seen as acceptable or “cool”. The track’s closing couplet, however, spoils this message: “Cause the problem is we think it’s cool too/Check your ingredients before you overdose on the cool.” In the aforementioned examples, Lupe makes the listener the victim of society’s toxic “cools,” which somewhat effectively illustrates the song’s point. Tying it together by placing the blame on the listener, however, comes off as didactic.
Furthermore, Lupe uses a poorly-constructed narrative to dash any hope of infusing his own perspective the right way, the Hip Hop way. Rap artists have an obligation to talk about themselves; the genre is a rich tradition of experience-based storytelling. Virtually every respected Hip Hop artist derives the basis of their lyrical content from first-hand experience, and to refuse to is to reject sacred custom. Nas, for instance, spends the entirety of Illmatic telling stories about growing up in Queensbridge. On Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z rhymes about his drug-dealing days. More recently, Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City deals with growing up avoiding gangs in a Compton dominated by them, and the list goes on. Instead of rapping about his experiences or feelings to convey messages, Lupe channels his voice through several characters in an ill-conceived narrative concept. This formula results in an album where the only meaningful first-person voice is telling you how smart it is.
In the album, a scattered group of songs gives narratives that follow the overlapping stories of three-characters: the Cool, the Game and the Streets. The Cool, a disadvantaged child, grows up on “He Say, She Say” with his father absent. As the album progresses, the Game becomes his father figure, the Streets his love interest. Both end up corrupting him, leading to his death in “The Die.” Lupe admits the concept isn’t fully fledged and takes place over only five of the album’s nineteen tracks. I personally have never picked up on it after listening to each one about fifty times.
2. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
The lyrics on Kanye West’s Fantasy are just as meaningful as Lupe’s, and he expresses them by embracing an inseparable part of Hip Hop head on, all the while making them musically accessible for non-rap fans. The most successful conscious rappers have always communicated important, substantive messages by rapping about their own experiences. These include Nas, Tupac, and Kendrick Lamar. Kanye West accomplishes this especially well on Fantasy because he raps from the perspective of two conflicting selves. One of these truly believes that he is the best of all time, the other is humble, self-conscious, and disgusted by himself. One is solely concerned with the material, the other with the existential.
Arrogant Kanye makes himself heard throughout “Gorgeous”, in which he calls out widespread racism in America firsthand: “What’s a black Beatle anyway, a fucking roach? I guess that’s why they got me sitting in fucking coach” and “At the airport they check all through my bag/And tell me that it’s random” communicate that racism is still alive and well. “Gorgeous” begs the question: if Kanye, a “black Beatle,” experiences regular discrimination, how bad must it be for less successful black people? Kanye’s braggadocio reinforces the point later in the track: “If I ever wasn’t the greatest nigga, I must have missed it!” Each shameless assertion of superiority on “Gorgeous” gives his argument more leverage — the more important Kanye is, the more heinous it is that he’s discriminated against because of his skin color.
Self-conscious Kanye, on the other hand, shines through in “Runaway.” Rob Sheffield claims in his review for The Rolling Stone that by the cathartic chorus “Let’s have a toast for the douchebags, … the assholes, … the scumbags,” “you’d best believe he means himself.” It only follows then, that “Baby I got a plan, runaway as fast as you can” is an admission of weakness and a want escape to his past deeds. Kanye delivers many of his points throughout Fantasy with moments like these, ones Pitchfork calls “perversely relatable.” The same principle also applies to the song’s verses. “You could blame me for everything” and “I don’t know how Ima manage if one day you just up a leave” work equally well when referring to a significant other or friend as they do when interpreted as purely introspective.
The song proceeds to melt into a three and a half minutes of heavily filtered, auto-tuned humming and muttering; Kanye uses his voice as an instrument to express emotions that words can’t. He constantly hovers around notes, purposefully singing out of tune, in order to coax the auto-tune into modulating his mumbles into pixelated despair. The result is music that evokes raw desperation and frustration and sounds as unstable as Kanye feels. While Kanye raps both “Runaway” and “I think I just fell in love with a porn star” at the start of the next track from the first-person, they come from two different personas. Lupe seems to have not thought this possible.
Kanye also enhances Fantasy by widening the audience for these messages with accessible beats and a historic set of rapping and singing features. While he deepens his Hip Hop allegiances by rapping from experience and featuring the likes of two Wu-Tang members, Rick Ross, and Jay-Z, he reels in pop listeners with singing features from Béyonce, Rihanna, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Drake, and dozens more. Furthermore, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon re-recorded his 2008 indie folk song “Woods” for “Lost in the World,” opening the album up to a different audience altogether.
Kanye’s beats further set him apart from Lupe. While several of Lupe’s lyrical and musical themes feel mismatched, Kanye’s are fully integrated with his raps. They fit the song’s lyrical themes largely because Kanye himself produced virtually the entire album. Kanye’s music has an advantage for the same reason people use to claim Macs are better than PCs; just as Apple manufactures both the hardware and software of their computers, West makes his beats to fit with his lyrics, and vice versa.
The beats that underlie Fantasy do more than just fit its lyrics, however. They innovate. The standalone pieces themselves are dynamic and diverse. On “Blame Game,” Kanye mixes slow drums and wining strings with a delicate and somber Apex Twin sample, adding disappointment to angry, desperate lyrics. “Devil in a New Dress,” a track that uses religious imagery to express lust and anger, derives its spooky, surreal funk from a looped seven second Smokey Robinson sample. On Fantasy, Kanye succeeds in rapping over music that both excites his traditional Hip Hop fans and attracts new ones.
3. Rapping Up
Kanye West expresses just as much meaningful social commentary by rapping through personal experiences and emotions as Lupe does through indirect third-person narratives and metaphors. This is what sets him apart from technically and lyrically masterful conscious rappers like Fiasco; his words feel infinitely more real. What sets Fantasy apart as an album is that he does this with two personas instead of one, doubling the potential for meaningful lyrical expression. His arrogance and strong first-person voice don’t put him on the same plain as Whiz Khalifa or Lil Wayne; he will always be opposite their end of the rap spectrum no matter how many of them he features on songs. Instead, his assertive voice makes what he’s saying heard, and what he’s saying is important. Furthermore, Kanye’s beats are the best possible fit for his lyrics while still appealing to fans of other genres. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is more than just an ideal rap album, however; it has had and will have a profound impact on the genre and on popular music as a whole.
In an era with rapidly changing genre definitions and restrictions, Kanye mixes the best of the best and uses it to broaden rap’s impact. Hip Hop has long been an unsung gem of American culture; in the 37 years since its popularization, only two rap records have won the Grammy for best album: Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, both of which had to appeal to different genres and popular themes to do so. Although Fantasy features artists and styles from several musical areas, its main character is doubtlessly the unrelenting rap stylings of Mr. West. The result is that when music fans of any type see the record atop a “best albums” list, they think of rap, not pop-rap fusion or anything else. With My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, West uses meaningful lyrics and eclectic, accessible musical themes to both spread Hip-Hop and invigorate fans within the genre. Kanye doesn’t make Hip Hop more poppy, he makes the popular more Hip Hop.
