- Courtesy of Lupe Fiasco’s Facebook
- Lupe Fiasco
We live in an age where there are a multitude of avenues for you to stick your foot in your mouth, and Lupe Fiasco has suffered for it. The public can handle mercurial musicians—hell, celeb-centric media requires them to stay ahead of the information—but it helps when these artists create work that stirs something in people (see Kanye). That hasn’t been the case for Lupe in recent years.
But Lupe brought some of the ideas he employed on “Next to It” to Tetsuo & Youth, specifically his role as an all-seeing narrator who isn’t necessarily all-knowing. The MC’s intelligence can be as much of a problem as it is a boon for his music, and some of his past material struggles under the weight of complex moralisms. Lupe’s ambitious, but his execution can backfire, as was the case with one of the Food & Liquor II singles, “Bitch Bad.”
“Prisoner 1 & 2” is a little more than eight and a half minutes long, which makes it the third-longest song on Tetsuo & Youth. The second-longest, “Mural,” is the first proper track on the album, and Lupe coasts through the thing like a bike messenger weaving through traffic; he manages to keep the energy high through a long cut with no distinct hook, and it makes for one of the album’s most masterful strokes. Tetsuo & Youth is long, dense, and filled with experimental flourishes. There’s a lot on here that requires time to fully unpack, and fortunately Lupe’s performance is the thing that’ll encourage people to give the album the time it deserves.
