Lupe Fiasco's The Cool
Developing in tandem with his Chi-Town mentor Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco’s sophomore effort is a far grander than his debut. “The Coolest,” “Little Weapon,” “Hello Goodbye,” and “The Die” are chock full of sound and syllable, buoyed by the same enormous, inflatable synths as Kanye’s *Graduation*. However, some of the best moments on *The Cool* hearken back to the nimble mischief of A Tribe Called Quest; “Paris, Tokyo” is Lupe’s holler-back to Tribe’s classic “Award Tour,” while “Gold Watch,” with its tricky beat and trickier rhymes, might be the album’s best song. As his music grows beyond the simple nostalgia of his 2006 hit “Kick, Push,” Lupe weaves what are easily mainstream rap’s most ambitious verses. “Dumb It Down” is a portfolio of exploratory rhyme styles: “I\'m not a listener or a seer so my windshield smear / Here you steer, I really shouldn\'t be behind this / Clearly cause my blindness / The windshield is min-strel / The whole grill is roadkill / So trill and so sincere / Yeah, I\'m both them there.” While songs like “Put You On Game” become too grandiloquent for their own good, there are dozens of verses on *The Cool* that are as complex and challenging as anything a Grammy-nominated rapper has ventured.
Not quite the concept album we were promised, The Cool still features isolated moments of widescreen drama-- and Fiasco's storytelling abilities, lyrical dextrousness, and willingness to submerge himself in the theatre of it all make for a rewarding sophomore album.
Last year's massively buzzed-about Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor was supposed to make its creator the thinking man's rap superstar: Think Kanye West before money and fame drove him insane or a Jay-Z more interested in robots, anime, and the Koran than conspicuous consumption. But rampant leaks and a mediocre…
Lupe Fiasco anchors his new album in the declaration, “I present the death of tha cool” — showing all the artistic ambition and cold-eyed moralism that makes him such a fascinating hip-hop figure.
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For those old-fashioned folks still buying CDs (myself included), Lupe Fiasco’s debut, Food & Liquor, offered more in the way of liner notes than the...
Lupe Fiasco - The Cool review: Surprisingly, The Cool works despite its many obvious flaws