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Lupe Fiasco has fans that any artist would envy. When it looked like Atlantic Records would shelve the rapper's long-delayed third album, Lasers, those fans rallied to his aide, launching an aggressive online support campaign and holding protests outside Atlantic's New York offices last fall. Their tactics worked: Lasers is set for release next week, by many accounts because of their efforts.
But Fiasco has an odd way of repaying his fans' loyalty. Fiasco promised them the album they were fighting for would be uncompromising, a rejection of the shallow pop-rap his fans loathe. He even christened it with the temporary title The Great American Rap Album. In an interview with Complex.com this week, though, Fiasco walked back those promises hard, admitting he acquiesced to label pressure to make the album more pop-friendly and recorded songs (including the album's noxiously perky, Modest Mouse-sampling hit "The Show Goes On") from templates Atlantic forced on him:
There will certainly be worse rap records released this year, but it's unlikely any of them will be more schizophrenic than Lasers, a mess of empty club songs that clash awkwardly against Fiasco's righteous political rants. Perhaps the album's greatest irony is that the songs apparently imposed by Atlantic actually work better than Fiasco's clarion calls. With their rap-rock indignation and ugly Auto-Tune, tracks like the 9/11 trutherism-tainted "Words I Never Said" or the brooding "Beautiful Lasers (2 Ways)" repeat the blunders of Lil Wayne's Rebirth. The difference, of course, is that Lil Wayne actually stood by his terrible album; Fiasco excuses Lasers' trespasses by pointing fingers at his label with one hand while cashing royalty checks with the other. If he insists on doing that, the very least he can do is stop taunting his fans by pretending to be a beacon of anti-corporate integrity.
But Fiasco has an odd way of repaying his fans' loyalty. Fiasco promised them the album they were fighting for would be uncompromising, a rejection of the shallow pop-rap his fans loathe. He even christened it with the temporary title The Great American Rap Album. In an interview with Complex.com this week, though, Fiasco walked back those promises hard, admitting he acquiesced to label pressure to make the album more pop-friendly and recorded songs (including the album's noxiously perky, Modest Mouse-sampling hit "The Show Goes On") from templates Atlantic forced on him:
I love and hate this album. I listen to it and I'll like some of the songs. But when I think about what it took to actually get the record together and everything that I went through on this recordwhich is something I can't separateI hate this album. A lot of the songs that are on the album, I'm kinda neutral to. Not that I don't like them, or that I hate them, it's just I know the process that went behind it. I know the sneaky business deal that went down behind this song, or the artist or singer or songwriter who wrote this hook and didn't want to give me this song in the first place. So when I have that kind of knowledge behind it, I'm just kind of neutral to it like, 'Another day, another dollar.' As opposed something like The Cool, which is more of my own blood, sweat, and tears, and my own control.So it turns out the album that Fiasco's following fought so passionately for wasn't so much a labor of love as a labor of grudging compromise. It's one thing to release a shameless crossover albumrappers have been doing that since the genre's earliest days, sometimes with great resultsbut it's beyond cynical to do so on the backs of fans promised the exact opposite kind of album. That Fiasco can't even muster the conviction to even defend his album makes it that much more of a slap in the face.
There will certainly be worse rap records released this year, but it's unlikely any of them will be more schizophrenic than Lasers, a mess of empty club songs that clash awkwardly against Fiasco's righteous political rants. Perhaps the album's greatest irony is that the songs apparently imposed by Atlantic actually work better than Fiasco's clarion calls. With their rap-rock indignation and ugly Auto-Tune, tracks like the 9/11 trutherism-tainted "Words I Never Said" or the brooding "Beautiful Lasers (2 Ways)" repeat the blunders of Lil Wayne's Rebirth. The difference, of course, is that Lil Wayne actually stood by his terrible album; Fiasco excuses Lasers' trespasses by pointing fingers at his label with one hand while cashing royalty checks with the other. If he insists on doing that, the very least he can do is stop taunting his fans by pretending to be a beacon of anti-corporate integrity.
