It’s fitting, really, that the lead-up to the release of Lupe Fiasco’s third album has been such a… well, such a fiasco. Originally announced in early 2008, it has gone through multiple name changes and countless delays – all because his label, Atlantic Records, didn’t really know what to do with a rapper who wasn’t talking about bitches and bling, but rather spitting rhymes about self-esteem, self-knowledge and children being forced to join the army in Africa. In the end it took an online petition (which gathered 30,000 signatures) and a protest outside their HQ in New York to realise that not only did Lupe Fiasco have fans, he had lots of them. And they were passionate about their man. A tremendous public show of support in the face of a lack of support from the label – fitting again, when you consider that the first Lupe album, Food and Liquor, was all about trying to find a balance between wants and needs, between good and evil, between food and liquor.
Of course, the whole situation is absurd when you consider the success of the first two Lupe records. Both reached #1 on the Billboard Rap chart; both were nominated for Best Rap Album at the Grammys; both featured heavily on nearly all year-end lists. The fact that Atlantic/Warner seemed to be holding out for a blockbuster rather than being content with what will (in all likelihood) be a terrific album with moderate sales says more about the modern-day structure of record labels than I have the space to get into here. Consider the words of its creator: “We wanted to go for a more ‘popular’ sound,” says Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, on the phone from California. “The album is a bit more, I guess, popular-sounding than the other albums,” he laughs. “You don’t have to be a die-hard Lupe Fiasco fan to enjoy the music that’s on it.”
Despite the years of obfuscation from his label, Jaco himself remains philosophical about the whole thing. It’s just a business decision, he says, nothing else. “I would say [they don’t understand me] as an artist… the artist I am, and the artist they want me to be”, he explains. “They have a certain idea of what ‘a star’ is, or what ‘a star’ should sound like, and they want everybody to fit that mould, no matter what. They are happy to stuff you into that commercialised space, even if they have to cut off your arms and legs…”
In conversation, Jaco comes across incredibly well. While the Lupe Fiasco persona seems to get bigger and bigger with every tour (the current promo posters, with him in his badass leather jacket, are a case in point), the man behind the curtain is softly spoken and almost excessively considered in his responses. Over the course of our talk I get the sense that he’s reached an understanding with his label: he will fulfil his contractual obligations as long as he doesn’t have to pretend to be thrilled with them. He is thoughtful and pragmatic when it comes to The Business, lamenting the fact that American radio is so narrow and restricted – although he’s aware that there’s not much you can do about it. Jaco is happy to admit, for instance, that the first single from the new album, ‘The Show Goes On’, was presented to him by his label as a compromise to get a release date. “It’s all about compromise,” he says, without even the slightest hint of indignation or anger. “Sometimes you have to compromise on what you want to do as an artist for the sake of the business, because at the end of the day it is a business.”
His response to Atlantic’s dithering was, essentially, to quit. Jaco left the Lupe Fiasco moniker in LA along with all the baggage that the name entails, to reinvent himself as the lead singer of a band called Japanese Cartoon. Although, as the man himself explains, it wasn’t so much a reinvention as the other side of a split musical personality. “I just created something completely different [in Japanese Cartoon],” he begins, “and said from the outset that this is me, being completely different, on purpose. It has nothing to do with Lupe Fiasco, it has nothing to do with hip-hop; it’s just all about me making the music that I want to make. Lupe Fiasco is [a product of] my hip-hop experiences and influences, with Nas, Jay-Z, Wu-Tang and what have you, but Japanese Cartoon is the product of my Clash, Queen, Bad Brains, Radiohead, Coldplay kind of experience,” he explains.
The most important part of Japanese Cartoon, for Jaco, is that it offers tremendous artistic freedom. “There’s only so much that I can do within the framework of Lupe Fiasco, without ruining my commercial appeal, or ‘selling out’ or whatever,” he explains, “[but] there’s no ceiling on Japanese Cartoon. So I could make the next album a Russian waltz album, or an instrumental album like UNKLE does, and I don’t have to worry about any repercussions.”
So, what are we left with? Well, we have a new Lupe album, which is a good thing. But Jaco had to compromise his artistic vision, which is bad. But he seems to be comfortable with this, which is good… If this is starting to sound like Homer Simpson and his cursed frozen yoghurt I apologise, but it’s hard not to play ‘on the other hand’ after talking to Jaco for twenty minutes. I suppose all we can hold on to is that Lupe Fiasco owes Atlantic three more albums, and he seems to be able to balance the business with the art. The good with the bad. The yin with the yang. The food with the liquor.
