Lupe Fiasco discusses
the making of 'L.A.S.E.R.S.':
'It was destroying me'
On “The Show Goes On,” the first single from his forthcoming album, “L.A.S.E.R.S.” (1st & 15th/Atlantic), Lupe Fiasco does some venting at the expense of his own record company before turning the song into an anthem about perseverance.
Fiasco not only paraphrases the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten – “Have you ever had the feelin’ that you was bein’ had” – but calls out his employer for putting “chains on your soul.”
It’s a bold, border-line crazy move by Fiasco, but the Chicago native, born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco in 1982, felt he had had enough. Making “L.A.S.E.R.S.,” he says, caused him to re-evaluate his career and pushed him into a depression so deep he nearly didn’t come out of it.
On his first two acclaimed albums, “Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor” (2006) and “The Cool” (2007), Fiasco established himself as one of the more distinctive new voices in rap, an inventive lyricist with a knack for channeling the self-empowering uplift and incisive anger of the most politically conscious ‘60s and ‘70s soul, funk and reggae and filtering it into 21st Century hip-hop. But even after selling more than 500,000 copies of “The Cool,” Fiasco says he found himself in a struggle with his label, Atlantic Records, to make “L.A.S.E.R.S.” as he envisioned.
The MC’s fans, growing restless over endless delays bedeviling the album, eventually petitioned for its release (gathering more than 30,000 signatures) and staged a protest last October outside the label’s offices in Midtown Manhattan.The label finally set a release date for the album (it’s due in stores Tuesday), and Fiasco says he’s happy overall with the final result. One of the album’s key tracks, “Words I Never Said,” was directly inspired by the fan-led protest, a real-life example of the activist message Fiasco was trying to convey. In an interview, he went in depth on the struggle to make “L.A.S.E.R.S.” (Atlantic Records was thrice asked to address Fiasco’s assertions in this interview, but declined):
Q: You created a 14-point “L.A.S.E.R.S.” manifesto in 2009, which outlines what your career has been about: It’s OK to be different and think differently, it’s cool to be a misfit and swim against the tide. Did that directly inspire the album?A: It was an attempt to achieve some simplicity. “The Cool” was so complex and metaphorical that I felt a need for the message to be distilled and put 100 proof in your face. It was an attempt to make the album more pop, as in popular, as in something that people could relate to, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, a member of the KKK or a Black Panther, a supporter of Barack Obama or Glenn Beck. The manifesto has core ideas that everyone can believe in, and I wanted it to be the starting point for a real serious conversation. Me being part of a multinational corporation was part of it too.
Q: By approaching music as an outsider, as someone with non-mainstream ideas about politics and music, did that affect your relations with Atlantic while making “L.A.S.E.R.S.”?
A: Definitely. On a technical side I’m hamstrung, because I’m not a 360 artist (signed to a deal where the label gets income from touring and merchandise as well as sales of recorded music). That put me on a different priority list, a different budget to record the album, a different level of promotion. I’m not on the “A” list at Atlantic Records. There was a certain level of disbelief in the project. I was told “The Cool” wasn’t a success. Like what planet are you on to say it wasn’t a success? An album that sold 700,000 and got four Grammy nominations? That wasn’t success? So what is a success? A No. 1 smash on the radio, I was told. But I don’t know how to make those. I don’t think anybody knows what that is. So now I get into breaking the cardinal rule, which Jay-Z told me early on was, “Don’t chase radio.” You fast forward to 2011 and it’s let’s chase radio. It becomes an interesting hypocrisy that affects how you write your songs, who you hire to sing hooks, who you hire to produce. I was literally told for “The Show Goes On” that I shouldn’t rap too deep. I shouldn’t be too lyrical. It just needs to be something easy on the eyes. Like a record company telling Picasso that we don’t need these abstract interpretations of life, where people have to sit down and look at it and break it down. It was better to paint the Upper West Side lady and her poodle so everyone could look at it right away and understand what was going on. I felt like I was painting poodles. It’s why in the first line of “The Show Goes On” I paraphrase Johnny Rotten at the Sex pistols’ final show: “Have you ever had the feeling that you were being cheated.”
Q: How did you resolve the conflict with the label?
A: I had to paint puppies, to be honest. But I threw in my own twist. One of the eyes of the puppy is a nine-headed deer, and there’s some kind of mutation in the lady’s hands. There is some subversiveness tucked in there. The album is still a collaboration. They had to give, I had to give, because they have to have some incentive to promote the record. So the first verse of “The Show Goes On” is about them, but the rest widens it out. There are tracks like “Words I Never Said” and “All Black Everything” where they let me do what I want, they didn’t interfere. There was no pressure to create, no expectation to please someone. I’m comfortable and happy with the record as a whole, where before there was an imbalance. I hate this record, the process of making this record, and I love this record. What I had to go through was not fun, the ugliness I saw in people. But I love the manifesto, that the message got out, that fans protested for four hours in front of the label’s New York headquarters and demanded attention.
Q: The protest started with the fans, right?
A: It started with a kid who had some grievances with the label and he wrote a petition, grammatical errors and all, calling for the release of my album. Like me, people were getting tired of being told the album is ready but it’s not coming out. He got 30,000 signatures. It literally started as a joke on a hip-hop message board. “We should protest, ha ha ha.” Then someone says, “If we did, what would we need?” Another person says, “We’ll need permits.” And somebody else pipes in, “I know where to get them.” It snowballs into the Oct. 15 “Fiasco Friday.”
Q: That activist message is in “Words I Never Said.” It’s life imitating art, or art imitating life. Which came first, the song or the protest?
A: The whole album, the mission for me was to get people to act. At the time of the protest, “Words I Never Said” wasn’t recorded. But the message was out there with the manifesto. People got it. You take action if you see an injustice being done rather than sitting silent. I went back to the studio and did “Words” after that. People were saying to the protestors what about protesting against gun violence or poverty. And their response was that’s what Lupe raps about. It was motivation for me to give them a song that can’t be misinterpreted. Stare right at the neck of the detractors, challenge society, don’t let them intimidate you into silence.
Q: On the track, you criticize President Obama as well as right-wing commentators like Glenn Beck. Were you expecting to get some flak over that?
A: I honestly thought I wouldn’t. We shot a video for it, and once it gets more out there who knows what will happen. I think there is some basis for my complaint. I’m not throwing shots, I am a well thought-out guy. I’m trying to say something that has meaning, depth. I get more thumbs up and nods of approval from people who respect the fact that I speak my mind. I don’t vote, but I pay taxes. My taxes help pay for a lot of these wars and this public school system. We all do. That gives me the right and the responsibility because our hands and money are in all of this. My taxes from performing on stage pay for some hell in another part of the world. I can’t stay silent about that.
Q: In the song “Beautiful Lasers” it sounds like someone is contemplating suicide. Is that about you?
A: It’s about me contemplating suicide, coming to grips with it. I was reading about Hunter S. Thompson and why he committed suicide, the Kurt Cobains, people in the same business as I am who actually carried it out. You have the corporation in your ear and you’re living a public life, but you also have a private life and are thinking I don’t want to be here. And it also refers to social suicide, where I would just leave, just not do music anymore. I came out of it literally not (caring about any of it). It was a constant set of demands: If you don’t do this interview, you won’t get coverage in this magazine. If you don’t do this song, this album isn’t happening. Saying that I didn’t care became my therapy, my recovery. And I felt like I needed to document it. I felt like if I’m going through that, and I’m a normal person, I felt like other people must be contemplating this too because of similar pressures to do things they felt were wrong or against their better judgment. This is a very personal album about things playing out in a public space. My lack of enthusiasm for doing this event, or appearing on this TV network, or working with this person -- I didn’t see it right away, but it was destroying me. I was going through this classic breakdown. It came out in “Beautiful Lasers.” It’s a very powerful, energetic song, and me screaming in it was therapy.
Q: How close were you to feeling you could kill yourself?
A: The idea of suicide was real. The danger came as I started to catch myself rationalizing it. For six, seven months I was questioning my faith and thinking about how would this affect my mom, my family. I only got out of it by talking freely to a few people about it. They let me take myself out of circulation for awhile. It was a secret set of friends. A couple people in particular who let me stow away and allowed me to be cut off from the universe for a while.
Q: It sounds like you lost a piece of your soul. How do you get that back?
A: The first song on the album is called “Letting Go.” It’s my declaration of independence from the clutches of the record industry, the blogs, the fans, the press, the lifestyle. It’s me hanging over the side of a building. Remember in the “Juice” movie, the scene where Tupac is being held over the side of a building? I envisioned that in this song. There is a part of me that has been lost because of all this. I lost a damaged piece of me. And I got the rest of me back. We were performing parts of the record that the label was saying were not a hit, yet on stage people were hearing these songs and would go crazy in reaction to them. It made me realize that somebody is not telling the truth, and that things were going to be OK.