Shouting Grounds

People have been saying hip-hop is dead for years and up until recently I’ve been more or less inclined to agree with them. Starting in the early part of the current century and continuing up until the present the entire landscape of the genre has been littered with little-to-no-talent acts who couldn’t string a decent rhyme together if their over-priced and uncreative lives depended on it.

To be certain, since the early 2000’s we’ve had some bonafide talent, most notably with the likes of Kanye West and T.I., but by and large the music coming from the new crowd has been, to put it bluntly, complete and total crap. Occasionally something will hit with a catchy rhythm or hook that you can snap your neck to for a week or two but even then it’s just a slick beat with no substantial lyrical content behind it. As a direct result hip-hop has now entered the realm of the Super-Producer giving us such names as Swizz Beats, Scott Storch and Manny Fresh. You’ll notice I didn’t include The Neptunes in that list and that’s solely because I consider them to be the only new school producing group worth their salt and truly pushing the limits.

This all leads me to what I like to think of as hip-hop’s second coming. Yes, we’ve still got a solid stable of heavy hitters that continue to make semi-decent to good tracks, but in my opinion what the genre needs right now is some good, fresh talent. We need a knight in shining armor to liberate us from today’s over-played and underwhelming noise and whisk us back to those glory days of yesteryear.

Enter Lupe Fiasco! Hailing from my home city of Chi-Town, I first heard him on a Kanye West track (Touch the Sky) and I’ll admit wasn’t terribly impressed off the bat. However once his first big single hit (Kick Push) I found myself instantly digging his style and delivery. Thanks in large to Pharrell and Co. his beats are always top-notch but where he really shines are his lyrics, variable speed flow, and thickly layered content. When listening you can pick out his influences and it instantly becomes clear he’s a student of such greats as Nas, Common, and Q-Tip. He blends it all together, along with a portion of his own custom swagger, to produce a highly lyrically charged and versatile flow, that while not as smooth or honed as Eminem, T.I., or the king himself Biggie, is very distinctive in itself. His effectiveness is in his ability to have you instantly memorizing every line due to his dynamic and distinctive delivery. He infuses every syllable, word and sentence with a purpose and his lyrics are some of the most well constructed I’ve heard since perhaps Nas. While he doesn’t carry the word-smithing skills of Eminem or Kanye he more than makes up for it with the attention to detail he lavishes on his lyrics and content. And the music is fun! At times I find myself laughing out loud as he effortlessly uses his skills to lace his rhymes with double and sometimes even TRIPLE meanings! His flow is at all times saturated with a certain cockiness that distinguishes itself from Kanye’s “The world owes me” and T.I.’s “This is too easy”, but instead says something to effect of “I’m here to make my mark and won’t stop or drop off until the job is done”.

To date he’s released two mainstream albums: Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor and Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool and if you’re a serious hip-hop fan you need to own both! If this is the first you’ve heard of him and you’re interested in checking him out I would suggest starting with his mainstream hits like Kick Push and Superstar then move into some of the deeper stuff like Dumb it Down (currently my favorite song), Hurt Me Soul, Put You On Game, and Gotta Eat. Also if you wanna hear him give Twista and Bone Thugs a run for their money as the fastest flows in hip-hop give Go Go Gadget Flow a listen. While he may not be able to flow quite as fast for quite as long as the others I just mentioned the kid soundly holds his own and there’s no doubt he commands respect while doing it.

I can easily see a Grammy in Lupe’s future and I’m looking forward to many more albums from his camp. While not the best in the game his efforts thus far have already propelled him into classic status which is more than can be said for many of his fellow contemporaries.

So is he really the savior of hip-hop? Who knows for certain. I do believe, however, if not its savior then most certainly a prophet here to herald forth a new era in the game.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.