In an interview with Complex Magazine a few days ago, Lupe Fiasco sat down and shed some light on the “process”  and sacrifices he had to make just to get a release date for LASERS.  As one might’ve expected, Lupe claims that he wasn’t a big pusher for “Show Goes On”, even claiming

I didn’t have nothing to do with that record. That was the label’s record. That wasn’t like I knew the producer or knew the writer or anything like that. That was one of those records the record company gave me, [they even gave me] stuff they wanted me to rap about. It wasn’t like, ‘Hey I did this and I went to a mountain and found inspiration and it was this.’ [Last April] I was backstage at a show at the House of Blues in L.A. and the president of [Atlantic Records] came to me and said, ‘Hey check this out, I got this song.’ He played ‘Show Goes On’ for me on the iPod. I was used to it because they presented me like ten other songs in the same fashion or via email. So for me, at that point, it was just another record like, ‘Is this a song you want me to do?’ There was nothing special about it for me at that point. It was like, ‘You know we still want off the label, right?’ That was the conversations we were having.

While I anticipated that Lupe had to give up a little of what he wanted for the album to get Atlantic to put it out (throw a club banger or 2 on the record), I never could have dreamed about it going down like the way Lupe describes.  Even though the interview goes on to push the article in the ways of “Lupe hates everything about this album”, Lupe admits that he is happy to be getting the album out, especially after all the hard work his fans put in to get it to happen.  Additionally, Lupe got a couple of his tracks in (He called the recently released “All Black Everything” his favorite track ever) and I think more than anything, Lupe doesn’t “hate” the album so much as he is “disappointed” by it.  After having read the interview (which I would highly recommended doing), I feel that I know exactly what is coming from this album.  Like boys and girls at a middle school dance, this album will be as seperated as oil and water: half the tracks being senseless club bangers, and the other half being overly-political tracks like “words I never said” to compensate for the pop songs.

March 8 can't come soon enough...

As disappointed as Lupe is, I think his fans will be more so.  With The Cool (Which i firmly believe to be one of the best albums of the decade), Lupe achieved what has become rarer and rarer by the year; a record which appealed both to the common listener and to the hip-hop heads so listened to every syllable.  Unfortunately with fame comes pressure, from the radio stations, from the record labels and from the agents.  Just as Wiz and B.o.B couldn’t get popular via their stoner personas, Lupe had to give up his incredible intellectual rhyming abilities to put food on the table.  What puts him above the many before him who have done this? The fact that it seems that hes not doing it to put another beamer in his garage, but because he wants to give his fans more of his music, any way that he can.

Here is the link to the complex interview-Interview: Lupe Fiasco Hates His Own Album

And here is a throwback track I heard from The Cool while I was driving today.  Listen to the words and try and imagine this song ever getting put through as a single…