But I Sphinx Like Leon

Last year in one of his first singles I Gotcha, Lupe Fiasco claimed he came to resurrect hip hop a couple months before Nas even claimed it was dead. All the pretentious types ate it up and declared that Lupe was everything short of the second coming. Then Food & Liquor was released to a resounding yawn. Making matters worse, Lupe infamously flubbed the lines to Electric Relaxation while paying tribute to A Tribe Called Quest during the 2007 Hip-Hop Honors only to blame it on not being familiar with Tribe despite seeming to be part of their backpack rapping lineage. He did get some points back for appearing in the Nickelback video for Rockstar.

The problem, though, with Food and Liquor, was mostly in the bland production. Lupe always had a wicked flow, stealing Kanye West’s Touch the Sky from him, that lacked the profanities, gunplay, and misogynistic lyrics that have made rap a bore this decade. But things looked up when Dumb it Down released earlier this summer with its sparse, Drop it Like it Hot type synth and base drum simplicity which was a better beat than anything on his debut.

And there are plenty of other great beats for Lupe to tackle throughout Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool, mostly provided by Soundtrackk, like the opener Go Go Gadget Flow (not to be confused with Gnarls Barkley’s Go Go Gadget Gospel) with its frantic strings that sounds like it was taken from a lost Dr. Dre album. The guitar laden Hello/Goodbye (Uncool), co-produced by Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, is a nice diversion. Surprisingly the Patrick Stump (he of Fall Out Boy fame) produced Little Weapon works with Lupe taking on guns from those used by boy soldiers in foreign land to those used to knock over the cornerstone, gun down classmates and the ones we use in video games.

With most albums that go north of an hour (The Cool comes in at seventy-one minutes), there is some fat that should have been trimmed. Lupe should have gotten someone else to sing for Matthew Santos (not to be confused with the dude who succeeded President Bartlett on The West Wing but to be confused with another Chris Martin knock-off) on the three hooks he appears on. Snoop Dogg adds nothing to Hi-Definition. And Lupe name drops his next album LupEND about two too many times. And I’m not sure yet if Lupe shouting out the blog lupethefiasco.blogspot.com/ was brilliant or cheesy. But had this been his first album, maybe Lupe would have lived up to the hype he garnered last summer.

Song to Download - Dumb it Down

Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.