Conscious rap is
a sub-genre of hip-hop that focuses on creating awareness and
imparting knowledge. Conscious rappers traditionally decry violence,
discrimination, and other societal ailments. It's propelled by the
conviction that radical social change comes through knowledge of self
and personal discovery. After all, knowledge is power right?
Today, hip-hop
music has become mainstream, with most of it unfortunately glorifying
negative values such as crime, violence, materialism, and misogyny.
The roots of rap, however, contained meaningful, positive, socially
aware, political or educational messages. Now, the media promotes
primarily gangster rap. This leads to the young audience taking
studio gangsters as role models, or to people dismissing rap
as a whole because of commercial artists' negativity. Conscious rap
tracks have become more rare, and while they are still being made,
their audience is largely underground.
Lupe Fiasco is
who I wanted to really talk about today, a very rare mainstream
conscious rapper. The man's a genius, simple as that. He doesn't
drink, smoke, or swear and the words that come out of his mouth are
like poetry. His second album 'The Cool' is a semi-concept album
which expands on the story Lupe told on the track, ‘The Cool',
from his debut
album. Fiasco introduces the characters the Streets and
the Game and the album tells the story of the little boy from ‘He
Say, She Say' who grew up without a father, and the people that
step in to raise him are the Streets and the Game. Speaking
on the concept Lupe said:
"I expand on the story; I introduce
two other characters, the Game and the Streets. The Streets is a
female. She's like the action personification of the streets, the
street life, the call of the streets. The Game is the same way. The
Game is the personification of the game. The pimp's game, the
hustler's game, the con man's game, whatever. Then they've got
supernatural characteristics. Like the Cool, his right hand is rotted
away. The only thing that rotted away was his right hand. It
represents the rotting away of his righteousness, of his good. And
the Streets and the Cool kind of have a love affair going on. So
she's represented by this locket. And the locket has a key and it's
on fire. And as a gift to the Cool on his rise to fame, she gave him
the key. And the key represents the key to the Streets. So she wears
a locket around her neck at all times. And the way the story goes,
she has given that key to tons of people throughout time. Al Capone,
Alexander the Great, whatever. She's giving them the key to the
Streets. Fame and fortune - but also the prices. The Game, he's
represented by a stripped-down skull, a skull with dice in his eyes
and smoke coming out of his mouth. The billowing smoke is actually
crack smoke. It's not a full concept album; it's more spread over
like five [tracks], really abstractly."
Thanks Wiki, but
besides the story, most other songs are about the issues of the
world. He has one song about child soldiers called 'Little Weapon'
and also 'Hurt Me Soul' where he talks about pretty much every single
issue concerning us right now. To get an indication of how smart Lupe
is I'd like to see how many people get this line. "Never met her
before, but I think I like her like a metaphor". I've had to
explain it to almost all my friends.
There are many
other great rappers who don't just talk about killing people, smoking
marijuana, girls, cars, and money, but if I were to talk about all of
them this would go on forever. So I'll leave it to you to check them
out yourselves. Recommended: Talib kweli, Immortal Technique,
KRS-ONE, and Mos Def.
It's
recommended to anyone reading this to go get the albums 'Lupe
Fiasco's Food and Liquor' and 'The Cool'. Even if one person decides
to take my advice, I'll be happy. It'll make the world a better
place.
Regards
Fahad aka
Crackademic - the academic of the epidemic of the crack
Subscribe to this comment's feed