Fiasco finds cooler way to rap fame

BALTIMORE - People are always questioning Lupe Fiasco's street cred.

"They have the nerve to say, 'Why ain't you shootin' up no n- in your songs?' " the rapper told a packed house during a concert Sunday at the Baltimore club Sonar. " 'Why ain't you talkin' about pushin' no weight?' " (That's slang for dealing drugs.) " 'Why don't you do something for the 'hood? You just don't know how to dumb it down, do you?' "

With that, Fiasco - who plays a sold-out show tonight at the Fillmore at the TLA - led his five-piece band into "Dumb It Down" from his sophomore album, The Cool. The rugged track refutes the view that a nerdy, skateboarding, Nietzsche-reading, jazz-and manga-loving alt-rapper like Fiasco can't reach hip-hop fans because "them big words ain't cool."

So far, it would seem that Fiasco - the Chicagoan born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, who refers to himself on The Cool as "a raisin in the sun, ragin' against the machine" - is winning the argument.

The Cool, released on Dec. 18, is a quasi-concept album that was easily the best CD of 2007 to hit stores after critics' best-of-the-year deadlines had passed. Its lyrical pleasures include "Gotta Eat," in which he playfully rhymes from the perspective of a cheeseburger out to rule the world.

More than that, it's a commercial success. Despite limited radio play for its single, "Superstar," The Cool is the top-selling rap album in the nation, topping such Fiasco buddies as Kanye West and Jay-Z on the Billboard rap-album chart.

The core of The Cool, Fiasco says in an interview after signing autographs at the Baltimore record shop Sound Garden, is a cycle of four songs about three characters who are "literal and figurative."

The character The Cool is the drug dealer who died with the epitaph "hustler for death, no heaven for a gangster" at the end of "He Say, She Say" on Fiasco's 2006 debut, Food & Liquor. (Its single "Daydreamin', " a duet with Jill Scott, is up for a Grammy at the Feb. 10 awards show.)

The album The Cool lays out the backstory of the title character, in relation to his counterparts The Game and The Streets, each of which is imagined in deliberately cartoonish detail.

As for The Cool, the temptations are too hard to resist. "He falls in love with The Streets and then he's raised by The Game," says Fiasco, who's turning the story into a "Vincent Price-style" radio show. "There is no way out."

Such was not the case for Fiasco himself. The 25-year-old rapper was one of nine kids who grew up on Chicago's west side, and then - his parents split when he was in sixth grade - with his father in the suburbs south of the city, "just as deadly" as any urban ghetto, he says.

Raised as a Muslim, he's never drunk alcohol or taken drugs. Despite the fast-food cautionary tale that is "Gotta Eat," though, he's not going to become a vegan any time soon.

"Hell, no! I'll eat a cow right now," the bespectacled lyricist says, with a gusto that matches his enthusiasm for such diverse subjects as Benny Goodman, Tom Waits and the Ralph Bakshi animated movie Fritz the Cat, which he stumbled on at Sound Garden.

His mother worked as a chef. His father, who died last year, was "a renaissance man," an engineer, a martial-arts instructor, a musician, a Green Beret, and a Black Panther "freedom fighter," he says.

Fiasco's been into Japanese culture since he was a kid, and has four black belts in karate. Though slight of build, he could kill an interviewer with his bare hands (or with "a well-struck hammer," he jokes).

Growing up in the 'hood, though, he never felt the need to be a tough guy. "Ninety-five percent of my friends have been to jail," he says. (His business partner, Chilly Patton, is in prison on a 2003 drug charge.) "Growing up and watching them die off and go back into prison, I had exposure to that lifestyle."

But Fiasco, who on "Daydreamin' " thanked "all the television sets that raised me," says "the call of life inside the house trumped the call from outside the house. It was like: 'This is what I need here. I don't have any need for what they have out here.' "

Along with rapping, which he started to do in elementary school after being inspired by acts like N.W.A. and Nas, Fiasco got cultural sustenance from skateboarding, a pastime he paid tribute to in "Kick, Push," the Food & Liquor single that introduced him as a tough, and unique, rapper.

It helped, of course, that he had heavy-hitting supporters like Jay-Z in his corner. "I believe there will be another wave of superstars to move the game forward," Hova said in 2006. "If I had to name one person, I would have to say Lupe. He is making the most creative, different new music."

Fiasco doesn't skate anymore, following a 2007 street-skating accident that he says might have killed him if he hadn't been wearing a helmet. (He now advises young skaters to strap on their headgear.)

In addition to his solo career, Fiasco has plenty of other irons in the fire. He's got a clothing line called Righteous Kung Fu, and is writing a novel about a window washer that's "very subtle, very noir, very personal" and, befitting its subject matter, "self-reflective."

He's friends with fellow Chicago rapper Kanye West, whose song "Jesus Walks" was redone by Fiasco as "Muhammad Walks" on a 2005 mixtape that can be found on the Web. This summer, he'll tour with West, Rihanna and N.E.R.D. (no dates yet).

Intriguingly, he's teamed with West and N.E.R.D.'s Pharrell Williams as Child Rebel Soldiers, a hip-hop supergroup whose one release so far is "Us Placers," a reimagining of Radiohead singer Thom Yorke's "The Eraser." Fiasco hopes that the group will have a full CD out this year.

After that, he says, he'll release one more solo album, LupEND, before retiring from recording music.

Reminded that performers from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jordan to Jay-Z have gone back on similar claims, Fiasco says he'll stick to his.

"I love business and I love music. And I'll always perform," he says. "But I hate the music business. There's so much falsehood about it. I've been in it for eight years already, and LupEND probably won't come out for another three years. After that, I want to do other things while I'm still young: work on my clothing line, finish my book. Travel the world and actually see the world."

How could he conceive of walking away from a genre that he credits with his salvation, in "Hip Hop Saved My Life"?

"Hip-hop did save me," he says, a gleam in his eye. "But I think I've given my share back, too."

Inquirer critic Dan DeLuca writes about pop music and culture at http://go.philly.com/

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