Apparently, Lupe didn’t take his own advice to heart.

[xrr rating=3.5/5]Kendrick Lamar’s hit list on “Control,” in which he catalogued all the rappers he considered worthy of competing with him, was notable in part for the names not mentioned. Among these was Lupe Fiasco’s. The insulting omission did not pass without notice. Within 36 hours Lupe released “SLR2,” a track responding, in no uncertain terms, to Lamar’s diss ex …

[xrr rating=2.0/5]If one business thrived under the Bush Administration, it was political rap. At a time when social unrest in the arts communities was at an all-time high, listeners wanted their rappers to be as upset about the state of affairs as they were. Too angry to party, they put their trust in the “conscious hip-hop” sector, leading to the …

Sky Blue Sky by Wilco (2007) Drugs help. When Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy went to rehab (no, no, no) in 2004, the band had just come off the masterful one-two punch of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) and A Ghost Is Born (2004), two of the most experimental, sophisticated albums of the decade. Then after he cleaned up, they produced Sky …

Lupe Fiasco Lasers Rating: 3.3/5.0 Label: Atlantic The return of Lupe Fiasco is a lot like the (pretty good) opening 20 minutes of Die Another Day, when James Bond gets imprisoned in North Korea for a year only to find that, in his absence, the world changed without him, and suddenly, a well-dressed sex addict seems a touch irrelevant in …

Revisit: Lupe Fiasco Food & Liquor 2006 Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look. Lupe Fiasco grew up idolizing the mixtape circuit, so it was only fitting he would mirror that culture. His Fahrenheit 1/15 mixtapes spread like wildfire, and fittingly so; a rapper so deft, so cunning and so versatile in …