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Nas' & Lupe's Message Approach
Article by:
Michael Ivey
 Since hip hop music and culture boomed into a multi-million dollar industry a line has been etched between “underground” and “mainstream,” intricate and straightforward, or conscious and covetous hip hop. Some artists-Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, Jay-Z, and Nas for instance-transcend the labels, reaching people from all walks of life and schools of thought with unpredictable approaches to recording. Still, as the amount of rappers increases and art consistently takes a back seat to corporate interests and sensationalism, the question remains: what’s the most appropriate way for hip hop vocalists to use their global platforms? Should they spoon feed the audience- often a mixture of poor and well off, schooled and uneducated, youth-varied messages glorifying the ghetto, or should emcees be more artistic and paint hopeful pictures of how progressive the world could be?
With this in mind we compare two different works which are connected by the thread of inspiration. When last summer at the 2nd Annual Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival I asked one of 2006’s most popular emcees, Lupe Fiasco, why he so freely admits to patterning his now critically acclaimed debut, ‘Food & Liquor,’ after Nas’ 1996 sophomore opus, ‘It Was Written,’ the answer seemed pretty simple: “Because it’s a classic,” Lupe said. “I modeled my album after a masterpiece. And not song for song; not line for line; not beat for beat-it was more, for me, just like mood for mood. The way he set the mood on the album to me was just like incredible.”
Like a diligent student, Lupe makes his studies pay dividends, zoning revolutionary, introspective and uncompromisingly lyrical on ‘Food & Liquor.’ However, though he follows Nas’ lead in form, his content and perspective differs from the kid who leapt from the project window to hip hop’s hall of fame in a single bound (‘Illmatic,’ 1994).
Lupe nails the more up-tempo, conscious mood Nas sets at the outset of ‘It Was Written,’ countering the smoothly delivered maturity of “The Message” and “Street Dreams” with the Go-Go-esque “Real” and his most impressive lyrical display “Just Might Be OK.” “My vida loca was built like Bob Villa via God/ he architected, I authored what I harbored,” Lupe submits. After “Street Dreams” the mood of ‘It Was Written’ darkens, starting with Nas’ genius personification piece “I Gave You Power.” The destructiveness of handguns is countered by the unifying power of skateboards, a quarter of the way through ‘Food & Liquor,’ on the melodic crossover anthem “Kick, Push.” The difference in approach of two emcees quite similar in progressive leanings and creative song writing ability couldn’t be more glaring than when comparing these two; one, the story of a sad handgun, tired of being used for mayhem; the other, a tale about the forbidden pleasure that helps a young man find himself. A search into the two artists’ backgrounds shows that the contrast in styles can be attributed to circumstance.
Though Lupe is no stranger to the desperation and criminality bred in his native West Chicago, Nas’ grimy, fatherless experiences in the overcrowded Queensbridge projects spawned an intelligent artist more adept at depicting the seedy side of hood life from the inside out. So it’s a wonder that “Take It in Blood,” Nas’ raw mélange of lust and pride, is Lupe’s favorite track on ‘It Was Written.’ Or is it surprising at all? Wind chiming keys and a funky drum pattern set a dimly lit stage for Nas’ first person run down of a fly gangsters’ spoils. “I’m all about Techs, a good jux and sex/ Israelite books, holding government names from Ness,” he brags. However, Nas’ penchant for applying exaggeration as a tool for enhancing the impact of stories is revealed in the last verse, as he raps, “Just the killer in me/ slash drug dealer emcee/ ex slug filler semi mug peeler…yo simply follow me flow/ put poetry inside a crack pot and blow.”
Nas is a storyteller who happened to grow up surrounded by poverty, greed and addiction. Lupe Fiasco, a Muslim kid with a musician for a father and a cultured, gourmet chef for a mother, didn’t have to embrace street life, as Nas describes it, in order to be artistically inspired by ‘It Was Written.’
Lupe’s “Instrumental” comes closest to mimicking the mood of “Take It in Blood;” John Matranga’s throaty chorus and Mike Shinoda’s somber keys and mid-tempo percussion help Lupe describe the poisonous “box:” “He just sits and watches the people in the boxes/ everything he sees he absorbs and adopts it/…really hates the box but he can’t remember how to stop it.” The song illustrates the draining influence television can have on people - the kind of influence Lupe had to avoid in order to become the rare young hip hop artist who speaks on “American Terrorists” and his own trouble approaching girls (“Sunshine”).
“I fell in love with ‘It Was Written’ like when I was seventeen, eighteen-a very impressionable time-so I was like ‘I love this album,” Lupe admitted to me. Despite his youth, he was able to extract the moods, or “food,” from ‘It Was Written’ and feed his creative process without feeling like he had to be Nas [Pablo] Escobar in real life.
Do we need more socially conscious emcees? Sure. Balance is crucial to the prosperity of anyone or thing. But more than anything hip hop - myself and all who are inspired by a beat, a song, a flow, a dance - needs identity. How can one be true to his music if he is not true to himself? No one is all good or all bad like some emcees would have us believe. People, hip hop stars included, fall somewhere in between. If any conclusion about emcees can be reached here, it is that we must hold them responsible for the approach they take on each record.
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