Lupe Fiasco doesn't give you anything straight: Not a verse, a simile, or a song, and certainly not an album. As an artist, he's helplessly drawn toward perversity, and despite his immense gifts-- a curious, darting mind, a silver tongue, a rich imagination-- his career has at times resembled a performance-art dare to see how far one can coast on unearned goodwill. By the time his fans had rallied to petition Atlantic Records to release what turned out to be 2011's transparently awful pop-rap debacle Lasers, Lupe was looking less like a savior than a charlatan.
So give Lupe credit when it's due: This time around, he's trying to give it to us straight. His new album is called Food & Liquor II, overtly promising a return to his first and still best-loved album, and most of its production comes courtesy of his old standbys (Soundtrakk, 1500 or Nothin'). Save for the usual nu-metal hard-rock vocalizing on many of the choruses, it is his most relaxed, rewarding effort in a while, and at its best, it feels like a re-introduction to a promising artist who spent some time in the wilderness. At its worst, it's plagued by the same empty cleverness and strident moralizing that has always dragged down Lupe's music. The full title says it all: Lupe couldn't just leave it Food & Liquor II; he had to subtitle it The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1, rendering the album title so cumbersome and silly that only Lupe could have thought of it. It's like he can't help himself.
Lupe's dexterity remains his greatest asset, and he's at his best on songs like "Put Em Up", where his mind lights on unusual ideas and piles up surprising images: 80s babies get eaten by dingos while cars get flipped "like the ribs on the Flintstones." On "Around My Way", which controversially samples the same instantly recognizable sax line as Pete Rock and CL Smooth's "T.R.O.Y.", he hops from "emaciated models with cocaine and blood pourin' out they nostrils" to "human-body sandbags" to "the mixed girl in your math class" in the space of one verse. It's an exhilarating reminder of his sheer, unbounded ability.
It's when Lupe is pinned down by his subject matter that he starts fumbling. Thumping, strident beats like "Unforgivable Youth", "Audubon Ballroom", and "Ital (Roses)", resemble the most overwrought of Lasers' rafter-clanging productions, and they encourage his worst tendencies. The moral of "Ital (Roses)" is a sound one (don't buy what you can't afford), but Lupe can't get the point across with sounding didactic. "It's called being fiscally responsible," goes one especially difficult-to-swallow line. Big Boi, for contrast, hit this same message square on the head years ago on Outkast’s "Aquemini", with a single line that drew both blood and a guffaw: "Let your paper stack, instead of going into overkill/ Pay ya fuckin' beeper bill, bitch." Which one do you think gets through to more people?
Lupe's impulse to sermonize is inseparable from his music, but sermons that lack empathy or drift into condescension are useless. On "Bitch Bad", he mounts a from-all-angles investigation of the word "bitch" with a multipart character study that paints vivid images of a young girl whose self-image is skewed by internet rap videos, and a boy whose mother sings "bad bitch" song in front of him. But by the third verse, Lupe oversimplifies and figuratively pats the girl on the head, intentionally or no, with the moral: "He trapped in a reality, she trapped in a confusion." After all that skilled storytelling, the song winds up just another pitying, paternal "good girl lost" number. Conscious rap fans might protest that gangsta rappers' dubious messages never receive this kind of scrutiny, and it's true, there is an unfair double standard. But while Lupe remains admirably unafraid to wade into the hip-hop-and-cultural values discussions that usually lead to everyone screaming at everyone else, his touch is so shallow that it ends up feeling crass: cultural crusading as SEO tactic.
His most affecting moments remain his rare flashes of humility. "I don't know what really matters anymore," he admits early on, in "Strange Fruition". On "Hood Now", he celebrates hip-hop culture's ability to infiltrate and transform everything it touches, from fashion shows to professional sports, and offers this sly kicker: "Y'all know me, I don't vote/ But the White House? It's hood now." His admission touched off a small firestorm, but it's one of few places on the album where Lupe allows himself to seem truly human.
