Rapper Lupe Fiasco has delivered his first lecture in ‘How Not To Shift Units 101’, revealing his underlying hatred for his new record, Lasers (out on Friday), to Complex Magazine, while conversely telling fans that he’s disappointed by their negative reactions to it.
Fans have already taken to Twitter to criticise the processed, mainstream sound of Lasers (which leaked Monday), questioning whether Fiasco was contractually stonewalled by Atlantic into releasing music he didn’t want to. Fiasco does much to support that theory, saying that he never liked lead single and Modest Mouse-informed hit ‘Show Goes On’: “It was never a record like, ‘Hey! Lupe is super excited about [the track],” he says, “At that point, I was just drained. I was like, ‘Whatever. Another song, another day, another dollar.’”
Even more brutally, he describes what it was like to actually get the album into stores: “But when I think about what it took to actually get the record together and everything that I went through on this record-which is something I can’t separate-I hate this album.”
With that kind of attitude, you can’t blame some fans for turning their backs on the record.
“#LASERS = Long Awaited Sappy Excuses for Radio Singles,” tweeted one.
The record is indeed bizarre, with very few remnants of the Lupe Fiasco who blitzed the underground with Food & Liquor back in 2006. In fact, the two songs which sound like vintage Lupe are the only ones Fiasco will admit to being proud of: “I’m happy for the fans, this is their album. This is the album that they fought for and that’s what made me do songs like ‘Words I Never Said’ and ‘All Black Everything.’”
This isn’t just talk; those fans are very important. They’re only reason Lasers is dropping at all after a much-publicised battle between Lupe and his label, Atlantic, who controversially shelved the album for more than two years after deciding it wouldn’t sell. That resulted in Fiasco Friday, in which the rapper’s fans marched on Atlantic’s offices in New York City last year. We’ll let one of them have the final say on the matter.
Title Image by Kevin Winter via Getty
