Aight, here's my next pick for your listening enjoyment:
2015's Tetsuo & Youth by Lupe Fiasco. This is admittedly a pretty heavy duty album. Since we started this, I knew a Lupe album was an inevitability for me. Initially though, I was pondering one of his first few albums - either of the Food & Liquor albums, or The Cool, which are S-tier albums for me. While they are also pretty lyrically complex, they contain recognizable hits like Kick, Push, Superstar, Hurt Me Soul and others. But the brilliance I have always found in Lupe is how he makes songs that tell such vivid stories, or provide really interesting social commentary, but he presents it in a commercially friendly packaging. It's enjoyable to listen to, like a Kanye song, but it actually contains so much more depth. Over time, Lupe's popularity faded as he focused more on conceptual music that wasn't so radio-friendly.
This album came out in 2015 and as you can kind of perceive from the album title, it felt like a callback to the Lupe of old, with a title that even alluded to his previous Food & Liquor albums. The title also lays the foundation for the theme of the album, which is bases around life, death and rebirth, symbolized by the interludes that are named after seasons. It touches a lot on the cyclical nature of humans, and the need to break free from these cycles to experience life.
This album was one of those that dominated my listening habits for a long time, and one of the defining albums of my post-high school era. This album didn't have any radio hits, I don't imagine it was intended to, but it possesses that familiar Lupe formula. Genuinely, every song can be dissected and analyzed and even 10 years later, I still get hit with a line every now and then that I truly understand for the first time. But at the same time, this album sounds fantastic. If you didn't listen to the lyrics, you could easily think some of these songs were made for the radio. I'm not gonna lie, this is a 10/10 album for me that I suspect some probably won't be that impressed with, while hopefully at least one person feels similarly to me.
As far as songs on this album, Mural is the one that has captured the most attention, because it is just a straight up rapping marathon with crazy bars that doesn't really have a clear, direct meaning, but is literally meant to serve as a mural of his thoughts, experiences and beliefs. Just a tapestry of ideas and symbolism that pretty much sets the stage for all the rest of the album. While I would say it's my favorite song on the album, and one of my all time favorite rap songs, I'm really not even sure if it's the most intricate song on the album. I don't want to spoil too much or implant thoughts, but I would definitely advise anyone who at least enjoys the album, to dig deeper into the lyrics/meaning/easter eggs of Mural, Dots & Lines, Prisoners 1&2 and The Adoration of the Magi for sure, because I just think they're really cool concepts and it's impressive to see how lyricists can construct such complex puzzles to be explored, that also just make sense on a surface level.
Anyways, enjoy.
