From its artwork, which looks like a puzzle waiting to be solved, to its constant flurry of double entendres, it was the antithesis to inescapable anthems like 50 Cent’s “I Got Money” – AKA the only song blaring out the cool kids’ shitty Vauxhall Corsa stereos at the time. There’s a self-awareness here that suggests the bright lights of fame are cyclical and probably won’t last forever.Īs a white 17-year-old raised in a British seaside town, this album felt freeing. The juxtaposition of playful party-jam “Hi-Definition” and the existential emo-rock leanings of UNKLE-collaboration “Hello/Goodbye” felt deliberate, with Lupe almost saying you can conventionally embrace mainstream rap and still be on the verge of emotional collapse. Ten years later, in a world where an Instragram freestyle can make someone famous in the space of 24 hours, The Cool plays like a warning of what would come next. It’s an album by a rapper who appears troubled by what he’ll have to do to remain hot. Over the course of the record’s loose narrative, Lupe goes from being a shy kid on his first world tour (“Paris, Tokyo”) to questioning his very artistic existence (“Dumb It Down”). “Dumb It Down” is a portfolio of exploratory rhyme styles: “I'm not a listener or a seer so my windshield smear / Here you steer, I really shouldn't be behind this / Clearly cause my blindness / The windshield is min-strel / The whole grill is roadkill / So trill and so sincere / Yeah, I'm both them there.” While songs like “Put You On Game” become too grandiloquent for their own good, there are dozens of verses on The Cool that are as complex and challenging as anything a Grammy-nominated rapper has ventured.While on paper Lupe presented conventional pop sensibilities (everyone and your mum hummed the Coldplay-style, piano looped, chorus of pop smash “Superstar”), The Cool was a rap album designed for far deeper study. As his music grows beyond the simple nostalgia of his 2006 hit “Kick, Push,” Lupe weaves what are easily mainstream rap’s most ambitious verses. However, some of the best moments on The Cool hearken back to the nimble mischief of A Tribe Called Quest “Paris, Tokyo” is Lupe’s holler-back to Tribe’s classic “Award Tour,” while “Gold Watch,” with its tricky beat and trickier rhymes, might be the album’s best song. “The Coolest,” “Little Weapon,” “Hello Goodbye,” and “The Die” are chock full of sound and syllable, buoyed by the same enormous, inflatable synths as Kanye’s Graduation. Developing in tandem with his Chi-Town mentor Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco’s sophomore effort is a far grander than his debut.
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