Lupe Fiasco – Lasers (2011) [Atlantic] // Grade: D

“The first lesson Jay-Z gave me when I came in the game was; don’t chase radio.”

That’s Lupe Fiasco, the day his new record Lasers dropped, attempting to sell the much maligned and delayed disc to radio listeners. From a quote like that, you’d expect to hear a record that was challenging and/or not very commercial. Essentially, this is the sort of qualification an artist gives when they want the public to realize “hey, the single may not be the catchiest shit ever, but you should still cop this album.” Lasers is indeed challenging, but not because its a dense lyrical masterpiece or an experimental, personal artistic statement. It’s challenging because it’s an album of songs that sound like they should be playing in the background of a particularly shitty yet, dramatic MTV reality show (think that show where cats from Road Rules and The Real World get really serious about playing camp games for money). While those songs serve their purpose in 30 second blasts, highlighting contrived moments of emotional revelation, listening to them for just shy of an hour proves to be light torture best reserved for those suspected of committing acts of terrorism.

To be fair I’ve never been a great fan of Lupe Fiasco. He has some good singles and B-sides (“Kick Push” and “Dumb It Down” go pretty hard, “I’m Beaming” and “Superstar” are good pop records) but, his potential has always outstripped his actual production. He’s made decent albums but they never gelled completely to reach a point of greatness. This record isn’t in the area of “Me, personally, I don’t fuck with it musically, but it’s still aight” – this is instead unequivocal, hot garbage, in the most commercial baiting way possible. While Lupe is pretty much par for the course lyrically, sticking to his usual topics of enlightenment and reductionist, anthemic political statements, the music here is so horrible it’s impossible to appreciate the lyrics.  Lupe Fiasco and producers The Future, took the blueprint of songs like Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love The Way You Lie”, Jay-Z and Alicia Keys “Empire State of Mind” and B.O.B and Hayley Williams “Airplanes” and made an entire album of shit. I don’t find any of those songs compelling, looking at them objectively though, they all hit the mark of being grandiose pop rap songs, Lasers aims for the same effect yet misses completely. The formula of pairing a rapper with a female singer over some half baked rap/rock hybrid hearkens back to the heyday of late 90′s pop nu-metal radio dominance. Every song wants to reach the triumphant heights of a 10 minute long Queen epic in three minutes, yet, the songs don’t show an understanding of musical construction beyond that held by most high school bands.

Lupe likes to fashion himself as a revolutionary of some sort, yet the music here is the kind of faux edgy pop that’d you’d likely find blaring out of an Ed Hardy store or possibly a Hot Topic. In the same interview that the quote above is taken from, Lupe discusses that he had to make compromises to get the album made. Compromises on rap albums usually mean adding another club track, one more RnB feature for the ladies, maybe feature the hot artist of the moment – but you still get to keep your core sound intact on most of the album. That’s not the case here. These songs feature every imaginable compromise possible. Lasers is far beyond compromise, this is complete submission. Autotune: Check. Horrible features: Double Check. Bullshit rap rock: Check. Fake ass, mega club rave music: Check. Choruses that make you wonder “hey, what’s Evanescence up to these days?” – present and accounted for.

In Lupe’s defense before the album dropped he tried his hardest to separate himself from the work. He claimed he was forced to record the album under heavy pressure from the label. He also spoke of feeling suicidal due to the level of powerlessness hoisted upon him. If that was the end of the story, we could excuse this album as a contractual obligation. Lord knows most people understand making compromises to make a buck. Shoutout to everyone working fast food gigs, except for that one dude flipping burgers for the love of burgers alone – we all respect your dedication to the art. The thing that’s damning about this story, is that post this album having commercial success Lupe has essentially recanted his dismissal and has been celebrating it’s success on Twitter. A reversal of opinion like that based entirely on popular opinion is dubious at best and character damning at worse.

Making an album that attempts to hit so many popular trends (and even a couple that aren’t popular anymore) usually ends up yielding a tepid ineffectual product.Yet, this album is clinically precise at being the pandering shit that people who consume music on a tertiary level will enjoy. As a testament to that, this record has sold 240k units in it’s first week of release and given Lupe his first number one album. Maybe this record is a piece of shit made by committee, or maybe Lupe, the revolutionary, has sacrificed his musical integrity for the benefit of his message and snuck his message to the people into a palpable form.  Somehow, I doubt its the latter.

- Behold the Destroyer