When you hear the term “Alternative Hip Hop” what comes to mind? Is it A Tribe Called Quest? Maybe Common? Slum Village? All of these are right in their own special way, but for me, Food & Liquor is always the first thing that comes to mind. Lupe Fiasco’s debut album, Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor still stands for me as the pinnacle of Alternative Hip Hop. This album spoke to me like no other album did at the time. In the early 2000’s my favorite rappers was probably everyone’s favorite rappers at the time. 50 Cent, Ludacris, basically super popular artists, but when I, and I’m pretty sure every young black nerd, heard “Kick, push”, it changed the concept of hip-hop to us. This is a look back and review of Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor.
Part 1: The Impact
I remember hearing “Kick, Push” for the first time and was honestly just confused at what I was hearing. Black people and skateboards? That’s not normal. But it was infectious. The super chill but yet pounding beat by Soundtrakk, mixed with this super confident lyricism that just felt so different from everything out at the time. “Kick, Push” represented something that was largely missing from the Hip Hop and honestly black culture, and that’s this grimey, nerdy undefined style that just seemed to speak directly to me. And that’s one of Lupe’s strongest attributes, he had this aura of coolness and swag, but yet it wasn’t flashy or drenched in cockiness. Lupe’s music was Alternative, not because it utilized jazz samples or R&B beats, but because it spoke to a completely different demographic that just really wasn’t represented anywhere else in the genre at the time.
Not only is “Kick, Push” a great introduction to Lupe, but it’s a great introduction to Lupe, the storyteller. Lupe effortlessly glides through a story in which he describes the trials and tribulations of a young skater trying to find his way in the world and find himself. Lupe has such a stellar way of telling a story while not being pandering or “FEELING” like a story. Every line has meaning, every verse has cohesiveness with the proceeding or succeeding verse. Lupe continues to use this album to tell stories several times in songs like “He Say, She Say”, “The Instrumental” and “The Cool” which becomes it’s own style in itself.
Not only is “Kick, Push” such a different style for Hip-Hop, this album as a whole truly shines in it’s genre blending and experimental sounds. You have the Alternative Rock inspired “The Instrumental” or “Daydreamin’” which gives us this fusion of old school traditional pop mixed with this outworldy spacey sound settled under a string sample. Food & Liquor Brings a ton of variety to the table and completely switches up expectations every few tracks, which in a way makes every track kind of have their own identity.
Part 2: The Content
Probably my favorite Lupe Fiasco song of all time has to be “Hurt Me Soul”. It completely and perfectly captures everything great about Lupe. It shows his love for hip-hop and respect for past artists. He displays masterful lyrical technique as he raps about his experiences growing up with hip hop. At the same time he raps about the general ills of the world, both from the standpoint from the hood and from a global standpoint. My favorite little part of this song is from the third hook. Each hook he’s portraying someone having some type of hardship or problems in their life. Lines like “My Mom Can’t Feed Me”, “They Burned My Village”, “I Ain’t Got No Hang Time” and “Poisoned our leader” draws a broad picture of the many different problems people face world wide and in different cultures. That theme in itself is genius, making the song a sort of an outlet for frustrations. However in the third hook he says this line which always makes me smile: “I can't stop eatin, my best friend's leaving/My pastor touched me, I love this country”. I just love the irony in the last line, “I love this country”. It’s just the blind patriotism that makes it so great. Everyone is talking about their legitimate problems, and here comes this guy saying that he loves his country, not realizing that in itself IS a problem. And I got to shoutout that third verse, it’s brilliant. Lupe raps an entire verse rhyming off of the “in” sound, but everything sound so completely natural. It’s straight up effortless and his flow just sounds like he’s just having a conversation, that’s how smooth everything feels in this verse.
Another standout track is “American Terrorist”. So let’s understand the context of the world at the time. This is the mid-2000s, 9/11 is still fresh in American’s minds, the U.S. is deep in the middle east and Muslim citizens has had a natural target on their back in America for years. Lupe being Muslim and growing up as a young black youth in America definitely gives him a unique perspective that we don’t see pretty much at all in hip hop culture. So in the song “American Terrorist”, Lupe raps about the contradictory nature of American’s labeling others as “terrorists” while many American’s are terrorist themselves, just to their own country. Lines like “Camouflaged Torahs, bibles and glorious Qu'rans/The books that take you to heaven and let you meet the Lord there/Have become misinterpreted, reasons for warfare/We read em with blind eyes I guarantee you there's More there/The rich must be blind because they didn't see the poor there” establish Lupe’s feelings towards people’s misinformation regarding religion and how people are deliberately misled in the content of these religions. He suggests that American’s are terrorizing themselves when he raps lines like “Can you please call the fire department they're down here marching for freedom/Burn down their Teepee's, turn their TV's on to teach 'em” which he explains the contradictory nature of American’s fighting each other over basic human rights, destruction of culture and forced indoctrination through news media. He goes further in talking about extremism and how both sides can be extremists with these lines “Now if a Muslim woman strapped with a bomb on a bus/With the seconds running give you the jitters?/Just imagine a American-based Christian organization/planning to poison water supplies to bring the second-coming quicker”. I commend Lupe for addressing a hot topic like this when America was probably at the height of it’s anti-muslim campaign.
Outside of “Kick, Push”, we get another example of Lupe, the storyteller with the song “The Cool”. In this song, Lupe is being portrayed as a drug dealer who died and mysteriously comes back to life. Any Lupe Fiasco fan knows about his sophomore album “The Cool” in which this song is the springboard for that concept album. “The Cool” starts with this harsh synth sound that gets drowned out by an increasingly loud drum loops as Lupe raps about this character waking up in his casket. 6 Months has passed after this character has died, even though the character believes it’s only been hours since he’s died, digs himself out of his coffin. By the way, my favorite line in here is “And when he couldn't dirt-spit, he swallowed it, working like a/Hmmm reverse archaeologist/Except, his buried treasure was sunshine/So when some shined through a hole that he had drove/It reflected off the gold and almost made son blind”. I just like the idea of Lupe thinking in the middle of the track to come up with the term “Reverse archaeologist”. The story continues as the character tries to make his way back to his home only to be robbed by the same people who shot him, which at this point, he’s finally accepted his death and shows no fear. I really do like the concept of taking one song and expanding it in to a full album and I like how he cleverly foreshadows events and song in the next album “The Cool”.
Part 3: Conclusion
Lupe truly did bring some fresh, completely new perspectives to hip hop. His Islamic infusion in tracks like American Terrorist and the intro, his nerd culture, his hood culture living in Chicago all come together in such a lyrically and audibly unique package. So If it isn’t completely obvious at this point, I really love this album. As far as debut albums go, Food & Liquor is a outstanding one. There are some growing pains here and there, I didn’t particularly like “Kick,Push II”, as a follow up it falls a bit flat, nowhere capturing the spirit of the original, and while I understand it’s going for a different tone, It’s definitely the track I skip the most from this album. And there are a few tracks that get lost in the mist of everything like “Real”, “He Say She Say” and “Pressure”. And I could argue that some tracks feel a bit overproduced with cluttered and messy sounding beats that just feels like too much is going on. Despite all of this, Food & Liquor is still one of my favorite projects from Lupe. My Favorite Tracks are as follows: “Just Might Be Okay”, “Kick, Push”, “The Instrumental”, “Daydreamin’”, “The Cool” and “Hurt Me Soul”.
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