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Happy Sunday, y'all.
Sharing only because some of you asked.
I've been exchanging with multiple people about publishing
this somewhere bigger, but just ended up saying "fuck it" and put
it up on Medium, somewhere for everyone to read openly because
its not that big a deal.
Btw, I was asked to make it extensive and thorough...and I
certainly delivered there. LOL. Its more in the NY Review of
Books style of review, where the reviewer reviews the book +
uses it to talk about a lot of the issues the book raises, as
much as the book itself)
In any case, yeah, I really like this record. Frustrating to
review because there are so many examples to use and things
to cover, and also because I'll be discovering new shit about
it for some time.
Below: O_E long ass review (link and pasted below):
https://medium.com/@QuantumJenkins/hip-hops-infinite-jest-a-review-of-lupe-fiascos-tetsuo-and-youth-62b86cf1f40d
Hip Hop’s Infinite Jest: A Review of Lupe Fiasco’s Tetsuo and Youth
by Orbit_Established
David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement address (2005), later published as 'This is Water', was a cult favorite well before his death by suicide in 2008. It once read as a powerful (or lame, depending on how cynical you were) vaccine against the quarter life crisis aimed at the caps and gowns of graduating Millennials. Read it today, and it’s a posthumous case study in a young person struggling with being “inside of one’s own head,” temporarily staving off the demons that would be Wallace’s eventual undoing.
This is the only David Foster Wallace we ever knew. His work was loved and hated for it. He was accused of pretension, lauded for genius and diagnosed with madness, sometimes by the same person. And the trips he took us on through his many thoughts — encoded in flashes of electric current and reading like a Federer vs. Nadal duel — are how he earned at least a good paycheck, and more precisely, status as a literary almost-legend.
Wallace’s most well known work, the novel Infinite Jest, is a titanic science fiction/tragi-comedy/satire that his critics and supporters are still unraveling. Even if we don’t know what it is about, we are sure about what it is: a treatise on many things, by a gifted writer, laughing (and maybe crying) at just about everything, serving the many masters inside his own head.
By “inside of his own head,” we are referring to the non-technical and widely (probably overly) used descriptor for a state of mind, personality, or pathology affecting many young creative people. Its the act of fighting our thoughts with other thoughts, with a zero-sum or worse result: our productivity diminishes, our relationships fall apart, our happiness suffers. It’s replaced “writer’s block” as the most feared affliction of the artist (and can cause “writer’s block.”). It ruins careers and lives, and the world offers few reliable remedies.
Major label hip-hop is now almost entirely a producer of comfort music, a space not built with the ramps and rails in place to accommodate the “inside your head” disability. This is probably for the better, as making that faint neurotic flavor sound good is difficult.
While I want to say records like Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) are an exception, many would agree that the quirks that makes it legendary aren’t in what Kanye says (which is rather ordinary) but in the music its layered over (which is unearthly). Great mental illness hip-hop records such as Redman’s Dare Iz a Darkside (1994) fall to the left of merely being inside of one’s head, and into the deep depression and addiction side of the spectrum.
It’s now been a full decade since Lupe Fiasco’s entry into the hip-hop world, and there are few artists with a more tempestuous relationship with its citizenry. His conflicts stand out because something feels unnatural about them: he doesn’t partake in rap beefs. He doesn’t rely on reality television drama to sell records. Almost no one, including his harshest critics, can deny his gifts.
Not the typical recipe for an artist with an up-and-down relationship with fans, and mostly down relationship with hip-hop’s critical establishment of late. So why has his name become so synonymous with trouble? Who or what is to blame?
Some of it might be the usual suspects — immaturity, a rise to fame faster than he was prepared for, unrealistic expectations, etc. Some of it, however, is specific to his generation: His first major appearance (on Kanye West’s Late Registration) occurred the same year Facebook was founded (2005), and he released his first album the year Twitter was born (2006). His trouble with navigating social media has been costly, as he’s been guilty of several moving violations (at least) playing out for everyone to see, hashtag by hashtag. And his responses usually fall somewhere between clumsy and miserable, which has transformed his reputation at the (the hip-hop fan) median from wunderkind and next big thing to pretentious, surly, jerk.
This is the Lupe Fiasco that entered the studio to record 2015's Tetsuo and Youth: bloody but unbowed, deep within in his own head, and in need of way to restore his direction as an artist and man.
While still a moderately big star by modern standards, his place in hip-hop history is very much up for grabs: would he, like Nas did with Stillmatic (2001), reclaim stardom and status near the top in the face of near extinction?
Would he go the way of Canibus and decompose into uncomfortable, inorganic obscurity?
Or would he go the way of M.F. Doom and embrace his inner conflict, allow it to throw a delightful pizza party in every corner of his mind, inviting us every once in a while (even if not often enough)?
The result is a product that does all of the above and none of them, delivering a record unlike anything I’ve heard in many years, at a time I would argue that the art form needs it most.
The intrigue begins with the album’s title. According to Lupe, it was a working title that he never got around to changing. “Tetsuo” is a reference to Tetsuo Shima from Akira, a teenager with psychic abilities. “Youth” is a reference to the album’s focus on children and childhood. Its clear that Tetsuo is most likely Lupe himself, armed with an elevated understanding of everything.
The album’s is structured as a temporal progression through seasons (summer, fall, winter, spring), each track supposedly themed around change or progression.
The album opens with a musical introduction titled “Summer,” followed by “Mural,” the albums opening song. Less than a week after its release, “Mural” has already achieved legendary status in the lore of internet lyric scholars, as Lupe somehow tricks the listener into feeling like a 9-minute song goes by too quickly.
And interestingly, “Mural” doesn’t have the feel of an artist “going in” on anyone or anything, but like someone reading a complicated machine learning algorithm for life, not in Java or Python, but in ordinary English. And yet it doesn’t feel like words at all, but individual lyrical pixels in a digital panorama.
Like a mural, the song cannot be analyzed using a reductionist lens. Also like a mural, however, there are corners that reveal different ideas, speak to different parts of the author and observer.
To pick one random line (and I mean it, as just about every one has a story attached):
I run the Gambit like I’m throwing cards,
from Popular Mechanics to overdosing hearts
Its an play on the idiom “Run the gamut,” but altered and layered with a comic book reference (Gambit from the X-Men), along with the formal definition of the word gambit (a chess move where a pawn is sacrificed). The “Popular Mechanics to overdosing hearts” speaks to Lupe’s topical range, with the “overdosing hearts” a reference back to both Gambit and gambit: the former referring to the fact that Gambit threw kinetically-energized playing cards at enemies, the latter that Lupe shares so much (from nerd speak to emotive lyrics) both sacrificially and strategically.
In a single line, Lupe offers a complete metaphor for his rap career, something he pulls off dozens of times throughout “Mural.” The song is Lupe’s hip-hop life (or actual life) playing out before our ears. The minute we realize this, we consider that the album’s true meaning is being told in reverse, with “Mural” representing Lupe’s death — literal or metaphorical. That it comes before the “Summer” musical introduction is revealing: Like we all look forward to summer, Lupe is looking forward to his death. This might mean the end of his contract with Atlantic Records. This might mean him leaving hip-hop for good. This might be a commentary on our individual fear of death in the broader sense. “Mural” is the defining song of the album (even if not the best) for a reason: despite its length, Lupe strikes the perfect chord of telling you a lot (and a whole lot), but not too much.
The second track, “Blur My Hands” further fuels speculation about the album’s intended order: the refrain and reference to Terry Fox speaks directly to being courageous in the face of pending death. The “Summer” to “Fall” transition ends with “Dots and Lines,” one of the albums catchiest songs, and about emancipation from his record contract, and most likely much more.
The tracks falling between the “Fall” and “Winter” interludes are the busiest conceptually, and is where the album asserts Lupe’s dominion over this project, and our ears and minds.
“Little Death,” is a tour through the depths of captivity, a whirlpool of political, spiritual and artistic commentaries.
Lupe shares his perspective on the act of creation:
"On the pallet of dark greys, concaves and spirals.
Kaleidoscope into an Eiffel.
It ripples then it tidals.
Vacillates, then it virals."
The album’s turning point, in my opinion, comes at the end of the “Fall” to “Winter” transition, in “No Scratches,” perhaps the defining emotional experience of the album, and one of the more interesting takes on the nature of bitterness and conflict that I’ve heard in some time.
In it, Lupe divulges the ontogeny of hatred, dressed up in a romantic relationship (the dueling masculine and feminine voices that sing the refrain create a sonic ambiguity that fits perfectly), but applying to any soured relationship between people, ideas or institutions. He uses a life as a road race metaphor, with hatred presented as reckless driving:
"Mini-bar raided in the Indy car faded.
500 miles, its pretty far, aint it?
But it’s a pretty car, ain’t it?
Pretty hard painted.
But pretty darn dangerous…"
He closes with his fusion-take on the “don’t argue with fools…” and “either we live together or we die” idioms:
"…so I be James Dean.
So your wreck and my wreck, look like the same thing."
It is, in essence, a call for a truce between him and several communities — the black community, the hip-hop community, and his own thoughts — that he’s clashed with over the years. He’s had enough, and he’s willing to move on if we are.
The “Winter” to “Spring” transition provides music that is gentler on the ears, starting with the bouncy “Chopper,” a ratchet sounding song that still can’t help but be clever, all while appealing to our youthful sensibilities. The album then takes off on a progressively ethereal ascent, in sound and substance, through motherhood (“Madonna”) and eventual birth in “They Reminisce over New,” a reference to the film Tron, which was originally released in 1982, the year Lupe was born.
In the end, we are left with a sequence of songs, from “Summer” all the way back through “Spring,” encompassing the many stages of life and development: “Mural” the moment we reflect on it all and leave the earth, “No Scratches” when we finally become mature enough to let go of hate, “Chopper” when we’re governed by our adolescent urges, and “They Reminisce Over New” when we enter a new world, with new rules, unsure of how we arrived, and less sure about where to go.
And after this conclusion, where do we go? What are we to think?
Is Lupe telling us a tale about his birth or his death? Or about our birth or death?
Might this also be a commentary on how he thinks about his place in the art form? Perhaps now, no longer riddled with insecurity as an artist (or maybe just feeling good after making a great record), Lupe feels born again? Or so accomplished that he’s ready to leave?
Perhaps it is, as his critics would much prefer, “not that deep,” that Lupe (and his creative team) simply thought the published sequence sounded better, and that the theme was added after the songs were made. Were this true, it would actually make the project more impressive — that such order arose out of chaos is testament to excellent production and a lyricist agile enough for verses to fit into any context.
Or maybe the true meaning is elusive because Lupe wants us to figure it out on our own.
This last one is most likely to be true, and the one I challenge all fans of the art form to consider. Hip-hop criticism doesn’t have an especially good recent relationship with introspection, and is ultra quick with the “pretentious” label trigger.
The truth is that we don’t know what Lupe intended. The challenge is in (a) accepting that and (b) trying to figure it out.
And this is ultimately why David Foster Wallace’s legacy is safer than Lupe Fiasco’s. We are okay with not understanding artists when they are novelists, and especially when they are white, male and deceased: any inability to grasp Infinite Jest’s multiple messages falls on us (successfully in many cases, as thousands have been shamed into dissecting it, to much joy and enlightenment).
Hip-hop is given no such benefit of the doubt.
Its one of the worst, and under-reported manifestations of hip-hop’s gentrification: black artists can be smart, but not in the way white kids are smart. Were the art critic gatekeepers fair and self assured, they’d not only admit that Lupe was more intelligent than they are, they would admit that “not getting it” is the fault of the reader, not the writer.
And we can finally ask these difficult questions about our culture because, on Tetsuo and Youth, a black man stops apologizing for being smarter than everyone else. And magically, the non-apology is spread over a wondrous musical landscape, sequenced well (forwards or backwards), and features some of the best wordplay we’ve ever heard on a hip-hop record.
If Good Kid M.A.A.D. City’s brilliance was in Kendrick Lamar making friends with every faction at every corner of the school cafeteria without compromising himself, then Tetsuo and Youth does almost the opposite: its Lupe eating in that same cafeteria, all alone, contently wearing a Bruce Leroy glow with the self esteem of a star quarterback surrounded by an entourage of only his own thoughts and ideas.
I don’t know the last time smart sounded so self-assured, so free and indifferent to how it’s heard. And the voodoo works, because we believe him.
Tetsuo and Youth is Lupe Fiasco climbing deep inside his own head, finding a wormhole, coasting comfortably through space time, back to where he started — as a syllabic savant and soothsayer — but ten years older, many more wiser, and with the child-like curiosity and hunger of his younger self.
It’s an album that could, and should, be transformative for an art form that has run up against recent evolutionary dead-ends. Whether it is or not depends on how courageous we are, a contingency that Lupe Fiasco has peacefully decided to be unconcerned with.
Tetsuo and Youth is Lupe telling us something that we’ll be better for trying to understand. And if we don’t, he’ll feel no two ways about it, like David Foster Wallace does to this day, chuckling infinitely in jest.
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O_E: "Acts like an asshole and posts with imperial disdain"
"I ORBITs the solar system, listenin..."
(C)Keith Murray, "
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