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I can't stop playing it, man. It's like Nas, Canibus, Twista, and Mos Def merged into one man. there's nothing Lupe can't do with words. Modern day hieroglyphics and Sanskrit combined. :wow:
The album is like a musical matryoshka doll:
From Wikipedia: also known as Russian nesting doll, refers to a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other. The first Russian nested doll set was carved in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin, who was a folk crafts painter at Abramtsevo. Traditionally the outer layer is a woman, dressed in a sarafan, a long and shapeless traditional Russian peasant jumper dress. The figures inside may be of either gender; the smallest, innermost doll is typically a baby turned from a single piece of wood. Much of the artistry is in the painting of each doll, which can be very elaborate. The dolls often follow a theme; the themes vary, from fairy tale characters to Soviet leaders.
When you play the album backward, you get the analogy perfectly: each song is a complete statement by itself, but as you continue to play the songs it becomes clear they each fit inside the next, building to a bigger magnificent whole. The other similarities are clear: the artistic intricacy; the layers, the complex representations of gender ("Little Death"), each doll following a theme...
When you play the album forward it's as if Lupe tranformed the rap game into a video game of his own song, and on the final song he beats the entire game... Proceed to the next level, indeed. :damn:
This is the first album I've heard that has quintuple entendres... there are complicated mathematical and linguistic theories boiled down to their essence in couplets... I honestly think someone could write a 250 page book of critical essays on the themes and theories explored on these songs. Shit is just :mindblown:
"Such is life: odd as Egg McMuffins at night..."  hlawd: Lupe manages to connect inflexible moral codes of love and marriage to the absurdity of time-specific divisions of meals, and the hypocrisy of puritannical values as well as fast food industry practices. "is it slippin' like permission? Am I trippin' like field." Lupe had me feeling like a child again, connecting his confusion over love, religion, and politics to those childhood recollections of school that wash over us like a fever-dream.
:blessed:
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The Lesson
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