Utter Fiasco, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #122

April 5, 2011 Arthur Tebbel 1 Comment

Dear Art,

Last year you and Chris bitched at me for not putting out an album before I went on tour.  I thought that was pretty messed up of you but here we are in 2011 and the album, Lasers, has dropped.  Not only that but it’s been selling like hotcakes.  It is, by no small margin, my bestselling album to date.  Are you ready to eat crow yet?  Will you admit that this album was worth the wait?

-Lupe Fiasco

Lupe,

I’m kind of in a bind here.  Chris and I were very vocal about you just releasing an album.  You did finally get it out.  It also happens to be a complete train wreck.  People might be buying it but it’s a freaking mess.  Your first two albums were great; more importantly they had their own sound.  Now you sound like every other pop rapper.  Lasers sounds like the best album a guy like B.O.B. would ever release.  Unfortunately that still isn’t very good.

I get where you’re coming from though.  Being a niche musical artist is probably not as fun as being a huge star.  You aren’t anywhere close to being the first rapper to dumb down his material to reach a bigger audience, hell, Jay-Z has practically made an entire career out of doing just that.  Jay-Z, however, didn’t have the Internet single for any of his albums be about how he refused to dumb down his records.  You did that on your last album.  The song was even called Dumb It Down.  It sort of leads people to believe certain things about you when you explicitly say them on records.  It would be like The Who following Who’s Next with an album about how fooled they got again.  I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed.

This would be an easier blow to take if the rest of hip-hop weren’t in such a sorry state.  There are like two people making good music right now, Jay and Kanye.  There’s some cool underground stuff like Childish Gambino (the alias of Donald Glover the black guy from Community, if you haven’t heard his stuff go listen right now) or the LA collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.  But that isn’t the same as actual mainstream talent on actual mainstream labels.  I would like to live in a world where I can get good hip-hop and it isn’t coming from blogs or YouTube.  Right now it’s basically Kany West and then nothing.  It’s kinda sad; it doesn’t need to be like that.  Is all that extra money for Atlantic Records really that important?