Looking Back On What Food & Liquor Did And Didn't Do
Lupe Fiasco’s Debut LP Revealed A Complicated Figure That Needed Hip Hip More Than It Needed Him
Tristan Young @talltristan
Hip Hop doesn’t need saving. Never has, never will. Mid 90s pop needed to be shaken out of its complicit and frustratingly apolitical rut. Early 2000s rock required a severe course correction from emo-bro sermonizing in the form of disaffected but at least rhythmically capable indie rock. Mainstream electronica’s dalliance with EDM in the early 2010s was distressing to say the least. But hip hop, in all its tangential forms, was always comfortable in its own voice. It was confident too. That didn’t stop a lot of publications in 2006 from crowning Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor as hip hop’s savoir. Such problematic claims were never fully interrogated at the time, chalked up instead to the doldrums of the pop culture hype complex. Food & Liquor wasn’t there to save anything, except for maybe Lupe Fiasco.
Released in 2006, Food & Liquor was Fiasco’s debut LP, produced by his own underdog record label First & Fifteenth, and released under Atlantic Records. Even before the album, Fiasco was becoming an increasingly known quantity in mainstream hip hop as he was featured on a verse in Kanye’s 2005 album Late Registration. Among many to take an interest in Fiasco was Jay-Z, who helped with production and securing the record’s release. Even with the pedigree behind it, a few hiccups impeded Food & Liquor’s roll out, namely it was leaked several months early. While opinions of the leaks were largely of intrigue, much of the impending fanfare of the actual release was blunted. Fiasco responded by tweaking and remixing some of the tracks, removing others and recording whole new ones, delaying the formal release even further.
Regardless, impressions had been made, interpretations too. People focused on the opulence and grandeur of Fiasco’s orchestral arrangements. Even more so on his lyrically intricate and finessed wordplay. Dizzying blitzes of syntax combos and double entendres were doled out with jarring efficiency and efficacy. People called it ‘intellectual’, and that it would alter the course of hip hop for the better. The implicit and inherent racism in such statements says less about hip hop and more about how it was covered in mainstream journalism as recently as 15 years ago. The tacit assertion that it’s somehow unexpectedly noteworthy or unique for a black person to have an impressive vocabulary. The pleasant surprise that his expressions of luxury would fall along such classicist lines as if that’s something that was not likely to appeal to the average black person. Worst of all that such pursuits would somehow lift hip hop out of its current (apparently lamentable?) existence. None of this was ok. None of this passive aggressive moralising and attempted gentrifying of hip hop was necessary when all they had to do was say they liked it. Besides its not like he was the first rapper to use string or brass instruments in an eloquent fashion. Remember The Pharcyde? And they were considered buffoonish delinquents.
Food & Liquor may not have been a prophetic or revelatory experience, but it was exciting and terrifically produced. Mid 2000s hip hop had been defined by variants of southern boom clap production (dirty south, Atlanta grime, etc.), yet this went in a very different direction. It leaned heavily into classical instrumentations, repurposed towards brash and ostentatious boasting, to excellent effect. I Gotcha struts with intricate and cocky piano scales that beg to choreographed into a dance routine. Much has been made of the evocative and empathetic melodrama of the violins of Hurt Me Soul or He Say She Say, and with good cause. Most thrilling of all is the vivid and palpable horn arrangements in some of the tracks. The simmering waveform rolls of Kick Push are lovely but it’s the unmitigated and escalating fever of Just Might Be Ok that really sells Fiasco’s instrumental vision. The ascending and relentless horn slaps are explicit and highly rewarding.
Food & Liquor does not shy away from comparatively more modern compositional forms despite its reliance on the big band aesthetic. Sunshine creates its surreal wonder perfectly with looped, slightly glitched keys, and droning synth passively buzzing in the distance to create an insulated warmth. Daydreamin’ engages in modern trip hop both in terms of anachronistic samples (courtesy of the Wallace Collection circa 1969) and scratch culture. Elements of Black Funk and Black Blues Rock are extrapolated upon to make an electric guitar heavy tapestry in Pressure as a portrait of aspirational Americana as it could exist. It’s fitting that that this song features Jay-Z, who in the 2000s was solidifying his entrepreneurial empire and his status as a new class of mogul and expression of the American dream.
Fiasco’s lyrical prowess is exercised less as an instrument of his intellect and more of a portrait of his complex and at times confusing upbringing. Raised by his father, a member of the Black Panthers, in admittedly impoverished neighbourhoods besieged by drugs, populated by the homeless and exploited sex workers, Fiasco nevertheless looks upon his upbringing fondly. He claims that despite their institutional obstacles his father went to great lengths to ensure his son had as much of an education as he could provide for him. Television was taboo, but he was engrossed in comics. His Islamic upbringing would make him recoil at the misogyny and objectification of woman he observed in some hip hop. He socialized through skate boarding.
Fiasco channels the experiences of his youth into a something that isn’t exactly auto biographical, but more like a holistic composite of what the life of someone like him could be like. As was documented ad-nausem upon it’s release, yes, his rapping is intricate, at times stunningly so. No mere education can accommodate the verbal dexterity and discipline of some of his verses; a trait that some observers at the time seemed to forget completely ignores social or educational boundaries. Inane as it is, you’ll twist yourself into knots just trying to keep up with lines like “you don’t want a loan leave my cologne alone/ it’s a little to strong for you to be putting on”, in I Gotcha. Fiasco effortlessly manoeuvres the sharp turns of his syntax when he clips through, “Anything not coming out the box he blocks it/ see he loves the box and hope they never stop it”, during The Instrumental. Fiasco certainly loves to flourish his skills even with a wink and nod such as the immaculately engineered meta-line in Sunshine, “never met her before, but I think I like her like a metaphor”. Even Jay-Z follows Fiasco’s lead in Pressure as he boasts, “If the war calls for Warhols hope you got enough space on your halls walls”. Is it gaudy? Yes. Is it still really good? Also yes.
Those interlocking verbal gymnastics are dazzling, but far from Fiasco’s only tool in his repertoire. Food & Liquor actually deploys a diverse range of lyrical sets ranging from compact one-liners to far more long form efforts. Like the aforementioned brazenly pompous cologne line, Fiasco excels at extended metaphors. He celebrates the completion- finally- of Food & Liquor in Just Might Be Ok with a detailed imagining of leaving his child hood home and building a new one for his family, and eventually his supporters. “Then he leaves the house that love built, that HUD renovated, that Section 8 paid for”, he grins. The juxtaposition of the album at its most instrumentally grandiose and his acknowledgment of his humble beginnings is one of the most triumphant moments in the album. In an allusion to his endearingly nerd-core inclinations he describes in Daydreamin’ the anatomy of giant robot he’s piloting as a stand in for the demeaning hierarchal structures of the neighbourhoods many under privileged youth grew up in, and how to try to break through these structures. It’s all a little over complicated but it works, “now there’s hoes selling holes like right around the toes/ and the crack heads beg at about the lower leg/ there’s crooked police that’s stationed at knees/ and they do drive-bys like up and down the thighs”.
Elsewhere in the album he conducts himself far more literally, and sticks to a single linear topic for the duration of an entire track. In what would become the soundtrack to nearly every skate video for half a decade, he recounts in Kick, Push how a love for skate boarding expanded his horizons and brought him fulfilment at many points throughout his life. His recalling of finding a like-minded potential love interest makes for a great anecdote. “’She said Bow! I weigh 120 pounds/ now let make one thing clear I don’t need to ride yours I got mine right here’”. Sunshine takes a chance encounter and weaves it through the surreal and disorienting wonder of falling in love for the first time. All of the attendant serenity, anxiety, and elation are depicted through a timid fever dream of a melody and writing. Sometimes, even outside of the macro ambitions of Fiasco’s verses he simply finds ways to effectively combo up words in satisfying ways: “I ain’t’ nicest MC, I ain’t Cornell West/ I am Cornell Westside”.
The album begins with a speech by Ayesha Jaco. Despite its spoken word nature, it’s alluringly rhythmic. “Food & Liquor Stores rest on every corner…” she begins. Food & Liquor is not so much of a thematically intense album as it is one very overt in its intentions. Fiasco sings about his philosophy in the intro, your good and your bad. Your Food and your liquor. Despite the simplistic binary of such a statement he uses it as a starting point to embellish on the complex and often contradictory designs that make up all of us. He doesn’t spend his time devoted to the virtues of what is good in life or condemning what is bad, but rather the complications that arise when both must intersect within a densely populated ecosystem. In other words, within us. Fiasco described food as necessary and what we need to grow; liquor is a distraction, a poison. Yet they exist together, in every store in every neighbourhood in Chicago. They are inexorably linked and we have to find some kind of equilibrium. Fiasco uses the album to document his struggles in navigating this mindset, but ultimately the validity in doing so.
It seems simple enough looking at the album form an atomistic perspective. Most songs can be subdivided in what is virtuous or pernicious in life. Real celebrates making art unapologetically, pursuing ones goals in Pressure, beating addiction in Kick, Push 2, and so forth. Concurrently he bemoans indoctrination through television in The Instrumental, family abandonment in He Say She Say, and- with vividly biting satire- the commoditization and all consuming avarice of rap in Daydreamin’. His extended parody of a director desperately trying to make a rap video, “now c’mon everybody lets make cocaine cool, we need a couple more half naked women up in the pool”, is peak Lupe. However, observing how the tracks play off and intersect with each other adds fascinating layers of dissonance, and reveals a person still trying to figure out not just who he is, but why.
Fiasco continues his tirade against hip hop not just from the cynical gaze, but from moral grandstanding in Hurt Me Soul: “I used to hate hip hop, yup, because the women degraded”. However he goes on to recount how his exposure to It Was Written by Nas (interesting that it wasn’t Illmatic) challenged his viewpoints about it. His burgeoning appreciation for the genre stood in direct contrast of his Muslim upbringing and he struggled with his own hypocrisy. He expands these sentiments into a metaphor for America, a country at war with nothing more viciously than its own self, “took me off they welfare, can’t afford they health care/ my teacher won’t teach me, my master beats me”. In the same song he maligns Jay-Z for his shallow pursuance of wealth. In the next song he gives him a hype verse. In American Terrorist, set to Mathew Santos’ harrowing cries, acolytes and vile opportunists can turn religion against everyone in America; and yet it is only Islam that is treated with such suspicion and derision. Still, Fiasco, at this point in his life, had actively pursued success along pathways defined by the same country. What does that say about his devotion? He doesn’t answer, but is willing to open himself to such scrutiny. Fiasco is many things: comic book enthusiast, Muslim, rapper, conspiracy theorist, community organizer. None of these descriptors fit cleanly into mutually exclusive vacuums even if the arrangement of an album can potentially accommodate such a thing. They exist together in messy and unpredictable ways. The sooner we except the influence that the good and the bad have over each other the sooner we can attempt to balance them, he argues.
The explicit and sub textual implications can be a little slippery, but that’s what makes it engaging and worth revisiting. A song like Just Might Be Ok that is ostensibly a hype track about the completion of his album is also a lyrical metaphor for the poverty minority youth develop in. 10 years after it’s release it became a visual appendix for the demonstrators protesting the police murder of Eric Garner. His condemnation of systemic neglect and racism in Hurt Me Soul is also a confession of his own hypocrisy in regards to his views on hip hop. American Terrorist obviously laments the manipulative demonization of Islam in America, unless that’s merely pretext to back door an examination of the effects of poverty and grief. Its abstractions like these more than the frantically choreographed complexities of Fiasco’s verbosity that speak to the depth of the album.
Fiasco of course wasn’t without some of the narcissism that any ascending pop star dabbles in. After narratives about his supposedly messianic release cropped up he added a song where he says he’s come to resurrect hip hop. Intro promises (rather boldly!) that Fiasco was something of a godsend. The generous reading of this is he was poking fun at his own hype. But considering it’s mentioned shortly after mourning the bygone days of Martin and Malcolm, and before quoting the Quran, I doubt it. He believed it maybe a little. Subsequent albums would grow even more delusional in this regard: Lupe went on some wild rides in later years. No matter what he thought he was or had become, in Food & Liquor he was relatable, and saviours aren’t relatable.