Lupe Fiasco

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Lupe Fiasco was born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco on the 16th of February 1982, in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up in a household where one day the music was N.W.A, and the next it was Ravi Shankar, and the day after that a father might be teaching his children how to shoot an AK-47. That father was a Black Panther Party member, a prolific African drummer, a karate teacher, and the owner of karate schools and army surplus stores. He was also, by his son's account, a Renaissance man.

  Wasalu would eventually become Lupe Fiasco. The name came from a high school friend and from a song by The Firm. He liked the way it looked on paper. He would later reflect that it humbled him, because a fiasco is a disaster, and you should be calling other MCs fiascos, not yourself.

  What followed that name was a career that resisted easy categorization: a rapper who initially hated rap, a conscious lyricist who topped the charts, an artist whose debut was nominated for four Grammy Awards, and whose third album debuted at number one despite a troubled two-year battle with his own record label. The story of how Wasalu Jaco became Lupe Fiasco, and what he built from that tension, is worth understanding.

• 2. The West Side Education

  ›

  The Madison Terrace housing project on the West Side of Chicago was where Fiasco spent his early years. He began taking martial arts classes at age three. His parents divorced when he was five, and he went to live with his mother, though his father remained a central presence.

  In sixth grade, Fiasco moved to Harvey, Illinois, to live with his father full-time. His father lived next door to a crack house, and taught his son to use guns to defend himself from drug dealers. Yet the same father who gave those lessons also ran a household where reading was highly encouraged and Academic Decathlon competitions were a part of life.

  Fiasco initially disliked hip-hop for its vulgarity. He preferred jazz, and idolized the clarinet player Benny Goodman. His struggle to learn an instrument pushed him toward poetry instead. Then in eighth grade he heard Nas' 1996 album It Was Written, and something shifted. He started rapping his poems.

  At Thornton Township High School, Fiasco met a gang member named Bishop G. The two bonded over music, and Fiasco's father let them make mixtapes in his basement. Their first public performance ended when they were kicked off stage. Their eclectic style wasn't what the audience had come to hear. The failure, and the way his father's basement became a laboratory for something different, planted the seeds of everything that came later.

• 3. Da Pak and the Turning Point

  ›

  At 18, Fiasco was scouring flea markets and secondhand stores, picking up old mixing boards, record players, stacks of vinyl, and mic stands. He was building a studio from scraps because his parents were not enthusiastic about having a rapper for a son.

  At 19, he joined a group called Da Pak, which was shaped by California gangsta rap acts like Spice 1 and Ice Cube. Da Pak signed to Epic Records and released one single before falling apart. Fiasco described standing in a record store looking at a song about cocaine, guns, and women, and feeling like a hypocrite. He said: "What Lupe Fiasco says on this microphone is going to come back to Wasalu Jaco. When the music cuts off, you have to go home and live with what you say."

  That reckoning sent him back toward the lyrical tradition of Jay Z and Nas. His mother also handed him a record by The Watts Prophets, one of the first groups to combine spoken word with music. One of his first self-recorded tracks after Da Pak was a song called "Could Have Been," which laid out the career paths he had not taken. No video was made for it. It was released as a demo tape and discovered by MTV.

  He signed a solo deal with Arista Records, but was dropped when the label's president and CEO L.A. Reid was fired. During that short tenure at Arista, he met Jay-Z, who was then president of Def Jam Recordings. Jay-Z called him a breath of fresh air, said he reminded him of a younger version of himself, and helped him land a deal at Atlantic Records.

• 4. Food and Liquor

  ›

  The title Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor came from the stores common in Chicago neighborhoods, where you could buy groceries and alcohol under the same roof. Fiasco explained his thinking: food represented growth, strength, necessity. Liquor was the want, the thing that breaks you down. He said everyone is made up of a little of both.

  The album was officially released on the 19th of September 2006. Its production credits included Jay-Z, Kanye West, Mike Shinoda, and The Neptunes. The record peaked at number eight on the Billboard 200 and number two on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. It was nominated for three Grammy Awards, including Best Rap Album. Fiasco won Best Urban/Alternative Performance for "Daydreamin'," featuring Jill Scott.

  The path to that album had run through a Kanye West remix. Fiasco had reworked West's "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" into a track called "Conflict Diamonds" to raise awareness of the blood diamond trade. West noticed, and invited him to appear on "Touch the Sky" for Late Registration. That song, which sampled Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up," peaked at number forty-two on the Billboard Hot 100.

  Fiasco's first single as a lead artist was "Kick, Push," a love story about two people who share a passion for skateboarding. He said: "I'm not the greatest skateboarder, but I'm a damn good rapper, so I made a damn good skateboarding song." The single marked his first Billboard Hot 100 entry as a headliner and was later nominated for two Grammy Awards. GQ magazine voted him Breakout Man of the Year for 2006.

• 5. The Cool and Personal Loss

  ›

  Lupe Fiasco's The Cool was conceived as a concept album that expanded on a track by the same name from his debut. The premise was stark: a hustler dies, comes back to life, and is then robbed by two children using the same gun that killed him.

  While recording the album, Fiasco's father died of type II diabetes. His business partner, Charles "Chilly" Patton, was convicted of attempting to supply heroin to a drug ring and sentenced to 44 years in a correctional facility. Both events shaped the album's themes.

  Fiasco chose not to work with big-name producers on the record, citing the commercial failure of his collaboration with Pharrell on "I Gotcha" as a reason to keep costs down. The album came out in December 2007. The lead single, "Superstar," featuring Matthew Santos, was a semi-autobiographical account of his rise to fame. It peaked at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. Major League Baseball players including Hanley Ramirez, Troy Tulowitzki, Ryan Zimmerman, Gerald Laird, and Ryan Braun used it as their at-bat music.

  That same year, it was revealed that Fiasco, Kanye West, and Pharrell Williams had formed a group called Child Rebel Soldier, which released a single called "US Placers" featuring a Thom Yorke sample. Fiasco also told The Village Voice that he was writing a novel titled Reflections of a Window Washer. In 2008, MTV ranked him the 7th Hottest MC in the Game.

• 6. The Lasers Battle

  ›

  At a performance in New Zealand in February 2010, Fiasco played material from an album then called We Are Lasers for the first time. He said the album was finished and waiting on Atlantic Records for a release date. The label pushed back, saying the record lacked commercial singles, and presented him with songs they wanted him to record. He refused. He said he would not own those songs.

  For six months, the public did not know why the album was delayed. Fans responded by creating an online petition that gathered more than 16,000 signatures. Fiasco said the petition brought him to tears. He released a song called "B.M.F-Building Minds Faster" to thank them.

  More than two and a half years after the album was completed, Lasers finally arrived on the 8th of March 2011. The lead single, "The Show Goes On," sampled Modest Mouse's "Float On." It peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100, making it his highest-charting song. In its first week, Lasers sold 204,000 copies and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, his first album to reach that position. Critics were divided. One review at AllMusic gave it three out of five stars and said the album's rhymes had been dulled for the sake of chasing pop trends. The album was nonetheless nominated for Best Rap Album at the Grammy Awards, with "The Show Goes On" nominated for both Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song.

• 7. Beyond the Microphone

  ›

  Fiasco co-founded 1st & 15th Entertainment with Charles "Chilly" Patton in 2001. The name came from the traditional twice-monthly paycheck dates. When Patton was convicted on drug charges, Fiasco took over as CEO. He eventually used the label to release albums independently after departing Atlantic following Tetsuo & Youth in 2015.

  In 2005, he founded Righteous Kung-Fu, a company producing fashions, sneakers, toys, video games, comic books, and graphics for album covers and skateboard decks. He also runs a fashion line under that umbrella called Trilly & Truly. In January 2006, he signed with Reebok as part of the "O.G" marketing campaign.

  On the 7th of January 2010, Fiasco joined musician Kenna, actress Jessica Biel, and others on an expedition to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro called Summit on the Summit, intended to raise awareness of the billions of people worldwide who lack access to clean drinking water. Thirteen days later, on the 20th of January 2010, he released a track called "Resurrection" with Kenna in response to the Haiti earthquake, as part of a charity compilation for Music for Relief.

  Between 2020 and 2023, Fiasco was a visiting scholar and artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught a class called "Rap Theory and Practice," often working alongside Professor of Digital Media Nick Montfort. In January 2025, he joined Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Institute as a Distinguished Visiting Professor for the school's Bachelor of Music degree program. His 2024 album Samurai, released through his own 1st & 15th Too imprint, was a concept album dedicated to the life and legacy of Amy Winehouse.