LASERS - Lupe Fiasco

[Woy]

Free File Hosting, Online Storage &amp File Upload with FileServe

New link.

 

[Carmelo]

Fuck Atlantic.

 

[Maestro]

Just got done listening to it, i definitely think that the previous version of Lasers would have been better.

Shining Down
I'm Beaming
Beautiful Lasers
Coming Up
Army Girl
State Run Radio
Stereo Sun

=Great lineup.

The second half of the album is definitely better than the first.

 

[KNUBB]

I like it. It isn't near the level of F&L and The Cool, but it is a solid album. Think of it like Kanye's Graduation. Itself is a decent album, but compare it to the predecessors and people will consider it crappy.

 

[Boucher]

DL now

 

[Maestro]

I like it. It isn't near the level of F&L and The Cool, but it is a solid album. Think of it like Kanye's Graduation. Itself is a decent album, but compare it to the predecessors and people will consider it crappy.

Amazing comparison.

 

[strahanfan92]

I'm going to try and hold off on listening to it. It comes out in a week, i can live until then, i hope. Kind of disappointed in the leak, but you expect these things to happen. You reviewing it?

Nothing to be disappointed with there, early leaks happen with every CD. Only one week early at least it wasn't 2.

 

[Champ]

I need a link for my boy. Anyone got one?

 

[EmpireWF]

Thanks Woy

 

[CCBrink]

Great article.

Interview: Lupe Fiasco Hates His Own Album | Complex.com

 

[kyhadley]

Great article.

Interview: Lupe Fiasco Hates His Own Album | Complex.com

You can easily sense what he's talking about in the album.

I don't know how signing to a label works but god I wish he could break free from Atlantic.

 

[Boucher]

I like Break the Chains its got a cool house music feel

 

[CCBrink]

Some thoughts from a poster at another forum I go to.

A lot of attention will be focused on some of the clutter like "Outta My Head" and the hooks by MDMA, but many of the songs are the most personal of Lupe's that he's released. Its an interesting change of pace from crazy lyrical Lu, this is the first time that we are learning about him in his songs. We've been given glimpses into his childhood and his views on hip hop like in "Hurt Me Soul", but nothing that gave us an opportunity to learn about Lu the person. I think that if you listen to "Till I Get There", its a good commentary on the process and his feelings with being a major label recording artist and the difficulties that he has had to deal with these past few years and the handling of Lasers.

There is no question that many of the hooks suck. If Lupe was singing the chorus in "Beautiful Lasers", that would probably unseat "American Terrorist" as my favorite song by him. Lu's live performances of "State Run Radio" are hair raising and give the chorus a powerful punch that is thrown away for the poppy sound of the boy band singer that replaced him. The strong possibility that the "State Run Radio" chorus was likely one of the victims of Atlantic's adjustments is ironic because the song about large government/corporations controlling what is being delivered to the masses is an example itself.

The many articles that I have read about Lu's feelings on the album, including the one that CDawg linked, make it obvious which songs Lupe's not crazy about and were given to him by Atlantic. He explicitly says "The Show Goes On", which I thought was okay because of how he was able to slam Atlantic in the first verse. "Out of My Head" is really the only song I wish was off the album, and "I Don't Wanna Care Right Now" would be much better if MDMA was dropped and there was less production manipulation.

In the end I'm happy with it. Is it the album that I have been anticipating and building up for three years? No, it probably would have been impossible for Lu to meet the sky high expectations. But he did give us a new perspective, magnified more problems in the music industry and corporatism (, and gave us some songs that are interesting to analyze ("State Run Radio", "All Black Everything", "Break The Chain"). People will say that old "Carrera Lu" and lyrical Lupe died, which is bullshit. All the have to do is look at his recent releases of "SLR" and "Go to Sleep" which are enough lyrical wordplay and genius to fill up any other great rapper's career.

 

[CCBrink]

double posts :smh:

 

[Pitty]

If you're not downloading the leak to buy it from Atlantic records in a week, you're doing life fucking wrong. If any album is meant to be pirated, this is it.

 

[Woy]

Lupe Fiasco Responds To His Album's Bad Reviews | The Smoking Section

Thought this was a pretty interesting read.

 

[CCBrink]

Good write up from the Sun-Times.

Lupe Fiasco's "Lasers" album finally will be released to the public this Tuesday. It's been a long time coming -- his last record was "The Cool" in 2007 -- but it's not at all the album the Chicago rapper wanted to make. His valiant attempts to buck up and promote it are downbeat and disheartening.

When I first chatted with Fiasco during some down time last week in New York City, I congratulated him on the album's first single, "The Show Goes On," which had just gone gold (selling 500,000 singles). He huffed, his whole attitude was "whatever" as he responded: "It's their record. My words, their music. They forced this song to be a No. 1 single, and that's what they got. I can't take any credit for it."

He's referring to Atlantic Records, the once historic label (founded by Ahmet Ertegun) now a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group. According to Fiasco, various players at Atlantic thwarted his artistic mission on this, his third album for the label -- a process that dragged on for three years and ended only when several hundred fans scheduled a protest last October in downtown Chicago and outside the label's New York City offices.

Ahead of the protests, Fiasco tweeted, "Victory!" and Atlantic suddenly announced a March 8 release date for the album. Fans gathered anyway, and eventually were greeted by a Warner exec brandishing a boom box. He played the song "The Show Must Go On," and the fans applauded.

Now here comes "Lasers," at long last. Songs include "Letting Go" and "I Don't Wanna Care Right Now." On "Words I Never Said," his sharp tongue attacks both sides, from right-wing commentators to President Obama. The music is lively, flexible, full of cool synthesizers. It doesn't sound like a compromise.

But Fiasco said he's just happy, if you can call it that, to see the record out there -- mostly because it means he's two albums closer to the end of his contract with Atlantic.

"'Lasers' is a great album. I'm actually happy with the record. I feel I got to say what I wanted even with --" He pauses, maybe frustrated, maybe choosing his words diplomatically. "It doesn't make up for what it took to get through it. It's still being argued and debated upon. ... The climate of this record was very weird, in some instances surreal. I became very abstract. I had to create this commercial art that appeases the corporate side. I had to acquiesce to certain forces. Hopefully within that I snuck in some things I actually wanted to say any way I can."

From creative high to dangerous low

"The Cool" was released Dec. 18, 2007, and by Jan. 9, 2008, it had sold 198,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It eventually went gold. The album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's rap chart and stayed there for nine weeks. At the next Grammys, "The Cool" won best rap album, along with best rap/sung collaboration and best rap song ("Superstar" with local singer Matthew Santos) and best rap solo performance ("Paris, Tokyo").

The successes capped a steady crescendo of acclaim. Fiasco -- born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, raised around the South Side's Madison Terrace housing projects, a devout Muslim who abstains from alcohol and drugs -- had been signed to another major (Epic Records) at age 19 as a member of a gangsta rap group called Da Pak. With the assistance of Jay-Z (who calls Fiasco a "genius writer"), Fiasco moved to Atlantic, debuting with "Food & Liquor" in 2006, which featured production by friend and champion Kanye West and received critical raves for its bold sounds and intelligent wordplay.

So when Fiasco met with Atlantic to talk terms for his third album, he felt he was on pretty great footing.

"If 'The Cool' was a success, I was supposed to get a bump in the budget for my next record," Fiasco said. "When I went in to cash in on that, I was told 'The Cool' wasn't a success. I said, 'Well, how do you gauge that? Even if you leave off the multiple Grammys, the accolades up the ass, the platinum singles, take out the subjective stuff. How many records actually sold?' They said it wasn't a success and we're changing the game, we don't go by that anymore. So I said, 'Let's not have any more meetings until we figure out what rules we're playing by.'"

A stalemate began, and Fiasco started to squirm. At a 2008 performance in Chicago, he suggested he would retire, promising one final record to be titled "LupE.N.D." -- a three-CD concept album, with discs representing "everywhere," "nowhere" and "down here." He told Billboard that year: "My next record might be my last one." By June 2009, he promised an audience at the Chicago Theatre that a single disc, now called "The Great American Rap Album," would be out by December.

Meanwhile, Atlantic had frozen his budget, and Fiasco was asking to be let go. The label refused. Jay-Z was offering to mediate negotiations. Darrale Jones, Fiasco's A&R rep at Atlantic and the man who'd signed him, has told other publications that the music Fiasco continued to deliver "wasn't commercial enough." (Jones and other label execs were asked to comment for this story. After much deliberation, Atlantic Records on Wednesday released a prepared statement instead. It reads, in its entirety: "We fully support Lupe and the release of 'Lasers.'")

"I was specifically told" -- Fiasco chuckled -- "'Don't rap too deep on this record.'" He laughed some more. "That was a specific order from the top. 'You're rapping too fast or too slow, or it's too complex.' ... There are consequences and combat that comes from that process and the eventual compromise. With me, though, I'm not writing about someone else. I'm writing about me. This is my life. It's very personal for me. So for somebody to kind of put their fingers in that and play with that, it becomes more damaging."

Fiasco said he spiraled into real depression, even contemplating suicide -- but he kept writing. He documents his struggles, in a general way, throughout the song "Beautiful Lasers": "Sometimes livin' in a word like this / it's pretty hard not to go insane," he raps, later considering bailing back to the South Side ("Go home, sh--'s far too gone") and then peering into the abyss while hearing contradicting internal voices:

All you see is all my rights
All I see is all my wrongs
Door keep telling me to fight
Gun on my table telling me to come home
Telling me to to put him inside my hand
Then put it up right next to my dome
Door keep telling me to find a reason
Anything to keep me from squeezing
Simplest things, yeah, you really like summer
You really like music, you really like reading, love
I can't win if it's me against me
One of us ain't gonna survive

"He started doing that record on stage, and I was shocked," said Jason Evans, a k a JROC, Fiasco's cousin who works A&R for Fiasco's Chicago-based independent label, First & 15th Productions. "He would introduce it, he'd say, 'I wrote this record when I was at a real down point in my life.' It was like a confession. That's how I found out, and we talked throughout that tour. It was shocking that he'd come so low because he's so mentally strong. ... He's 100 percent Muslim, very religious, and his father instilled all kinds of moral strength into his upbringing. It had to be bad if it came to that."

Doing his duty

Fiasco's fans tried to have his back. When summer of 2010 rolled around and still no news of the new album, two protest marches were scheduled in New York and Chicago. Dan Winchester, a local video producer, organized the Oct. 15 ("Fiasco Friday") event here. Even though the release date was announced a few days before, about 200 fans still showed up at Buckingham Fountain that afternoon and marched north along Michigan Avenue, carrying signs of support.

"Instead of an outright protest, it became a statement march," Winchester said. "We definitely made a statement -- that we support positive music, that we're not going to stand for corporations watering down music to be all pop and all sound the same. Once you sign a contract like that, they control everything about it. That's what they've been doing with Lupe, and we wanted to stand with him and against that corporate meddling."

Fiasco heard about the planned protest online. "Somebody kept spamming my Twitter page about it, the same guy, over and over," he said. "I was like, all right, chill out. But they really meant it. It was a full-on, full-blown angry protest. Then we had the meeting with Atlantic and they set a date, so it became a celebration. They still had 250 kids out there [in New York]. ... I went. I had to see it with my own two eyes."

Fiasco said the confluence of collective action and movement at Atlantic helped bring him around.

"I'm OK now. I'm happy, I'm stable," he said. "I've distanced myself from the situation emotionally and spiritually. It doesn't affect me. I found a nice balance to navigate through it without it leading to me killing myself, literally."

The process of finishing "Lasers" he described with words one hates to hear from a creative artist. He "hunkered down" and "got through it." He "went along," he "acquiesced." He "found some emotional distance from the music." He "lost those aspirations."

"I am a hostage," Fiasco said. "I gave them what they wanted. If I didn't, at the end of the day the album wasn't coming out."

"The Great American Rap Album" was recorded simultaneously with "Lasers." It's a "different sound" and should be released by the end of this year, he said. After that, maybe a greatest hits.

Meanwhile, Fiasco talks like a bored cubicle worker watching the clock, waiting for quitting time.

"There are certain expectations I don't have anymore. There are certain things I'll keep for myself now until they can be received the way I want them to be received. You'll still get albums, and they'll be good."

 

[Woy]

1.) Letting Go (ft. Sarah Green) | 3 - 3.75
2.) Words I Never Said (ft. Skylar Grey) | 4
- Third verse is awesome.
3.) Till I Get There | 3 - 3.25
4.) I Don't Wanna Care Right Now (ft. MDMA) | .25 - 1
5.) Out Of My Head (ft. Trey Songz) | 3 - 3.75
- Probably a little biased here because Trey's on the track. Sounds more of a Trey song though than a Lupe one.
6.) The Show Goes On | 2 - 2.5
- Hated this song when it first came out, but it has grew on me a little bit.
7.) Beautiful Lasers (2Ways) (ft. MDMA) | 4 - 4.75
- Great song that suffers from another meh hook.
8.) Coming Up (ft. MDMA) | 3 - 3.5
9.) State Run Radio (ft. Matt Mahaffey) | 1.5 - 2
10.) Break The Chain (ft. Eric Turner & Sway) | 2 - 2.25
11.) All Black Everything | 2.25 - 3
- A rare good hook, but this sounds more like a history lesson or political ad than a rap song.
12.) Never Forget You (ft. John Legend) | 4.5 - 5

Overall: 2.97/5

Brief Notes:
- Bad hooks and bad production, plus a less-focused effort from the rapper himself. Most of my thoughts will go into my actual review, I just needed to add something here.

My actual review is in my thread, this is just the brief one that will go in my list.

 

[Rivers17ncsu]

I agree with majority of your review, very good review. I liked Break The Chain and State Run Radio though.

I think my rating score ended up at 3.5/5

 

[JrRawlins]

im feeling all black everything.... and words I never said..... but thats about it....