Did all of that happen between albums?

Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, it happened towards the end of Food and Liquor, kind of towards the end of the promotion for that, like the whole time we were recording Food and Liquor, we were on trial and you know, going through the motions of court with my partner and my father was in and out the hospital during the whole situation.

Do you vent about those specific issues directly on this album?

Lupe Fiasco: Yeah actually I do. I think I probably tell them through the story of "The Cool". As far as the resurrection, you know, it's kind of like a reach that I would love to have my father back or I would love to have my partner out of jail which, hopefully he'll be getting out soon. I wish that process was actually real and could actually take place.

When you mention that macabre kind of feel to the album or even to that song in general, a few movies come to mind like "From Hell" or "Jack the Ripper". Do those also tie into those songs or is that the feeling that you're trying to bring to it?

Lupe Fiasco: I think in a certain way. It's a little bit more serious, you know in this approach as opposed to the first album where everything was a bit more playful and I think that comes directly from just the mood that the album is in.

People, at least I thought the idea of Food and Liquor, was going to be something that like blurs the line between so called conscious rap and the street or just like for hustlers and rap nerds.

Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, this album is more street, I get to tell my street story through these characters. In "The Cool", there's another character, and to go back, talking about the maturity and the whole thing, it actually comes from like being cool. You know, the clothes that I think are cool and things of that nature but a lot of the stuff comes from that. Like I think, you know, button-up shirts with the collar up, safari shirts are cool, you know, and this is cool and that's cool but as far as the street story and stuff, I build up these characters to tell these stories. Like there's three main characters: The Street, The Game, and The Cool. The Street is the actual personification of the street, you know, if the street was a walking, talking person, what would it look like? It would look like this. Then The Game, is the personification of the game, the hustler's game, the pimp's game, the Mack's game, the prostitute's game, you know and what would she look like? The Cool, to me he has two levels: there's the real, kind of Fonzie ["Happy Days"] cool and then there's the kind of destructive, chasing the cool?trying to be cool in the streets, you know, I'm cool because I got a gun, I'm cool because I sell drugs so that character is represented in two ways. He's represented on both sides, he's represented as this fresh, young, cool, fly, money-getting type of dude who everybody likes and then he's represented also, on the other side as this zombie with a rotting, dead hand who freshly digs his self out the grave.

Oh, so this is that character from the first album making a second appearance?

Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you think that characters like that, they try too hard? That they don't actually see that quote, unquote coolness in them? That they have it naturally but they do all these other things whether it's like hustling in the streets or trying to deal with fast money, that they're trying too hard to achieve that cool when they already have it.

Lupe Fiasco: I don't know, some people already possess it. I think it's the arguments to be had or the discussions to be had about it. Is it something that is just in you and it's from your environment or is it something that you're born with because I know, there are two type of people that are cool to me in the world, like the coolest people were the nerds in high school. You know after high school, all those people who were nerds and you they got the coolest jobs with the coolest type of people, they could do the coolest things, they could build a computer from scratch, as opposed to all the popular people in school, now they're in the service industry, they're working in retail, the stuff they do isn't cool, or even they fell into the whim of the streets, you know they fell off into doing drugs or whatever or when they were doing drugs in high school, now they're the uncool people. Now they got ten kids and all types of other stuff as opposed to focusing so I think they were chasing that cool in high school and they'll be represented by the hustler freshly dug out the grave, rotting hand and the whole thing as opposed to the other type of cool person who was the nerd at one point, who kind of stuck to his goals and when he got out of high school, his life blossomed, he could relate to more people, a kind of all-around nice guy. Home // CELEBRITIES // WEB EXCLUSIVE // Lupe Fiasco: Cooley High