Right. What about The Game? Can you describe that character?

Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, The Game, he's a very dapper, he has dice for eyes and he had bullets for teeth. Actually there was a cipher for BET with Papoose and Styles P and the verse that I kicked was actually the physical description of The Game. "The game as the belly of a beast/ blunts for fingers and hollow tips for teeth/ wire taps for ears/ Nike airs for feet/ blaspheme for cribs?/ a system for a heart/ and rap music for beats" etc, etc, etc. So I put as much physical, as much as that stuff as I could into him so he breathes crack smoke. If you go back and listen to that song, every kind of line that's in that song is some physical characteristic. They're all real characters, like Kadeem Hardeson actually plays The Cool, and there's a few other actors, a few people out of Hollywood that we cast to actually play the other characters as well, so they're actually real people.

Sort of like interludes on the album with those people's voices?

Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, actually the way the album is structured is that story because I didn't want to get to heavy into it, like I put a lot of thought into from behind the scenes so from me like trying to explain it, it may come out kind of complex because it is. It's a deep storyline. It'll probably be a little bit more easy to follow on the album once everything's done and all the songs are down and people see the characters but me trying to describe is like, wow, because there's a lot that goes into it. On the album, I didn't want to get hammered down into just doing a full concept album because to me full concept albums have their flaws because you're chasing, trying to tell a story and you might not even know how to end it. So you might just do something just to end it and it might be kind of wacky or whatever. So what I did, I just focused on five records, and tried to tell that story in five records and some of them I direct, actual line for line, word for word what the character would say and some of them I'm more abstract, describing the character or describing the influence of the character. But it's [the story] over like 5 or 6 records plus the album has records like "Superstar" or me just talking about what happened in the past year and just rapping to be a rapper or whatever but it's 5 stories that I like directly focus on the storyline of "The Cool."

I think having those interludes will help explain those songs because you know sometimes like when you get so wrapped up in a song you may have to go back and listen to it.

Lupe Fiasco: Yeah, it's so much, we're going to tell it across so many different mediums like we're doing a vintage radio show, kind of like the throwback Vincent Price, "War of the Worlds" kind of situation for it. Like there's toys, there's all kinds of craziness for it, where the story is going to get told on as many levels as possible, and the music is just like one of those mediums. There's a comic book, that's just one of the mediums that you can get it and feel it on another level, like you can read it or you can listen to it as a story then you can listen to it as music then you can actually play with it as a toy, you can actually wear it as a shirt.

Cool.

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