Every rapper's writing process is different, but Lupe Fiasco's may be more involved than most MCs in his class. The astute lyricist did a great deal of reading to help him prepare to record his upcoming Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album, Part 1. On his reading list were Howard Zinn's "The Bomb" and Stephen Pimpare's "A People's History of Poverty in America." The latter inspired Lupe's next single, "Lamborghini Angels."
The track won't be out until about the third week of August, after the Muslim fasting period that Lupe is currently taking part in. Still, that didn't stop the Chicago spitter from delivering an a cappella preview of the song when he visited "RapFix Live" on Wednesday. The track's title may suggest something flashy, but the verse of "Lamborghini Angels" that Lupe previewed talked about the specific inequalities that women faced in the 1800s. "Literally that's the anecdote that went down in the book, 100 years ago. I was like, let me make a rap out of that," Lu said of the bars that he spit. "It's really like, Oh, you're a woman in the 1800s and you want to go to school? You're crazy and we're sending you to a mental asylum to get a lobotomy."
It was a memorable day for the MC, who later in the show broke down in tears after he, "RapFix" host Sway Calloway and Queens, New York, rapper Nature watched a 2006 clip from MTV's "My Block" series in which a young Lupe took Sway on a tour through his west side Chicago 'hood.
The trip down memory lane proved to be too much for Fiasco, who started to cry after seeing old footage of friends who are now either locked up or in a grave. It was a very touching moment. "Chicago's the murder capital. The dudes in that video are in prison, a couple of fed cases, and then there's ghosts. You see people that, that ain't there," he said, sobbing, hiding his tears behind his round-rimmed shades. "To see that so real, it hurts, bro. I ain't gonna front. It hurts; it hurts a lot to speak to ghosts."
Check Lupe Fiasco's verse to "Lamborghini Angels" below:
"With her eyes to the ceiling and a needle to her brain/ She looks back into the crowd, wipes the blood and then explains/ How she slipped from this existence to the realm of the deranged/ Her becoming must be halted to reverse what she became/ From the looseness of her tongue, to the pollution of her aims/ To do nothing is barbaric, the solution is humane/ You must destroy the mind and hopefully retrain/ You torture out the wildness, then replace it with the tame/ Blank slate when she recovers, she won't even know her name/ Perfect wife and perfect lover, no resistance, no complaints/ My God bless the scientific cure for the insane/ Knew that she shouldn't go to school, but she thought that that should change."
What do you think of Lupe Fiasco's "Lamborghini Angels" verse? Let us know in the comments!