Lupe Fiasco, rap-nerd favourite turned musical ronin

livemint.com:

Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor, which earned widespread critical acclaim and three Grammy nods for its immersive, fantastical story-telling and deeply insightful meditations on Islamophobia, racism and American gun culture. 2007’s follow-up The Cool—a concept album a young boy raised by The Streets and The Game (both personified as characters in the narrative)—built on that success, debuting at #15 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, and at #1 on the rap chart.

The album cemented his reputation as one of the most promising rappers in the game, offering a philosophical, even nerdy take on a genre that had come to be dominated by the hyper-violent machismo of gangsta rap. But Lupe, it seemed, wasn’t built for the games that the music industry loves to play.

The delay in releasing his third album, Lasers, apparently because Atlantic Records didn’t think it had enough commercial singles, kicked off a rift with his label that would derail his upward trajectory. When it finally came out in 2011, two-and-a-half-years late, Lasers debuted at #1 On the Billboard Top 200, a smashing commercial success.

But his next two albums with Atlantic would face delays and conflicts of their own, leaving Lupe embittered with the mainstream music industry and its crass commodification of hip-hop culture. Lupe’s anti-establishment politics, and his unwillingness to compromise on his ideals, also made him plenty of enemies.

In a 2011 interview with CBS, he criticised the US government and Barack Obama’s foreign policy, calling Obama “the biggest terrorist." Two years later, he marked Obama’s inauguration by performing a 30-minute version of a song with anti-Obama lyrics at a gig in Washington DC, eventually having to be herded off by security. His