When the magnum opus of rap rains upon the crowd, even the night sky pauses its outpour.
Clothes and skin have long united in soaked euphoria, surging and swaying in a sea of waving hands. The man on stage raps with his eyes closed, leaning into the damp air as if to suspend the sudden thunderstorm that rolled over Johannesburg mere minutes before. Then, with measured breath, he distills the weather into dense clouds of meaning.
“I prefer girls to reign all over the world,” he raps, and his voice commands the rumbling beat like a storm god himself. “And not rain like rain man, or rain like rain dance, or rain like a slight chance of rain when it’s raining, or rein like deer slaves to Santa Claus sleigh man, but reign like queens that reign over made man.”
When the beat stops, echoes of reverence hover above the city. Mural, a song widely regarded as one of the most lyrical records in rap history, brims with such density of metaphor, entendres, references and rhyme schemes that it feels near impossible not to drown in its flow — even for an ardent admirer like myself. And yet, as he submerges the crowd in another swirl of syllables, the man on stage barely catches his breath. It is the effortless ease that only a true master of the craft possesses: nothing to it but to do it.
It was two months prior when I had spotted his name on a poster for Back to the City, Africa’s biggest yearly hip-hop festival. Bouncing off a photo montage, the letters leaped at me in bold excitement: “LUPE FIASCO.” In the giddy minutes that followed, I texted everyone who loves me. They did not have a choice, and they knew it.
There is no other artist, perhaps no other person, who I have allowed to influence me and my work as deeply. As a poet, I have been striving for such command of the craft. As a performer, for such mastery of movement. As a martial artist, for such resilience and discipline. As a person, for such commitment to truth and change and justice. I keep striving for it, daily.
For years, I carried Lupe’s music with me, carefully cushioned in the back of my mind, safely hidden from the many who would not care to understand. A low-frequency hum, a constant reminder. Now I would get to experience him — not the version living in my mind but the one in flesh and full force. A prospect that felt equal parts delightful and daunting. A feverish daydream on the horizon.
When someone’s work starts to move the air around you, you begin to study the weather: the winds that shaped it and the lightning strikes it learned to hold. Long before I got to know him as Lupe Fiasco, before he would send storms of pictures in word form around the world, there was Wasalu, a boy born in 1982 into a neighbourhood of Chicago where violence was no stranger on the doorstep. He spent his childhood breaking bricks, catching arrows with bare hands and pulling rocks out of boiling cauldrons. His father Gregory Jaco, revered in the community, was a polymath: a martial artist, member of the Black Panther party, military man, engineer and musician.
At the age of three, his father handed him his first Samurai sword, a katana. Wasalu’s home was a literal dojo, but he also grew up reading encyclopedias and National Geographic magazines, playing video games and listening to Bach, Beethoven and Benny Goodman. While his parents were Muslim, they exposed him to a vast array of belief systems, from Christianity to Buddhism and Shintoism. In the same breath, he lived with drug dealers, gang members and sex workers in the midst of Chicago’s housing projects. A childhood filled with conflicts of curious complexities. “It immediately sets you up for how big the world is,” he once reflected in an interview, “but also for how limited your surroundings are.”
What happens when a person with the open mind of a scholar and the discipline of a black belt enters the music business at the tender age of 18? The path ahead would stretch sinew and spirit against the system’s grinding greed. Having started to rap professionally with his friends in high school, he signed his first record deal before graduating. A few years later, he had already featured on Kanye’s hit single Touch The Sky, released his debut album with Jay-Z as executive producer, and won a Grammy for his record Daydreamin’. His sophomore album The Cool followed soon after and is widely deemed a classic of conceptual and narrative depth.
But the ugly face smirking behind the industry’s facade soon started to crack open. As major record companies do, his label Atlantic Records demanded profit over purpose, commerce over craft and style over substance. Having chained himself contractually to the belly of the beast, Lupe was soon caught in battles against his own label, opposing their attempts to mould him into a more digestible artist. A visceral tug-of-war that would belch out a third album with major commercial pop appeal, leaving many fans disappointed; and a fate he would wrestle with for many more years to come.
But his father had trained him to be a martial artist, all too familiar with adversities. In 2007, just as his career had started to take off, Gregory Jaco died. In his last words, he left his son with a seemingly simple command: “Tell the truth, Wasalu.”
And he did. Throughout the 11 long years that followed, he did.
Like a malignant tumour spreading across a painfully twisted body, his relationship with the label grew only more cancerous. Still, Lupe refused to fold. Not when his label forced him to play shows despite life-threatening pneumonia. Not when they withheld his subsequent albums for years, until even the global hacker collective Anonymous threatened to launch cyberattacks against the label’s executives. Not when he joined the Occupy Wall Street movement and called then US president Barack Obama a terrorist for invading Afghanistan, and not when he, long before Israel’s current genocide, advocated for a free Palestine. Not when he stopped getting booked by the entire industry. Not when nightmares of Samurai swords began bursting into his dreams, pushing him to the edge of depression and suicide. Keeping to the unyielding stance of a black belt, even with his arms in restraint, he did not bend.
Lupe Fiasco lost a mainstream career in the pursuit of purpose and principles. He gained me and many others as pupils on his path. His layered lyricism has handed me many a present I am still waiting to unwrap in the future. But, beyond anything, Lupe keeps pointing me towards my very own path.
Today, my footsteps are firmly rooted in the belief that it is my duty as a writer to tell the truth, the full truth, without crouching to cowardice or comfort. I also believe I must sharpen my own craft so I may wield it into a sword, swung against the unjust. It is Lupe’s work that keeps teaching me how to reach for the highest level of swordsmanship.
Since his release from Atlantic Records, the constraints of the music industry hold less sway over him. He keeps putting out music under his own label 1st & 15th, with far more control of his own. He still tours frequently, across the US and globally. Since 2022, he also holds a professorial position at MIT, teaching a course titled Rap Theory and Practice, and started lecturing at Johns Hopkins University. His mission remains longevity, but it is no longer confined to his own career – it now extends to rap as a whole.
On the day before the concert, at a small media gathering at the South African Hip Hop Museum, I finally met him: not yet performer, but a person, not yet the man who would command the sky but calm, reflective, precise. When I asked him about the role of artists in these times, he leaned into a brief pause before answering.
“The world is in crisis because America is in crisis,” he spoke with measured care. “The far right, Christian nationalism, transphobia, homophobia — all that is a problem for the world.”
“I’m trying to build counterpoints and rebuttals so these things cannot go unchecked.” He paused again, as if weighing the words briefly on his tongue before releasing them. “Because I really believe that, in a few years, America will be at war with itself. And I do not want that to happen. So as long as I can say anything to get someone to change their mind, I will.”
The following night, in the crowd, it all made sense. The resistance and refuge, layered into his music. The brimming daydream, conducted over Joburg’s night sky. At the crest of the song, Lupe Fiasco raised his arm and turned the crowd into a sea of waving hands. A few raindrops fell again. Caught in the stage lights, they shimmered like tiny truths.
Rain and reign, merged in dense clouds of meaning.
For years, Lupe Fiasco’s music lived softly in my mind – a hum of resistance, a reminder of truth. Then, under Joburg’s stormy sky, I finally stood before the man who wields words like swords