Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool hit during my transition into adulthood, from the streets of the West Side to being dropped in the middle of the North Shore. When “Gold Watch” and “Go Go Gadget Flow” come on, I think about my freshman year of college and some of the first friends I made during that time; those who embraced a nervous 18-year-old girl — me — coming off the grief of my grandmother’s passing while trying to navigate a foreign world. Sept. 25 marked the 14th anniversary of “Superstar,” the first single off Lupe’s sophomore album, and one of the songs my friends and I danced the night away to at a sorority ball.
The West Side hadn’t really had a rapper of our own to blow that big in hip-hop in a while. My generation grew up idolizing the dizzying tongue of Twista, the country twang of Crucial Conflict and the slick talk of Do or Die. We stuck our chests out with pride whenever their videos played on BET, MTV or The Box — because, like the South Side with Common, we had our own hometown heroes too.
It felt good to see the West Side on the hip-hop map, which felt super dominated by the coasts at the time. However, their success felt distant to us. They were the big homies; so we were a little too young to feel part of their unique grind from the street to the TV screen.
Then came Lupe. Many of us first heard him on Kanye’s “Touch the Sky,” standing toe-to-toe with one of the biggest rappers of the time, who also happened to be Chicago bred. But when “Kick, Push” boomed out of my homeboy’s speakers for the first time in 2006, it sparked something new in us. We felt seen, not only because Lupe came out of the West Side like us, but also because he represented a new alternative brand of hip hop.
Lupe wasn’t the flashy rapper with the dope boy swagger and chains and video vixens. He was a poet, still talking about the craziness we experience daily growing up on the underserved West Side, but unafraid to be Black and nerd out — a foreign concept to rap in the mid 2000s. His debut, Food & Liquor, which unbelievably just went gold this September, showed us that we could carve out spaces for our niches too.
Last month, Lupe performed The Cool in its entirety on the Radical Stage at Riot Fest in Chicago on Sept. 17. Everything about his set took me back my freshman year in college.