![]() ![]() ![]() What he didn’t like, at least at first, was hip-hop. He liked Tchaikovsky, jazz, Benny Goodman. It’s not a novel dichotomy, but he draws it vividly: he tells EW that there was blood “from some guy who got shot” on the doorknob to his childhood apartment before adding that the apartment didn’t have cable, so the Jacos couldn’t get their “brains washed by MTV.” There were crackhouses next door, he says. In stories about his childhood, Lupe returns again and again to the eclecticism of his parents’ home –– or parents’ homes following the divorce –– and to the violence that lurked outside. ![]() He owned karate schools and army surplus stores and some National Geographics. His mother, Shirley, was a gourmet chef and his father, Gregory, was the sort of Renaissance man who could only emerge after Vietnam: he was an engineer, he was an accomplished African drummer, he was a Panther. He grew up first in and around Chicago’s West side, and later in its South suburbs, with three siblings and six half-siblings. Wasalu Jaco was born in February of 1982. “They don’t know there’s more where that came from.”Īnyway. At one point Lupe raps, to Chilly: “Remember when the police took our cars?” It makes search and seizure sound a little whimsical. The song is written mostly in second person. But before he had submitted a single song to Atlantic –– when he was jacking Mase’s “Welcome Back” beat for “Welcome Back Chilly” –– Lupe Fiasco was largely unknown outside of Chicago, and Chilly was fresh out of a lockup of more than a year, still awaiting trial but evidently willing to be optimistic. If you’re familiar at all with Patton, you know him as Chilly, the partner and mentor figure who guides and haunts Lupe’s first few studio albums. This is not one of the parables that would come to dominate Lupe Fiasco’s music when he became a national star in the middle of the last decade this is a little celebration for a man named Charles Patton. The last song on Fahrenheit 1/15: The Truth Is Among Us is about an accused heroin trafficker’s brief window of freedom. He always gave me Tribe Called Quest because that’s what he thinks I like.” –– Lupe Fiasco, 2006 “I was trying to get one of those spacey way-out Pharrell records, and he wouldn’t make it for me. ![]()
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