A Review of Lupe Fiasco

A Review of Lupe Fiasco’s “Words I Never Said”

From the blaring siren opening chorus, the drumbeat is showing us that a revolution is underway but how seriously is it to be taken? People compare Lupe Fiasco’s song “Words I Never Said” to a protest song from the Vietnam era though the merit of the song lies more with the economic complaints rather than the ones on foreign policy. The line “Crooked banks around the world, would gladly give a loan today, so you can miss a payment and they can take your home away,” and the line, “Your child’s future was the first to go with the budget cuts,” make it work more as a clash of the classes song since he only mentions the war on terror and attacks on Gaza in the first verse. Sixties protest songs were short and simple, since it doesn’t take a long rap verse to tell people that killing is bad. Protest-raps are long-winded, which is fine but that leaves a lot of room for garbage. The lines on the schools and banks carry a fact behind with the anger, which he lacks with all of the lines concerning his conspiratorial politics.

By going after Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, it seems rather hypocritical to stoop to their level by asking, “9/11, building 7, did they really pull it?” Like Beck, Fiasco can get the paranoid fired up while not really taking responsibility for what he says. It is one thing to call the war on terror “bullshit”, since you can’t go to war with an emotion, and the way we are approaching Al-Queda may not be the most efficient or ethical. He could even go after the media for persecuting Muslims. Though there is something cheap about questioning the perpetrators of the September 11^th attacks.  Since he only gave that line in the form of a question, he can just throw up his arms and go don’t look at me, I’m just the guy asking questions, when put under pressure for saying it. It’s the only line in the song with a question mark at the end of it that carries the attitude of a conviction and it throws all reasonable credibility of the song out the window.

While a solution is not required of a protest song it is encouraged since the skeptical will ask, “How would you handle the situation, or run things better?” Fiasco indicts the American people for their docility by saying “I think that all the silence is worse than all of the violence”. But what is his solution? Not voting, “Next one neither”, referring to the upcoming 2012 elections. He even stated in interviews that he wants to encourage kids to not vote, while insisting they aren’t doing enough to fight the powers that be. Is there a worse form of political silence out there?