‘Tetsuo & Youth just has a lot to offer. While not quite as cosmically dense as some of his other work (Drill Music in Zion alone has enough material to fill a college course), there’s a ton to chew on.‘
Release date: January 20, 2015 | 1st & 15 / Atlantic Records | Facebook | Twitter | Website
Hip hop is probably one of the least-featured major genres on A Scene In Retrospect, and while I understand why that might be, it’s still a shame, because even from an outside perspective, there’s a lot of raw talent and stellar releases in that genre. Which is why I’m glad to open 2025 on Tetsuo & Youth by American rapper Lupe Fiasco, as expertly interpreted by one of our resident hip hop heads, David. Strap in, it’s a long one.
David Rodriguez
After not connecting much with Lupe Fiasco’s music over the years, something deeply compelled me to listen to Tetsuo & Youth when it dropped ten years ago. While I have no data to support it, I have to believe that album was my most listened to of January 2015 and likely a month or two beyond on Spotify. I connected with it and it kept me on some sort of rails while I was acting WILD. No details because it’s honestly shameful and I DON’T KNOW YOU.
Getting into my real hip-hop head bag around this time made Tetsuo & Youth a treat. It was long, dense, teeming with lyrics and themes I did and didn’t get the full gravity of – the type of shit Rap Genius was originally created for – but it was also profoundly approachable and catchy for what it was. Production was immaculate and really different from other stuff I was listening to at the time.
While not a traditional concept album, it is heavily, purposefully sequenced and themed. Four interludes named after seasons provide tonal and mood context for main sections/thirds of the album with Tetsuo & Youth starting with “Summer” and ending with “Spring”. This in and of itself is even open to interpretation (if you’re an overthinker like me). Summer is short with only three songs between it and fall, ones that are mostly upbeat. Fall is longer at four songs, more thematically weighty and dreary. Winter is the longest with five songs packed with the darkest themes and coldest lyrics. Spring doesn’t get any songs as it ends the album, it only provides the portal back to the front of the album to run summer back again. I see this as commentary on having longer winters which can mean more cold, more depression, less light during the day, etc. The warm days, the ones more often revered, are fewer and as such should be cherished when they appear. Let’s go over a song from each season, huh?
Dissecting the greatness of “Mural” is honestly a fool’s errand. It’s over 150 bars nearly nonstop of observations, philosophical postulations, admissions, references, questions, and more. I could fill this whole article on just this song alone, but suffice it to say the thoughtful, warm, summery piano-fortified beat and Lupe’s collected flow all has a pinky-out sensibility to it and I’m willing to bet Lupe fans all have their own favorites lines from this song. Personally, a few of mine are:
‘I like my pancakes cut in swirls
Moroccan moles and undercover squirrels
I like cartoons, southern cities with large moons
Faith healers, ex-female drug dealers and art booms…
‘A word game backup plan that can dam lakes
Back up, the wordplay ain’t playing that the man’s stakes
Means I can still be the man if the dam breaks
And when demand brakes I’m reflectious, what they can’t face
My peers will still treat the mirror like it’s a fan base…
‘My rap position was Black condition and activism
Ammunition for abolition, missions attacking systems
But they not apt to listen ‘less it’s dropping on Activision’
It teeters on stream-of-consciousness and gives some more poetic insight into the thoughts of Lupe, from the irreverent to the character defining, all holding equal weight as it all paints a picture – mural – of his mind. One of my favorite hip-hop songs of all time.
From the fall section, “Prisoner 1 & 2” is arguably the most poignant and really spoke to me as someone just wrapping up a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice at the time this album dropped. Making great use out of a popular Garage Band pack-in string sample for the song’s first half, it’s a duel story where the first half, Prisoner 1, depicts criminals of various types and how they end up in incarcerated and are all dehumanized when they get there all the same (‘That’s how it is in a police state/When your life is just a number and release date’). Doesn’t matter if you’re a protester or molester, two crimes referenced in the first verse (I know peaceful protesting isn’t technically illegal, but… come on now).
It encompasses the emotions behind bars, the violence, the protests and hunger strikes, the absolute desperation and brokenness people get to when in prison. Prisoner 1’s hook is telling – ‘Love is Looking Over Various Errors/And hate is Habitually Accelerating Terror/Everywhere, but the mirror’ – when compassion, empathy, and rehabilitation would go a lot longer of a way than deterrence, revenge, and incapacitation for its own sake. Generally speaking anyway.
Prisoner 2 is darker, anxious, and more militant because it turns focus from the incarcerated to the incarcerator, or rather the correctional officers that staff and enslave the Prisoner 1s of the world and this particular story. Without tossing any bail (pun unintended) to cops, a way to think about incarceration is COs are imprisoned as well, subjected just as much to deterioration of morals, ethics, and general emotional disposition while working because it’s what it demands. It is, literally, bad for them too – hundreds of studies look into this effect, most controversially the Stanford prison experiment.
It should go without saying that Prisoner 2 would not exist without the societal and economic insistence that we have millions of Prisoner 1s incarcerated at once, most of them in for-profit prisons doing labor for million-dollar companies for free or fractions of the labor cost. The 13th Amendment is a motherfucker. And after all, Lupe knows it’s much easier to choose a job (‘They sell/cell they souls, they sell/cell they selves’) than it is to choose the criminalized life you’re forced into due to poverty, lack of social programs, good legal jobs, racism, classism, etc. Empathy flies out the window on both sides at Mach 9 when the hook of the Prisoner 2 part says the quiet part out loud:
‘You better watch these ni**as (en garde)
If it was up to me, I would never unlock these ni**as
Wouldn’t rehabilitate, man, I would just box these ni**as
And throw away the key
I’d throw away the key like the Coast Guard watchin’ me’
How about a winter song? I promise I’ll be quicker about this one. My favorite is “Deliver” for being succinct and catchy as you’d expect from a single, but still having more layers than a Chicago deep dish pizza. On the surface, it’s about the realities of ghetto life making it a no-go zone for other civilians like pizza deliverers, but there’s an important twist that nuked my learning mind at the time provoked by Lupe Fiasco himself. ‘Pizza man’ sounds like ‘peace of man’ providing an important double entendre that recontextualizes the track, the hook especially. The title too – “Deliver” refers to pizza/food restaurants, but it also refers to spiritual deliverance and how the hoods feel hopelessly exempt from it, forgotten by God. There’s a lot of lyrics you could break down, but my faves are pretty self-explanatory:
‘Ni**as selling dope, white people is the addicts
White folks act like they ain’t show us how to traffic
All that dope to China, you don’t call that trappin’?
Breaking Bad, learned that from a TV
So don’t say it’s politics when you see me
‘When you gon’ apologize for your CD?’
Ni**a, that don’t match red and black to a GD’
Tetsuo & Youth just has a lot to offer. While not quite as cosmically dense as some of his other work (Drill Music in Zion alone has enough material to fill a college course), there’s a ton to chew on. Even if you’re not a super lyrical person, the raw music and melodies on offer are impressive – “Dots & Lines” is a magnificent ambrosia of sonic textures with one of the catchiest hooks on the LP, “Body of Work” is foggy and moody with an awesome singing feature from Troi Irons, and “Chopper” is the toughest track by far being Tetsuo & Youth’s trap-infused posse cut featuring Trouble, Buk, Trae Tha Truth, Glasses Malone, Fam Lay, and Billy Blue. For Lupe Fiasco himself, it saw a return to form of sorts after a slump mostly caused by his label at the time, Atlantic (“Prisoner 1 & 2” can be viewed among fans as depicting that relationship in certain ways – they’re not called ‘slave contracts’ for the drama). This album arguably started another streak of strong work (yes, including DROGAS Light, it’s fun) up to and including his latest, Samurai.
An album like this deserves a lot more than I’ve given it, but I’m both ill-equipped to properly contextualize or proselytize on why some elements of this album are compelling, next-level, or just good, and what I am properly equipped to handle I don’t really have it in me to wax upon further due to being very, very tired and overwhelmed personally. In a way, it’s sad – I’ve waited years to be able to talk about this album and it comes during one of the most turbulent and busy times of my life in recent years. It is what it is. There’s also a bit of sourness on my part toward Lupe lately for seemingly diving into full-bore AI adoption with his art, something I can’t support on any level creatively or ethically as that particular machine is contributing to very real tragedies and bankrupts art as we know and understand it. But it’s his work, he can do whatever he wants with it. I’ll just play hipster and stick to his older, organic works if I have to. Dude is also teaching rap studies courses for MIT and soon Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute as well so he’s clearly getting shit done and, ultimately, I respect the hell out of it.
