Lupe Fiasco
Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, better known by his stage name Lupe Fiasco, is an American rapper, singer, record producer and music educator. Born and raised in Chicago, he gained mainstream recognition for his guest appearance on Kanye West's 2006 single "Touch the Sky", which peaked within the top 50 of the Billboard Hot 100. He also formed the rock band Japanese Cartoon in 2008, for which he serves as lead vocalist.
Fiasco developed an interest in hip hop in his teens, after initially disliking the genre for its use of vulgarity and misogyny. 19-year-old Fiasco adopted his current stage name, began recording songs in his father's basement, and joined a short-lived hip hop group called Da Pak. During his tenures at two major labels, Fiasco met American rapper Jay-Z, who led him to sign with Atlantic Records. The label released Fiasco's debut studio album, Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor, which peaked within the top ten of the Billboard 200 and was nominated for four Grammy Awards. Its first single, "Kick, Push", marked his first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 as a lead artist, while its third, "Daydreamin'", won Best Urban/Alternative Performance at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards.
His second album, Lupe Fiasco's The Cool, was met with continued acclaim and preceded by his first Billboard Hot 100-top 40 hit, "Superstar". After a two-year delay, his third album, Lasers, yielded his furthest commercial success—becoming his first to debut atop the Billboard 200—although critical reception was mixed. Its lead single, "The Show Goes On", peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains his highest-charting song. His fourth album, Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1, debuted within the top five of the Billboard 200, while his fifth, Tetsuo & Youth, saw a critical rebound, and served as his final release with Atlantic. He then founded the record label 1st & 15th Entertainment to independently release his subsequent albums: Drogas Light, Drogas Wave, Drill Music in Zion and Samurai.
In addition to music, Fiasco has pursued other business ventures, including fashion. He runs two clothing lines—Righteous Kung-Fu and Trilly & Truly—and has designed footwear for Reebok. He has been involved with charitable endeavors, including the Summit on the Summit expedition, and in 2010, he recorded a benefit single for victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In 2025, he joined Johns Hopkins University as a Distinguished Visiting Professor for the school's Bachelor of Music degree program. Fiasco is also noted for his anti-establishment views, which he has expressed in both interviews and his music.
Life and career
1982–1999: Early life
Fiasco was born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco on February 16, 1982, in Chicago, Illinois. Fiasco is one of nine children of Shirley, a chef, and Gregory, an engineer. His father, a member of the Black Panther Party, was a prolific African drummer, karate teacher, operating plant engineer, and owner of karate schools and army surplus stores. Fiasco was raised Muslim on the West Side of Chicago on Madison Terrace housing project. At the age of three, he began taking martial arts classes. His parents divorced when he was five, and he went on to live with his mother, but his father still remained an important part of his life. He described his father's influence over the family by saying, "After school, my father would come and get us and take us out into the world—one day, we're listening to N.W.A, the next day we're listening to Ravi Shankar, the next day, he's teaching us how to shoot an AK-47, the next day, we're at karate class, the next day, we're in Chinatown...".In sixth grade, he went to live with his father full-time in Harvey, Illinois. His father lived next door to a crack house and taught Fiasco to use guns to defend himself from drug dealers. Despite his unstable upbringing, Fiasco states that he was well-educated as a child, asserting that his parents exposed him to a diverse array of subjects and that reading was highly encouraged in his household. As a teenager, Fiasco participated in Academic Decathlon competitions. His mother described him by saying, "He was a great spirited child. Smart, a bit complex; he kind of was a loner; he didn't hang with a lot of people...He always had the glasses. Always had a book bag over his shoulder and some type of a writing tablet." Fiasco initially disliked hip hop music for its use of vulgarity, and preferred to listen to jazz; he idolized clarinet player Benny Goodman. His struggle to learn to play an instrument led him to create poetry instead, which led to his interest in the lyrical aspects of music.
He began rapping his poems in the eighth grade, and upon hearing Nas' 1996 album, It Was Written, he began to pursue hip hop. While attending Thornton Township High School, Fiasco met gang member Bishop G. The two became friends due to their shared interest in music. Fiasco's father allowed him and Bishop to make mixtapes in his basement, and the two gained notoriety at the school for their music. However, they were kicked off stage during their first performance because their eclectic musical style was not embraced by the hip hop community. Early in his career, he went by stage names Little Lu and Lu tha Underdog. Growing up, Fiasco was given the nickname "Lu", the last part of his first name, by his mother. "Lupe" is an extension of this nickname, which he borrowed from a friend from high school. "Fiasco" is a reference to The Firm song "Firm Fiasco"; the rapper "liked the way it looked on paper." He also said of his name, "You know how rappers always have names like MC Terrorist—like they're 'terrorizing' other rappers? I knew fiasco meant a great disaster or something like that, but I didn't realize that the person named Fiasco would be the disaster, and that you should be calling other MCs fiascos—not yourself...it kind of humbled me in a sense. It taught me like, 'Yo, stop rushing, or you're going to have some fiascos.'"
2000–2005: Career beginnings
When Fiasco was 18, he began creating music as a solo artist in his father's basement, even though his parents were not keen on having their son be a rapper. He scoured flea markets and secondhand stores, where he was able to find an old mixing board and a record player, stacks of vinyl records, and mic stands. At age 19, Fiasco joined a group called Da Pak, which was influenced by other California gangsta rappers such as Spice 1 and Ice Cube. Da Pak signed to Epic Records and released one single before splitting up. Fiasco later described the experience, saying "We had a song out about cocaine, guns, and women, and I would go to a record store and look at it and think, 'What are you doing?' I felt like a hypocrite. I was acting like this rapper who would never be judged, and I had to destroy that guy. Because what Lupe Fiasco says on this microphone is going to come back to Wasalu Jaco. When the music cuts off, you have to go home and live with what you say."After turning away from gangsta rap, he developed a greater appreciation of the lyricism of Jay Z and Nas. His mother also gave him a record of the influential group The Watts Prophets, one of the first bands to use spoken words with music. Although he was without a group for the first time, Fiasco continued to record music. One of these first self-recorded tracks was "Could Have Been", which described the career options he could have pursued had he not begun rapping. He viewed the song as a turning point in his career that marked a drastic change in the subject matter of his music. "Could Have Been" was released as a demo tape and discovered by MTV despite the fact that no video was created for the song.
Fiasco later signed a solo deal with Arista Records, but was dropped when president and CEO L.A. Reid was fired. During his short tenure at Arista, he met Jay-Z, who was the president of Def Jam Recordings at the time. Jay-Z referred to him as a "breath of fresh air", saying that he reminded him of a younger version of himself. Jay-Z later helped him get a record deal at Atlantic Records. While Fiasco was working on his debut solo album, he released his mixtape series Fahrenheit 1/15 over the internet, which gained notoriety by word-of-mouth.
He remixed Kanye West's song, "Diamonds from Sierra Leone", renaming the new version as "Conflict Diamonds". With this remix, Fiasco wished to raise awareness of the conflict diamond business. This caught West's attention, and he asked Fiasco to perform on the song "Touch the Sky" for West's album Late Registration. The song, which sampled Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up", became a hit in the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number forty-two. After this success, Fiasco's first single "Kick, Push" was released earlier than expected. The song was a love story about two people sharing a passion for skateboarding, a topic generally not discussed in hip-hop. Fiasco explained, " just as deep as hip-hop. I'm not the greatest skateboarder, but I'm a damn good rapper, so I made a damn good skateboarding song." The single, and its accompanying music video, helped Fiasco get attention in the hip-hop community, and was later nominated for two 2007 Grammy Awards. During this time, he recorded guest performances on Tha' Rayne's "Kiss Me" and "Didn't You Know" singles, and also on K Foxx's 2004 "This Life".
2006–2008: ''Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor'' and ''The Cool''
Jay Z assisted him in the production of what would become his debut album Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor. The title of the album is a reference to 'Food and Liquor' stores common in Chicago. He explains, "The store is where everything is at...Food to me represents growth and progression. You eat food and you get strength. You need it to live. Liquor is not a necessity; it is a want. It destroys you. It breaks you down. I can see why it's prohibited in Islam...I've always felt like liquor represents the bad, the food represents the good, and everyone is made up of a little of both." Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor was officially released on September 19, 2006. The album featured production from Jay-Z, Kanye West, Mike Shinoda, The Neptunes, Prolyfic, among others. The record spawned the singles "Kick, Push", "I Gotcha" and "Daydreamin'" featuring Jill Scott. The critically lauded album was later nominated for three Grammy Awards including Best Rap Album. Fiasco won "Best Urban/Alternative Performance" for "Daydreamin'". In the same year, he was voted by GQ magazine as the "Breakout Man of the Year." He also received four BET Hip Hop Award nominations, and it made it to number eight on the Billboard 200 and number two on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. That same year he participated in the first Cypher at the BET Hip-Hop Awards.In 2007, Fiasco announced his second album, Lupe Fiasco's The Cool, a concept album that expands on the story of the track of the same name on his first album. While recording this album, Fiasco's father died of type II diabetes and his business partner, Charles "Chilly" Patton, was convicted of attempting to supply heroin to a drug ring and was eventually sentenced to 44 years in a correctional facility. These events greatly affected Fiasco and the subsequent themes discussed on the record. The disc was released in December 2007 in United States while the first single and video from the album, "Superstar" featuring Matthew Santos was released the first week of November 2007. Lupe Fiasco's The Cool, a concept album that expanded upon recurring themes in Food & Liquor, is about "a hustler who dies and comes back to life, only to get robbed by two little kids with the same gun that killed him." Fiasco decided not to work with well-known producers for the album since he considered it to be "too expensive", noting the commercial failure of his Pharrell collaboration, "I Gotcha".
Lupe Fiasco's The Cool was very well received by critics and was referred to as "one of the year's best hip-hop albums" by The New York Times. "Superstar", a semi-autobiographical account of his rise to fame, was released as the first single from the album, and peaked at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. Baseball's Hanley Ramírez, Troy Tulowitzki, Ryan Zimmerman, Gerald Laird and Ryan Braun have used "Superstar" as their at-bat song. The album's second single was "Paris, Tokyo" – a song based around Fiasco's experiences of touring the world between his first and second albums. Moreover, in 2007 it was revealed that Fiasco, Kanye West and Pharrell Williams had formed a group called Child Rebel Soldier. CRS initially released one single, entitled "US Placers" and featuring a Thom Yorke sample. In an interview with The Village Voice, Fiasco revealed that he was writing a novel about a window washer, aptly titled Reflections of a Window Washer. In 2008, Fiasco and his band 1500 or Nothin joined Kanye West's Glow in the Dark Tour which also featured Rihanna and N.E.R.D. The tour stopped in several cities, including his hometown of Chicago. In 2008, MTV named Fiasco the 7th Hottest MC in the Game and announced that he was remixing The Cool with French electro house act Justice.