![]() ![]() As “Baba Says Cool for Thought” goes on, I wonder if the white women cheering next to me realize the role they’re playing in the lyrics right now. It’s likely that the person standing beside you doesn’t feel the album the same way you feel it. Cause the problem is, we think it’s cool too.”Īlbums like The Cool are somewhat difficult to enjoy in a predominantly white crowd. “They thought it was cool to tear down the projects and put up million dollar condos, gentrification… They think it’s cool to stand on the block hiding product in their socks to make quick dime bag dollars… They think it’s cool to ride down on you in blue and white unmarked cars busting you upside your head. This track - featuring spoken word by sister Ayesha Jaco who runs the local nonprofit West Side United - hit in a new way, given that Riot Fest is now located in the middle of an under-resourced North Lawndale neighborhood where the early signs of displacement and gentrification are already present. The dramatic weather of lightning and rain made for a perfect opening of The Cool, as the intro track “Baba Says Cool for Thought” began to play. Everything about his set took me back my freshman year in college. ![]() Last month, Lupe performed The Cool in its entirety on the Radical Stage at Riot Fest in Chicago on Sept. His debut, Food & Liquor, which unbelievably just went gold this September, showed us that we could carve out spaces for our niches too. 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. Lupe wasn’t the flashy rapper with the dope boy swagger and chains and video vixens. ![]() 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. But when “Kick, Push” boomed out of my homeboy’s speakers for the first time in 2006, it sparked something new in us. 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. 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. ![]() However, their success felt distant to us. It felt good to see the West Side on the hip-hop map, which felt super dominated by the coasts at the time. 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. My generation grew up idolizing the dizzying tongue of Twista, the country twang of Crucial Conflict and the slick talk of Do or Die. The West Side hadn’t really had a rapper of our own to blow that big in hip-hop in a while. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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