2015's
Tetsuo & Youth marked the beginning of a defiant second wind for
Lupe Fiasco. Having shaken off his pop-tuned restraints, the Chicago wordsmith embraced his role as both poet and scholar, weaving complex allegory and wordplay into a work that could stand toe-to-toe with his early-2000s classics. And when 2018's
Drogas WAVE arrived with a two-pronged, monastic assault on the legacies of slavery, it became clear that
Lupe's best work may still be ahead -- a point that this year's
Drill Music in Zion continues to hammer home.
At a much more succinct 40 minutes,
Drill Music in Zion lacks the scope of its predecessors -- yet refuses to budge on their depth. Dualities emerge as early as its title: a juxtaposition of "drill music" and "Zion" begins a lengthy discussion of rap's consequences (with the project's
DMIZ/"demise" quasi-acronym hinting at the cost), while an allusion to The Matrix's "drilling into Zion" sequence forms an extended metaphor for resisting external principles. Narrator
Ayesha Jaco returns on "The Lion's Deen" to draw these threads out, lamenting how "lions in Zion became alley cats" in a passionate address "to unite the seeds of the oppressed."
Across the project's nine remaining tracks,
Lupe builds these strands into full-blown discourse: "Ghoti" meditates on technological interference, "Seattle" highlights the path to "escape from a city that's defined by crime rate, " and "On Faux Nem" offers a deeply poignant reflection on rap violence. His conceptual pen works as brilliantly as ever on "Precious Things" and "Kiosk" -- the former writes from the perspective of the narrator's hands, lamenting their use as tools of violence, while the latter sees Lupe alternate between a sleazy jewelry merchant and spurning narrator in a visceral critique of rap's materialistic vices. At the pinnacle of this all is the third volume of his "Mural" trilogy, "Ms Mural," which dramatizes a conversation between an artist and patron in a stunning reflection of the artist/audience relationship. Like most of Fiasco's best, it probes but never preaches: "Professionally accept what ethically I hate/So in all of my work, you see this wrestling with fate/Deceiving in the brushstrokes how aggressively I strafe."
On closer "On Faux Nem," Lupe delivers his first one-line verse -- "Rappers die too muchâ?¦ that's it, that's the verse" -- before leaving listeners with a minute to meditate. It is an uncharacteristic simplicity, but one that resonates profoundly; on DMIZ the writes his incisive pen into smaller frameworks, yielding stunning consequences. ~ David Crone
