The song Lupe Fiasco denied was a Nicki Minaj diss: “That’s a distraction”
Lupe Fiasco has packed important messages into his songs since his debut album Food & Liquor in 2006. On the sequel, Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1, released in 2012, the Chicago rapper speaks on misogyny in hip-hop and the use of the word “bitch” on the song ‘Bitch Bad’.
In the second verse, he touches on how these things affect children. He raps, “Now imagine a group of little girls nine through 12/ On the Internet watching videos, listening to songs by themselves/ It doesn’t really matter if they have parental clearance/ They understand the internet better than their parents.”
The music video, directed by Gil Green, finds a rapper dancing with a pink-haired girl. Rolling Stone pointed out that the woman is styled like Nicki Minaj, but he denied that it was in any way a diss towards the Queens rapper. Instead, he claimed it was an accurate depiction of rap videos then.
“Nicki Minaj isn’t the only girl with pink hair,” he said. “Lady Gaga I think had pink hair at one point. To tell the story, that’s what a hip-hop video looks like. The general hip-hop video looks like that. That’s the images you see.
“Go on World Star [Hip-Hop], nine times out of 10, it’s going to look like that. It’s not taking shots at anybody, it’s not meant to be a diss record. I don’t want to get off into the distractions. That’s a distraction, to be like, ‘Oh man, are you dissing Nicki Minaj?’ That’s a distraction from the point of what the video’s about.”
He added, “That’s what happened with ‘Around My Way’. People got caught up with, ‘Man, Pete Rock don’t like it?’ as opposed to, ‘The suicide rate in Pine Ridge is really 50%?’ So I’d rather not indulge. If you feel that way, make sure you say you feel that way. Or Rolling Stone feels that way. Don’t say Lupe said that.”
On the topic of internet culture and young girls watching uncensored videos online, Fiasco was asked if messages were changing or getting worse as a result of different mediums. “I wasn’t making a statement about promoting certain images through their sites – I was just using that to set the scene,” he explained. “It wasn’t a comment on internet culture or anything like that. It wasn’t like, ‘World Star Hip-Hop is the worst thing ever because they show naked women!’
“Picasso painted naked women. Was he the worst thing ever? Which would be World Star’s response to somebody who would say that. There are naked women walking around Africa who were walking around like that for 10,000 years. To tell a story you have to have character, you have to have a setting. I wanted it to be as real and realistic as possible.”
He continued, “When you go on the Internet, there are clean versions, but you rarely see clean versions because that’s the point of the Internet. It’s free speech. Say whatever you want. It’s not governed by the FCC. Who am I to tell them what they can’t do and then get pissed when someone tells me what I can’t do?”