The New York City rapper Lupe Fiasco considers his favourite
Unlike a lot of rappers, becoming a hip-hop star wasn’t the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition for Lupe Fiasco. To the contrary, he hadn’t even especially liked rap music as a kid. He apparently didn’t like the vulgarity and misogyny that was inherent to so much of it.
Lupe is said to have been a jazz kid growing up in Chicago, particularly enamoured by the clarinettist Benny Goodman. He wanted to become a jazz musician, but he was unfortunately not especially gifted as a player. He struggled to master an instrument, but what he could do was write rhymes.
It became clear that Lupe had a knack for poetry, and eventually this came to dominate his attention. With his obsession over lyrics growing, the appeal of rap music finally revealed itself to him and he became a true enthusiast and practitioner.
Nas’ second album, It Was Written, was an especially important album for the young Lupe, and it drove him forward in his rap development. He even took part of his rap name from Nas, as “Fiasco” was a reference to the song ‘Firm Fiasco’ that Nas’ supergroup The Firm released on The Album, their one and only album from 1997.
But for as much as he loved Nas, Lupe has claimed another rapper as his very favourite. Not Nas nor Jay-Z, although he’s previously proclaimed them as being among his favourite lyricists in the past. But he has since claimed his number one to be Ja Rule.
The caveat here is that Lupe proclaimed this fact during a conversation with Ja Rule himself. Perhaps the point should, then, be taken with a pinch of salt, but it seems clear, all the same, that he is a big fan of Ja.
“Listen, I grew up on Ja Rule, you feel me?” he said with Ja Rule beside him, as seen in a clip of the interaction posted online in 2023. “I don’t give a fuck what no motherfucka say.”
Listing off some of his favorite Ja albums, Lupe said, “Give me Venni, Vetti, Vecci, n***a. Give me motherfuckin’ Pain Is Love over anything, n***a. I don’t give a fuck. Give me 3:36 over anything.”
Lupe insisted that he often listened to Ja’s songs “on repeat,” which the New York rapper was obviously very pleased to hear. “You know what?” Ja told Lupe. “It’s so ill to hear that from a lyricist’s lyricist.”