Lupe Fiasco has been outspoken in describing the recording of his latest album, "LASERS," as a long, difficult process that drove him to despair and even had him contemplating suicide. Yet it has become the Chicago hip-hop artist's first No. 1 album, debuting Wednesday at the top of the Billboard 200 after first-week sales of 204,294.

The disc, described by Fiasco himself as a compromise between the commercial impulses of his Atlantic label and his own high-minded aspirations as a politcally outspoken activist-artist, is his third studio release, following "Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor" (2006) and "The Cool" (2007).

Despite his misgivings about the project, Fiasco has been active in promoting it, granting a number of in-depth interviews in which he spoke with typical transparency about how the album was created. "I hate this record, the process of making this record, and I love this record," he told the Tribune recently. "What I had to go through was not fun, the ugliness I saw in people." He had to make compromises to craft more commercially accessible tracks, citing the recent single, "The Show Goes On," with its interpolation of a Modest Mouse melody, as a particularly egregious example.

But he also said about half the record is exactly as he envisioned: "There are tracks like 'Words I Never Said' and 'All Black Everything' where they let me do what I want, they didn’t interfere. There was no pressure to create, no expectation to please someone."

greg@gregkot.com 

2.5 stars (out of 4)

Lupe Fiasco’s struggles to make his third studio album, “L.A.S.E.R.S.” (1st & 15th/Atlantic), didn’t end with its release. Instead, he has turned the album into a document about its difficult birth, and it’s not always an easy listen.

Normally such self-referential, the-record-company-done-me-wrong albums are ill-advised nonsense, a sign that the artist has completely lost touch with his audience. But Fiasco, exceptional in his ability to dissect broad social and political issues with thoughtfulness and insight, has never been one to bite his tongue or succumb compliantly to pop cliches. He turns the corporate in-fighting over radio hits into a broader exploration of how those in power manipulate those who are not. But at times, the compromises necessary to get L.A.S.E.R.S.” out of record-company limbo sap the music, with Fiasco sounding like a guest on his own album.

On “The Show Goes On,” the first single from his forthcoming album, “L.A.S.E.R.S.” (1st & 15th/Atlantic), Lupe Fiasco does some venting at the expense of his own record company before turning the song into an anthem about perseverance.

Fiasco not only paraphrases the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten – “Have you ever had the feelin’ that you was bein’ had” – but calls out his employer for putting “chains on your soul.” 

It’s a bold, border-line crazy move by Fiasco, but the Chicago native, born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco in 1982, felt he had had enough. Making “L.A.S.E.R.S.,” he says, caused him to re-evaluate his career and pushed him into a depression so deep he nearly didn’t come out of it.

On his first two acclaimed albums, “Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor” (2006) and “The Cool” (2007), Fiasco established himself as one of the more distinctive new voices in rap, an inventive lyricist with a knack for channeling the self-empowering uplift and incisive anger of the most politically conscious ‘60s and ‘70s soul, funk and reggae and filtering it into 21st Century hip-hop. But even after selling more than 500,000 copies of “The Cool,” Fiasco says he found himself in a struggle with his label, Atlantic Records, to make “L.A.S.E.R.S.” as he envisioned.