Lupe Fiasco's 'LASERS' debuts at No. 1
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."