# What inspired the story of Lupe Fiasco's album The Cool?

*A heretic poet's tour of paradise, and the guest's album The Cool*

- URL: https://muftiabulayth.org/r/oyiipehuiha/s/15/
- Date: 2021-04-26 · Kind: discussion · Transcript tier: machine · Recording: Lupe Fiasco | Stardom, Semiotics & Soul-searching | MindTrap#56 | Mufti Abu Layth al-Maliki MALM (1:15:55–1:23:42)
- Status: latest answer on its topic; a view quoted in order to be discussed, not a position held
- Watch from the start of the segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYiiPEhuiHA&t=4555s
- Recording page: https://muftiabulayth.org/r/oyiipehuiha/

**Topics:** Arabic poetry and men of letters; Narrative and story; The afterlife

**Summary (not a quotation; machine-made, unchecked):** Mufti Abu Layth describes a classical tale of a poet's journey through paradise; the guest explains the resurrection story behind his album The Cool and the slave-ship myth of Drogas Wave.

## Longer summary

Mufti Abu Layth recounts a classical poet [?] accused of heresy who wrote a work [?] in which a protagonist [?] sneaks into paradise and meets people he did not expect, including pre-Islamic poets such as al-A'sha [?], who say God favoured them for poems expressing humanity; he says it went on to inspire Dante's Divine Comedy. He links it to the guest's character in The Cool, who reaches heaven and is sent back. The guest says the story began on his first album, inspired by Michael Jackson's Thriller and the zombie genre, with a hustler, the Streets personified as a woman, and the Game as a demonic figure; the hustler dies and digs himself out of his grave, echoing the Day of Resurrection, only to find the world has passed him by. He adds that libations poured out by his friends brought him back, and that his record Drogas Wave imagines enslaved Africans thrown from slave ships surviving underwater to sink slave ships.

## Sources and names cited

- Lupe Fiasco (guest)
- Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri [?] (described, not named on air)
- Risalat al-Ghufran [?]
- al-A'sha [?]
- Dante Alighieri
- Michael Jackson

## Transcript (machine tier, 1:15:55–1:23:42)

[1:15:55] and he has this text called resalatul and in this basically people in his day and age some scholars who were calling him a heretic and they were calling him a cafe and farseer and there's one particular scholar called ibn aparia he writes this story of ibn kare who's this who's the actual protagonist and he's at the gates of heaven and he manages to sneak in and he goes into heaven and and this story goes on to inspire dante's uh inferno later on i mean his divine comedy later on but uh in heaven he meets all these different people and he meets people he didn't expect we're going to be in heaven and he meets the jahilia poets that you were saying

[1:16:34] he means asha he meets saheed he meets and he meets prophets and he meets other and he asks them questions and and he asked some of these poets how how on earth did you get here he asks them that what the hell why did god let you hear for god's sake and it's and it's fascinating because he expresses the reply that the poets would say well it's not because of necessarily religion because they may have predated islam but it was just maybe a poem they said so some of them they said you know some poems that they said

[1:17:12] in it they expressed humanity and they expressed these kind of things and and how god favored them based on that but that uh i mean that's a whole kind of a tale that he has a saga that i mean you've uh one tying into what you're saying about poets but there's something also in some of your albums uh a kind of story of my cool the cool a character who who has these different this he goes through the vicissitudes of of this you know the turbulent turbulence of this world and even gets to heaven and he's kind of sent back rejected

[1:17:51] [Laughter] what's the inspiration but behind this this character and this story it's an it's an entire uh like a greek tragedy in and of itself i mean the whole the uh the cool it's my it's my uh second album um but the story actually started on my first album um and i actually think it started off of that well i just started to develop these characters and and actually inspired by michael jackson the thriller right wow and i had this notion that you know what is what one genre uh in the human

[1:18:29] you know narrative space is uh consistent and it was like zombies right so i was like oh i need to have a zombie i need to have a zombie theme for real and i was like oh man night of living dead walking you know thriller walking i was like okay all right cool i need a zombie um and of course my spin on it in my take um and it's basically this this hustler um who who you know goes into the streets uh and literally the streets becomes a character so she's personified um as being the you know the the war path you know it's not the street or the when it was the streets the back alleys

[1:19:09] the you know personification of the the the dark sides uh and the temptations right of the world and she's so on her on her body she has tattoos of like you know alexander the great and genghis khan so she's responsible for kind of motivating them to to certain actions and activities um and and uh uh scarface and you know alcohol and all that stuff so she sees the streets and then you have the game which is like this super almost uh just demonic figure all the ills and all the bad you know that of this of this world um and so it's these three

[1:19:49] characters and kind of playing off each other so he meets the streets you know gets into this life um and then eventually gets you know you know gets into the game and gets kind of led astray then he dies right but then he he comes back to life right and you know digs himself out of his grave and it's all it's all kind of like pointing to like the day of resurrection you know like resurrection day so it has these these these tones of like massive macro narratives that we all kind of embrace um or or aware of or privy to whether we're practicing religions or not right this idea of the

[1:20:28] word come to end and people it's kind of these archetypal myths that are in our subconscious yeah so he he kind of comes back to life um and it's really kind of it's really kind of anti-climactic you know um i'm working on a i'm working on a a follow-up to it so i don't want to give it i don't know but he uh i mean and you have to kind of go to my first album to get his resurrection and his life is on my second album so i'm gonna go backwards yeah and when he comes out of his grave um he doesn't know what to do he's just kind of like standing in the graveyard

[1:21:06] and it's like there's nothing really for him to do you know so he kind of goes back to his old neighborhood you know it's very kind of like you know the expectation that he's not going to be dancing in the street with zombies and doing you know zombie dance moves you know he just kind of comes back to the world and it's just past them by you know nobody really cares he doesn't he doesn't raise too much apart from his physical state um and so yeah i've always played with you know themes of like life and death um you know in my music if not so memento mori

[1:21:45] um but just coming to terms with death there's another record that i did called drogoz wave um which is somewhat related to the cool uh in the sense that the cool uh when he was resurrected uh again going back to these things the libations or even bringing it back to that uh burning the mansions into the next world um this idea of pouring out a little liquor for my homies you know this one out for my homies you know yeah it was really reaching them you know that was the other piece so all his friends were pouring out alcohol to him or pouring out drinks to him or toasting him drinks or whatever to his memory and uh you know it would end up in his

[1:22:24] grave and it eventually flooded his grave and he kept he came back to life and that's what kind of brought him back to life these libations so anyway droga's wave is built on a similar premise um but it's about slaves so slaves were who were thrown off the slave ships or jumped off the slave ships um on their way to america um and they didn't die um they they were able to survive underwater you know they were revived underwater via drowning right they wouldn't come back to life and then they would um they would hunt slave ships you know like rewriting the past you know trying to terms or give a

[1:23:03] extend the life story of folks who died so tragically um and for no reason to give them a new role at least mythologically in today's era you know through hip-hop you know so you get these like these stories whether they're heroes or anti-heroes the cool is kind of like an anti-hero but these people are heroes um you know coming back to fight you know doing their part to sink slave ships wow you know yeah sorry i see your mind i see your eyes glazing over no no no i'm just nah that that's very very powerful no no no absolutely i'm uh that's

## Cite

Mufti Abu Layth Archive, segment oYiiPEhuiHA/s/15. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/oyiipehuiha/s/15/

Not a fatwa: these answers were given to specific people at specific times. Ask a qualified scholar about your own situation.