# What was Lupe Fiasco's childhood like?

*Childhood: martial arts, chess, classical music and the clarinet*

- URL: https://muftiabulayth.org/r/oyiipehuiha/s/3/
- Date: 2021-04-26 · Kind: discussion · Transcript tier: machine · Recording: Lupe Fiasco | Stardom, Semiotics & Soul-searching | MindTrap#56 | Mufti Abu Layth al-Maliki MALM (6:52–14:35)
- Status: 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=412s
- Recording page: https://muftiabulayth.org/r/oyiipehuiha/

**Topics:** Guest conversations; Personal stories and reflections; Music

**Summary (not a quotation; machine-made, unchecked):** The guest describes growing up in Chicago in a family of martial arts, music and engineering, giving up chess over a hadith, and turning to rap when he could not learn the clarinet.

## Longer summary

Mufti Abu Layth asks about his disciplined upbringing. The guest describes his father, a military man, hospital engineer and musician who played bagpipes, African drums and other instruments and ran martial arts schools across Chicago, so that the family business was martial arts, which he did from the age of three, alongside Islam, music, technology and science, all in the hood. He says he did theatre as a sound technician, academic decathlon and chess club, and that he stepped away from chess partly because of the hadith likening it to bathing in pig's blood. Asked how this fits the stereotype of the hood, he says these are just activities, describes listening to classical music, jazz and Benny Goodman as a child, and tells the story, which he says may not all be true, that he became a rapper after the school band told him it was too late to learn the clarinet.

## Sources and names cited

- Lupe Fiasco (guest)
- report: whoever plays nardashir is like one who dips his hand in the flesh and blood of a pig (cited on air as about chess) [?]

## Transcript (machine tier, 6:52–14:35)

[6:52] oh man no and um speaking of your your childhood your father i mean he was a man of great discipline i take you much into the martial arts and it kind of set you on that path i heard you had like uh you're on your third black belt by the age of 10 or something [Laughter] um yeah if i had to pick um a family business the family business would not have been music but in in a way it may have been music so my dad we're probably gonna reference my dad a lot um my dad he was he was he was you know in the military

[7:31] um he was a musician he was an engineer like his main job was an engineer so he worked at a hospital um as an engineer building and fixing i guess some running machines and stuff like that and he was also into music and into like uh musical instruments so here's my dad so black dude you know grew up in the projects in chicago right he played no lie the bagpipes [Laughter] wow we had he played the african jimbei drums so like

[8:11] i don't know if he played this but they were in the house and there were multiple of them he played he had the sitar no there were multiple multiples actually my actually my brother's name is yusted and he named him after usted alden khan so i think the sitar player the musician yeah and he also played uh like just there was a clarinet in the house there was some xylophones in the house like he was a music music dude um a musician proper musician playing playing instruments um and then the martial arts so he had you know been trained in martial arts i think since he was like 14 and had martial art schools all over the

[8:51] city chicago all kinds of students and so if i had to pick like a family business our family business would have been martial arts wow and i did martial arts since i was like three years old since i was a baby baby probably probably before i was before i was even born in my mom's stomach was probably so i was born into a martial arts family uh born into like a muslim family born into like music born into like technology and science and like all these different myriad of things but all like in the ghetto of chicago you know all in like the hood so to speak you're willing to chase as well

[9:30] as as a as a child is that you know what i'm we're gonna we're gonna have a lot of like hot takes about my relationship to islam and hadiths things that are super strong but i was playing chess like i was i in high school i did uh um i was into theater but as a technician so i was like the sound engineer and like stuff like that yeah um sorry i probably didn't show it with our sound issue but i was in town um theater program so i did i did theater

[10:10] uh and we did theater competitively so we would take plays and compete with other players i was on academic decathlon so i did like basically like jeopardy okay like at a high school level i guess wow um and i did chess club so i was in the chess club but i wasn't really that good in chess i wasn't like chess as well chess is life it wasn't like that was like here's another nerdy thing to do and i actually kind of stopped playing chess kinda kinda because of that the hadith that of like uh playing chess is like bathing in pigs blood or something like that and i was like

[10:47] what i like [Music] what that's hot take number one yeah and i kind of stepped away from from chess for that reason but i was never really that deep deep deep and i have a friend actually who uh who plays chess a lot now and wants me to get back into it he's like look you should just get into chess star plans in your mind like you'll be a master in 20 years and i don't think so i mean so all of this whilst in the in the hood like you're saying i mean these th these parts don't seem to be something you'd assume to kind of to really cross you know you've got you've got this

[11:27] because you're describing you know this this discipline of martial arts uh the mindset that comes with that um the kind of philosophy that comes with that things like learning this keen interest in even whether you know you don't have to be an expert chess player but still a passion uh it doesn't seem to you know it's not very stereotypical of of the hood i mean so and so what's uh talk to us all this wisdom all this uh they're just i mean they're just like

[12:02] activities they have i think maybe uh maybe unduly um that all this weight gets attached to like you know classical music you know so i used to listen to classical music yeah yeah i actually actually just actually just recently went and repurchased because it was on vinyl yeah all right repurchase i'm actually looking at it right now there's this vinyl set that came out that i remember having as a kid that i probably pulled either from my dad's record collection or my mom's and i would sit and just play classical music and listen to it as well and you prefer beethoven and and and

[12:41] this kind of classic music to the contemporary kind of music yeah and this so this is like when i was a kid it's like the late 80s maybe maybe early 90s but 80s so it wasn't like it wasn't like hip hop was everywhere type thing right right okay you know there's it's just music and my mom listened to jazz and like soul music my dad listened to everything so he would listen to like rock and roll and queen and like you know and then like in the midst of that you get you know either from watching cartoons and a lot of cartoons the soundtracks were jazz and classical music you know so as a child you're probably

[13:19] already keen to this type of music because it's in all the cartoons or like times but i always want to do i always wanted to do jazz so as i look like i'm looking off in the distance of my living room um there's this you know this tchaikovsky record set that uh that i just purchased that i used to listen to when i was a kid and then a bit of benny goodman record where he's the benny goodman was this clarinet player and i wanted to play like benny goodman i wanted to be like a clarinet player and the reason side story the reason that i started kind of rapping right so the myth goes is uh

[13:58] i went to my uh in high school i went to my to the band in high school i was like hey i want to play the clarinet can y'all teach me how to play the clarinet because that's how i thought it went i thought you went to school to learn stuff and i was like i'm gonna go to the band and they're gonna teach me how to play the clarinet and i was like oh no brother we can't teach you how to play clarinet you have to do that back in junior high so i said go to music school and kind of like dreams dashed and i already had a clarinet i had my dad's clarinet and uh dreams dash and i was like oh well maybe maybe i'll be a rapper you know

## Cite

Mufti Abu Layth Archive, segment oYiiPEhuiHA/s/3. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/oyiipehuiha/s/3/

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