Did Lupe Fiasco's way with words come naturally?

so i'm like i saw them so this is um this is not like oh man 20 years ago so some of it may be cloudy but that's kind of the general like ideas like i wanted to be in this very technical path um and you know had to you know my dad my dad was build things was an engineer all the stuff so i felt like i had the chops and it was in the family but also in the family was music also in the family was martial arts also was in the family was this this this opening businesses being an entrepreneur stuff like that um so i kind of like fell into what made sense to me and what i what i found myself doing every day you know i found myself coming home writing raps like every day thinking

about rap thinking about words thinking about this think about that thinking about telling stories and so it just opportunity came where it was like do you want to do this for a living and it was like yes and so the rest is history you know well do you you know you said about words and because you your rap is concept rap you're a conscious rapper you know you're not just and you were you were very um i mean you were very clear on that as well from what i understand that you know you didn't want to just take your music down a particular road of just you know what everybody else was doing whether it's just

you know gangs and violence and and you know the usual sex drugs rock and roll kind of stuff you wanted a message do you find that words they just come to you do they just come to you naturally i mean is this something how is this intuition how that's going on what what's going on here give us the insights the secrets first first i mean i went down that path of sex sex drugs and rock and roll you know like as you're as you're in the space and you're trying to figure out market you know where you fit and you're just like maybe i'll do this maybe i'll do a little bit of that and then again being from the hood like

really from the hood i mean that's part of it so like all my friends were like well i don't say all so different levels of friends but i had a set of friends that were in gangs you know that were the dudes in the street you know and it was something like okay let's let's that conversation is happening but then i also got friends that are like building their own computers and friends that are doing this and friends doing that so my social space has always been very vast and speaking to different crowds so one day i'm with the gangsters the next day i'm with the nerds you know and then the next day i'm with the the the mullahs and the imam right and then the next the next day i'm with you know

the strippers and the prostitutes the next day to dispel that myth that has just been this pure path of me being a saint and i want to make contact music and it's like i think just on a side note that's actually one of the most incredible things about udp is that you come across very real you know even on this when it comes to this when it comes to faith when it

comes to your art when it comes you're just being real just you know as you know you're not it's not sanctimonious it's not kind of trying pretentious it's not like you're owning the reality as it is because even uh you'd named um was it your label or your uh you named it food and liquor was it the my first album album right you and that was to represent realities in the real world whether it's going to be you know where you're from the streets but but not trying to be uh just sanctimonious or self-righteous just being real and i have to say that does come across very hard hitting

um speak speaking of words i don't know what sanctimonious means that dovetails very nicely into the into the question right was the words and i had to i literally had to work for the words you know so like there's always this uh this anecdote of like a ronaldo and uh i think messi and people say that messi is natural like he's just a natural football player right where ronaldo had to work right to get and if you look at him on the pitch you know they're they're equal right they both are

ridiculous but one had to really really work one was it just kind of came naturally to them so for me when it came to words you know i had to work so i would go um we had a pharmacy up the street from our house um and what we would do is after school i would go to the walgreens i would go to um walgreens and uh go to the magazine section and then what i would do is i would look at a magazine and i would take words off of the magazine cover no not the top shelf i take it is that the the naughty stuff at the top

right there [Laughter] it was it was whatever it was right um at walgreens they didn't have they didn't really have naughty naughty stuff like that um but it was uh whatever it was popular mechanics whatever magazine right race car magazine whatever the magazine and i would just take words the literal words that were on the cover and then kind of write them down and then i would like make myself put those in a wrap so i would take those words go home and i'll put those words in a

wrap and if you look at my old rap notebooks like some of my very first they're all destroyed unfortunately but well i hope they're not maybe it'll pop up later but it's just lists of words so you would think that it would be like verses and like you know song ideas and stuff like that but it's literally just like a list of words and then i would go and like okay i'm going to use this word i'm going to use transmission you know or i'm going to use um mephistopheles or i'm gonna use whatever right something like that and then that that graduated into you know building a vocabulary then that graduated into okay now whole sentences or metaphors so now this word builds

into this sentence or builds into this this metaphor and now i got a list of metaphors right and then it's okay i'm gonna use this this metaphor for this so i'm gonna use this simile for that or this simile for that so it was a process that actually had to kind of like work and work and work and work and then it became like just natural you know where i could just sit and then you know things would happen in my mind like okay that's clever i'm gonna keep that okay that's clever i'm gonna keep that oh that's and then it and then it kind of graduated from uh just metaphors and and stuff like that like punch lines into like images you know or like concepts of wow wouldn't it be interesting to take this