Nazi Hip-Hop Vs. the Great Lupe Fiasco

I learned from John Ganz’s Substack that Ye’s (aka Kanye’s West's) latest desperate, sad, and [pick your own adjective] cry for attention features the hook “N*gga, Heil Hitler.” Ganz seems to think Ye did not intend this as ironic—or perhaps asking about irony vs. sincerity is no longer relevant for understanding Ye's provocations—so Ganz ponders whether to respond by “dismiss[ing] it with boredom or laughter,” pitying it as “mental illness…[in] a lost and tortured soul,” or being outraged with a likely effect of “feed[ing] the whole thing.”   

I have not listened to the song because I don’t want to give Ye/West the satisfaction and I suspect Ganz is right about the lack of irony. If he's wrong, whatever ironies we could tease out would surely be a degrading kind for lost souls. But I will say that in the past I've been fascinated by layers of irony in West’s music—for example when he rapped “I am a God!…bring me my damn croissants!” in a context that extended complex ideas in “No Church in the Wild.” (I have a section about that in this essay.) I also will say that parts of Ye’s prosperity gospel music that I discussed here struck me as sincere at least in a mentally-ill-stream-of-consciousness way, and I'm curious about how they relate to other (less crazy) black evangelicals who voted for Trump. This could lead back toward Ye’s breakthrough hit “Jesus Walks.” Younger generations barely remember this stage, but back in 2004 that song come with a solidly anti-racist video version (albeit one that competed with another apolitical version for different market demographics) and seemed equidistant from semi-black-theology and semi-prosperity-gospel. It was as if he had an angel and a devil whispering in his two ears, and no one yet knew yet that the devil was going to win.   

Without my long-running interest in Ye’s trajectory, I would be keeping silent about him now, alongside the many who don’t want to feed him any attention, period.  

From a Sick Joke to an Exemplary Antidote 

However, I’m writing today to shine attention, not on Ye, but rather on a nearly forgotten song by Lupe Fiasco that incisively diagnosed Ye as a proto-Nazi twelve years ago and brilliantly mocked it. A possible answer to Ganz’s quandary—be bored? laugh? pity? be outraged?—might be to help this song go viral.

Lupe Fiasco's knockout response to Kendrick Lamar (featuring Kanye West as Adolf Hitler)

If you are pressed for time, you can cut to minute 1:28. Before this, Lupe has already mocked other rappers, cutting them down in their own styles, one after another, using his signature virtuoso wordplay.** He turns his attention to Kanye at 1:28, with a caricatured Kanye voice segueing from grandiosity into German language gibberish as "Ye" morphs into “Adolf”—presumably Hitler, sputtering in rage about Lupe’s far better skills. Then Lupe moves back to his own voice, noting how “evil” his rhymes are (in a sense similar to using “bad” or “sick” as positives.) I say this only to help you follow the logic on a first listen. The goal is to get you hooked so you listen over and over to the creativity and incisive critique in this commentary. The more you know about Kanye and Lupe, the more you will hear. Remember, this was years before Kanye’s overt Trumpian turn. Already Lupe saw it clearly and took it down with authority—at the same time hilariously and with dead seriousness.  

Lupe the Contender for GOAT in Context  

Sadly, to explain the brilliance of this song’s overall intervention requires a deeper dive than I can manage today, and this also might make the song too complex to go viral. Briefly, Lupe released several superior records between 2006’s Food and Liquor (2006) and 2015’s Tetsuo and Youth. In my own estimation these put him in contention as a top five rapper of all time, although not measured in sales or fame. Everyone can agree that they at least made him a major link in a chain of so-called "conscious rap” stretching from Public Enemy and KRS-ONE in early years to Kendrick Lamar as standard-bearer today. Kendrick clearly rides partly on Lupe's shoulders, extending the conscious rap sub-genre in which they are two of the top four or five GOAT contenders.    

I am not the only Lupe Stan who thinks this way. However, this is contentious and greatly complicated by an intense conflict Lupe had with his label—one stage of which was fueled by Lupe videos that called out their product as “dumb” and/or regurgitating a form of neo-minstrelsy. This conflict contributed to a steep drop in his media reach, as well as some mediocre records that were dragged down by low budgets and filler he did not approve. In this context the mainstream industry has tried to cancel him as no longer relevant. 

This set a context in which Kendrick, whose fame was rising as Lupe’s fell, bragged about himself as the only rapper who mattered, while also referencing some friends/allies who in retrospect are obvious non-contenders for such status. This was partly a beef with then-current rivals for the mainstream spotlight, and partly about who should be considered the overall hip-hop GOAT. But it disrespected Lupe indirectly by ignoring him. Lupe’s response begins with him yawning, implying he is bored with the whole thing and can effortlessly battle six of the contenders at the same time. But it builds toward an intense takedown of Kendrick (and also, less significantly, Lil Wayne.) He addresses Kendrick directly with the line “you will respect me…[and] no matter how far you go, you will reflect me.” Kanye is largely just collateral damage within this bigger picture, disrespected almost as much by Lupe ignoring him as addressing him.  

Since Lupe was by this time starting to drop out of sight in the mainstream—and since Kendrick apparently thought it better to ignore this knockout punch than to get up and continue a fight—this episode received less than a millionth of the media attention compared to last year’s Kendrick vs. Drake beef. Even I, a Lupe Stan who was tuned in more than average, learned about this well after the fact. My son, one of the few from an upcoming generation who follows Lupe, did not remember it at all when I mentioned it to him this week.  

I am bringing this back today as a near-perfect takedown of Ye’s then proto but now overt fascism. Appropriately, listening to it takes less than a minute of our time—synthesizing boredom, laughter, pity, and outrage, all at the same time!—then redirects our attention toward more important things.  

**Footnote: Most of this is my own reading. I can hear the Kanye, Lil Wayne, and Kendrick satires loud and clear, as well as paint the broad context, without any help. However, I learned parts of this from the discussion on Genius.com that I read as I first listened with this site’s lyrics to help me. Afterward I checked several discussions of the track that one can find with an internet search. They have varying levels of insight and I only scratched the surface, but this and this are examples of relatively helpful ones. Some of Lupe's satires and wordplay go over my head even informed by such commentaries, and one can go down many rabbit holes.