Myth of the Long Chains: The latest album by rapper Lupe Fiasco brings together his music and his intention to tell a story of the past and present. Photo: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
In some senses, it is easy to imagine Lupe Fiasco as a distant island in rap’s archipelago. Some believe his record label woes have dented not only his numbers but a bit of his creativity as well. Since releasing Tetsuo & Youth, his last artistic obligation to Atlantic Records, the man seemingly disappeared from the public.
When he emerged, it was with what many believe to be a vastly diminished audience. But the gifts of a “cult” audience are many. One is that the artist can pretty much do what they want, especially when coupled with newfound independence.
Drogas Light, his 2017 album, falls under this category. It is essentially a record parodying the trap music-driven mumble rap era we suffer under. Lupe appropriates the slang and other affectations, such as the triplet flows, and at times subverts the content in a manner consistent with his values. There are sections where the album maintains an almost mesmeric run of focused satire and then peters out sonically, like an athlete running out of steam before the finish line.
What we know now is that the album was the prequel to Drogas Wave, another concept album approaching the condition of life from a completely different angle. Over the years, Lupe has made it hard to appreciate his music while shoving aside his intent. When the two work seamlessly, he crafts otherworldly music, freed from the limitations of this physical plane. When his earnestness gets in the way, the results can be a plodding mess of preachy invective wrapped in befuddling beats.
Manilla: Lupe Fisscao’s Drogas Wave album cover
His first album, Food & Liquor, bears some traces of this, with the scales tipping either way at subsequent stages of his career. Drogas Wave is perhaps a microcosm of Lupe’s career, in parts otherworldly and in others merely ordinary. But remember, Lupe’s ordinary is still far ahead of the average rapping Joe.
The overall framing narrative of Drogas Wave is what he calls the myth of the Long Chains. It is the story of an underwater community of slaves who escaped a sinking ship and now sabotage the path of other slave ships. That part is concentrated in the first third of the album. Over the course of 24 songs, one hopes Lupe will maintain a tight grip on this framework, but he widens it to other aspects of community building by analysing various aspects of black life.
A two-part album, Lupe says the myth of the Long Chains unfolds over nine songs, followed by a trilogy of drug-related tunes before tracks 14 to 22 turn to themes of personal ruin, redemption, resilience and the philosophies and methodologies one might use to achieve these goals. The last two tracks, he says, are credits. Depending on how one views things, the entire album can be seen as thematically interrelated, unfolding as a document of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its contemporary setting.
In a Reddit thread used to post updates about the album, Lupe described his new project as containing lyrics “not that difficult to understand. What may confuse some listeners is the overall setting in which I frame certain lyrics. I unapologetically consider myself an expressionist as opposed to a hyper realist. I don’t necessarily aim to achieve concrete settings.”
With Drogas Light approaching things from a street level, Drogas Wave is a decidedly literary affair. In an interview with journalist and multimedia entrepreneur Roland Martin, Lupe explains that he has been part of a writers’ guild consisting of emcees for some time and they meet to discuss English, Ebonics and the art of emceeing from a linguistic perspective. That work is evident in Drogas Wave, as is his belief that “the whole world is made off of stories”, be it tales handed down from our grandparents or what happens in advertising agency brainstorming sessions.
I am drawn to the myth of the Long Chains section, not only for its subject but also for the multiple interpretations it throws up. Over the course of these nine songs, Lupe broadens the focus on slavery to include African culpability in the trading of their own people, the ways the enslaved resisted, the current refugee crises in Europe and capitalism as a form of chattel slavery. Not merely interested in a narrow North American view of the slave trade, Lupe’s myth of the Long Chains forces us to focus on the horror of the entire journey of the slave route, but offers his story as a metaphor for resistance, referencing what Maroons and other native communities did across the Americas and the Caribbean.
The album opens with a performance of the untitled poem that accompanied JMW Turner’s painting Slave Ship: “Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;/ Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds/ Declare the typhoon’s coming/ The dead and dying — ne’er heed their chains/ Hope, hope, fallacious hope!/ Where is thy market now?”
It then extends a greeting to other parts of the “New World” before touching on the concept of manilla, a bracelet currency used for trade and then the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The song Manilla highlights issues such as the prison industrial complex and worshipping material goods. Gold vs the Right Thing to Do, in which Lupe starts rapping in Jamaican patois and later abandons it, is the song where the “ship gets pulled to the bottom/ by a group of men and women holdin’ ropes/ With large hooks on the ends specifically designed for catching boats/ Crew in disbelief as they choke/ the weight of the chains on the slaves/ pulling down to what they think are they graves/ afraid as they sink from the surface of the sea/ ‘til a soft voice in the water tells them “breathe”.
Following a violin interlude titled Slave Ship, perhaps where the ship sinks to the bottom, WAV Files and Down (featuring Nikki Jean) are where the slaves acclimatise to their new safe haven and prepare to do the Lord’s work of freeing others. “Tell your daughters the water’s a treasure,” he raps on WAV Files. “Summon the forest/ Talkin’ to trees, now how could you be in the chorus/ With something so horrid?/ You became the boards for the floors and the doors of the warships.”
The last verse, a roll call of slave ships, is evocative, especially when one considers the symbolism behind their names.
In Down, Lupe declares the fish his friends and the whales his homies, alluding to sense of community, and perhaps a cohesion beyond skin colour needed to hoist us out of the doldrums of modern existence.
Enjoying his freedom from the constraints of the major label-run music industry, Lupe seems more forthright than ever, with myth making allowing listeners the freedom to find the relevance of his tales to their own lives.