Rating: NN
At this point, no one really knows where hiphop is heading. Lupe Fiasco over in Chicago, where the innovations of the South, Midwest, New York and West Coast scenes meet, doesn’t seem to have a better handle than anyone else. Which is why it sounds like he tried to drop in a little bit of everything on The Cool, just to cover all the bases.
On paper at least, that might sound like a winning strategy. Lupe Fiasco is adept at a variety of rhyme flows to keep up with whatever kind of joint comes his way. The problem is that he hasn’t yet developed a signature sound that immediately identifies a track as his own, nor is he capable of writing the sort of provocative rhymes that stand out. No matter how dope your tracks are, if you’ve got nothing relevant to say and no exciting way of saying it, they’ll ultimately ring hollow.
