| Plenty of good hip-hop records have come out of 2007, but arguably the year lacked one of those far-reaching, defining albums that will go down in the genre’s history. Given how much effort Lupe Fiasco put into publicizing The Cool before its release, maybe a lot of us were quietly hoping this would be it – the release that would leave a mark on hip-hop and give Lupe the recognition that his talent perhaps deserves. He claimed The Cool would be darker than his previous album, with deeper insights into those “uncool” social issues that so many rappers avoid.
Is he capable of creating such a rap upheaval? There is enough lyrical skill and unique worldly observations in his first effort Food & Liquor to suggest so, and this album has a lot to contribute to popular music as well. But before we get overexcited, Lupe Fiasco has hardly released an Illmatic yet in his short career, and Talib Kweli’s efforts to do the same with Ear Drum were often cringeworthy.
Well, this discussion is largely a waste of time. Unfortunately The Cool feels like a bundle of loose ideas, packaged with a pop gloss. Of course there are many strong moments. It is clever for instance how Lupe transforms the idea of searching for love into seeking refuge in "Intruder Alert", a song which targets cynical views on immigration. The use of strings and Sarah Green’s vocals provide an emotive edge, as seen on many of the tracks in Lupe’s previous album, but it is noticeably more sombre in tone. If anything though, "Intruder Alert" is a little overproduced to truly feel, often the case on The Cool. "Superstar", one of the album’s singles, is an interesting account of Lupe Fiasco’s own rise to fame with Matthew Santos singing a radio-friendly but nonetheless a captivating chorus. The slow dreamy beats are appropriate for the mood of the song and the general feel of the album, but regrettably, after repeated listens, it does begin to sound like a long drone which is no more special than Matthew Santos’s hairstyle.
Better tracks like "Dumb it Down" suffer from similar flaws. The imagery Lupe creates in order to mock more conventional hip-hop themes give us a real poetic display of his talent: “yeah, smell it on my unicorn we snort the white horse/ and toot my own horns”. But for such an anger-driven track, the repetitive synthesized loops, though indeed "darker", are a little stale. At this point, you could also accuse Lupe Fiasco of writing too many raps about his own music style, which seems odd given that he has not actually written that many songs yet in his three-year solo career. When the beats do pick up the pace, like on UNKLE-produced "Hello/Goodbye", at their worst they become so melodramatic and out of place with electric guitars blazing about everywhere that it breaks up any structure or unifying concept The Cool once had. The album is too long, too large in scope and too varied to succeed the way Lupe Fiasco is capable of.
Lupe’s speedy rapping on "Go Go Gadget Flow", his hooks on "Gold Watch", and his collaboration with Snoop Dog on "Hi-Definition" prove to be some of the finest moments on The Cool. However, these are some of the most pop-oriented songs in the collection, and you simply begin to have cravings for Food & Liquor. After all that, you wonder sometimes what The Cool actually did achieve. Reviewed
by: Rob McG
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