Tuesday, August 22, 2006

BEAST FROM THE EAST


I'm not sure if the world is ready for this.... Posted by Picasa

Back from Hong Kong, Beijing, and elsewhere in the Eastern Hemisphere...will return to Beijing and hit Babyface and Banana very soon......

Only hours upon entry into the States and I can already feel the hype for Lupe Fiasco's Food and Liquor escalating. Considering my previous post on "Mr. Righteous Kung Fu", I had credible reservations concerning his ability to attain mass appeal. [based upon my viewing of his lackluster performance] However, after watching his new video for "I Gotcha", I am still uncertain of how Lupe Fiasco will be perceived by the very fickle[downloading]buying public. The "I Gotcha" video is a very bold statement with respect to its assortment of pastel colors, action figures,StreetWear, and tripped out backgrounds. Contrarily, this video is already on MTV2, Lupe's backed by the internet,[respectively sneakerheads, cybergeeks...] heavyweights in the industry,[El Presidente, Skateboard P] and serious corporate backing[Reebok, and Atlantic Records' mean legal team] Hell, for some stupid reason Atlantic asked my man Eskay to pull an unreleased Lupe video off of his website. [Daydreamin ft. Jill Scott] I doubt I will be asked to remove it. It seems as if Atlantic doesn't understand the paradigm of Shameless Promotion like some of us do. However, with the advent of Food and Liquor on the horizon, the questions concerning Fiasco's official entrance into "the game" still linger. Will this freshman release do 50 Cent-like numbers and force hip hop to drop the glock and pick up the skateboard? Will Lupe really make it cool for [little] kids to be intelligent, nerdy, and ok to be into esoteric things like toy robots and Japanese Anime?
Things change. Two and a half years ago, I didn't have the foresight to suggest that Kanye West would influence youth to wear Louis Vuitton bookbags and Polo shirts with their collars out. I guess only time will tell.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As much as I want this dude to succeed, I don't see Lupe doing big numbers out the gate. People are expecting him to do 200k the first week and not even Busta can pull that.

I think he's gonna go the Gnarls Barkley route. Just push 40-50,000 albums a week for a few months until you hit platnum.