Food & Liquor II the Great American Rap Record

Food & Liquor II, in some ways, feels more like a Lasers pt. 2 or a Lupe’s Lost Tapes with much of this album actually written during the time of Lasers studio sessions (in fact, several of the records were meant for that album). While not as completely straightforward as Lasers, it retains much of the more directness in style, but truer to Lupe still plays with more abstract concepts. The cynicism of this record also is very strong as Lupe becomes even sharper in his critiques of social Ills and norms.

Despite spending his entire career addressing racism, misogyny, environmental issues, corrupt governments, war and violence in his music, this was the record that was overtly considered “a conscious rap” record. Numerous commercial successes and industry acknowledgements (by this point he’d been nominated thirteen times for Grammys having won for best alternative performance with

Jill Scott for DayDreaming) now saw Lupe arguably at or close to his peak in influence. And with that influence, he only doubled down in addressing what he felt were the issues of the day, and the contradictions they created.

Most heavy on his mind throughout this record is the increasing divide between the haves and have nots.

Lupe re-tells and reimagines

American history and continues to critique the state of current events as he sees them. He takes time for introspection on songs such as “Ital” and “Battle Scars”. He also indicts himself in the crimes of mass consumption as well (“BraveHeart”).

The song “Around my Way” is another example of Lupe’s uncompromising critique of the state of the world, and the oppressive history of the country he lives in. He opens the first verse recounting the genocide of the indigenous people in the Americas and then quickly moves to observations around negative body stereotypes for women, mass incarceration and hyper capitalism.

First off, say “Peace” to Pine Ridge

Shame at all the damage that the white man wine did Ghost Dance, Trail of Tears, five million beers a year

And all that other crime did

More peace to the teachers of blind kids

To rebels in small cells keeping their mind big

Say everything’s hostile Suicide bombers and prosperity gospels, emaciated models

With cocaine and blood pouring out their nostrils, they got to

Just to stay awake on the catwalk of life where everybody watch you

Straight hair, high heels and a handbag

Crucifixes, racism and a land grab

Katrina, FEMA trailers, human body sandbags

A peace sign and a pants sag

A money toss cause a nine stripper mad dash

A friend request following a hashtag

Now everybody want it like the last laugh

A Michael Jackson jacket or a Daft mask

Purple Jordans or the mixed girl in your math class

He saves the most scathing lines for the end, alluding to the Iraq War being more about securing American opulence than it was to establish freedom and democracy in Baghdad.

Stable is when the Ba’ath had Baghdad

But corporate jets really had to have that gas bad War and they hope they all fall from the ratatat

Cause that’s just more dinosaur for their Cadillacs

Continuing into the second verse, the condemnation of western sensibilities and habits continues.

And we marvel at the state of Ottoman

Then turn around and treat Ghana like a garbage can

America’s a big motherfuckin’ garbageman

If you ain’t know, you’re part and parcel of the problem

You say no you ain’t, and I say yes you is Soon as you find out what planned obsolescence is

You say no they didn’t, and I say yes they did

The definition of unnecessary-ness Manifested

Calling out the U.S. using an African country as a garbage dump, with the cause coming from mass consumption and pointing his finger squarely at the listener are further examples of Lupe’s rising cynicism. He also rebukes the methods and strategies employed to fight it.

Say that we should protest just to get arrested

That goes against all my hustling ethics

A bunch of jail niggas say it’s highly ineffective

Depart from Martin, connect on Malcolm X tip

Insert Baldwin to similar the separate

To me, the truth is more fulfilling than a meth hit

Consistently Lupe has namechecked Malcolm X and other radical thinkers and activists such as Baldwin, in his music, and he again lays it plain what he believes is the wrong strategy. As he moves to the third verse, his contempt for capitalism is fully laid bare.

An all-white Los Angeles, the dream of Mr. Chandler Hope and pray they take Columbus Day up off the calendar

South Central an example of God’s gifts

So shout to all the mothers raising babies in SPA 6

The projects of Oakland city, Detroit ghost towns

Monopolies on poverty where D-boy coke bound

It’s parts of Manila like the video for “Thriller”

But the US Embassy is reminiscent of a villa

If poverty is chocolate and privilege vanilla

Then what’s the flavor of the Sunday preacher’s pedophilia?

Cash rules everything around these niggas

As classrooms everywhere around me wither

Hither you can be Mr. Burns or Mr. Smithers

The tyrant or the slave, but nowhere in the middle

Of the extremes of America’s dream Freud fighting Neo, Freddy Krueger refereeing, now…

Gentrification, redlining and the massive wealth gap are the roots of the evil that Lupe sees. It’s what drives anti-intellectualism, the destruction of the planet, and for Lupe, the very degradation of our souls. For him in “Around My Way" the cause and the effect is crystal clear.

Similarly, "Unforgivable Youth" continues his critique of America. The opening verse recounts the “founding” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. An idea that has become antiquated and even has entered our lexicon as a derogatory term to describe someone who steals a preexisting idea of creation (“Columbusing”).

With land on the horizon and passion in their eyes and

What they think are islands are much more in their size and Bountiful and plentiful and resource to provide them

Supplies slim, morale once so heavily inside them

Now steadily declining

Return is not an option as necessity denies them

With this they choose to dive in Now along the shore and so aware of their arriving

Are the children of this land prepared to share in their surviving

A pageantry of feathers stands his majesty with treasure

Not the material things of kings that could never last forever

But secrets of the spirit world and how to live in harmony together

Unbeknownst to him his head would be the first that they would sever And stuck up on a pike up along the beach

Kept up as a warning to the rest to turn away from their beliefs And so began it here, and for five hundred years

Torture, terror, fear ‘til they nearly disappear

Lupe succinctly tells the story of colonization of the Americas. The simplicity and subtlety in how he does it underscores the devastation of its reality. It’s a story that in modernity is well documented but doesn’t hit any less harder when you hear the last lines, “And so began it here and for five hundred years, Torture terror, fear til they nearly disappear”.

The second verse finds chattel slavery discussed in a similarly measured fashion,

Ways and means from the trade of human beings

A slave labor force provides wealth to the machine

And helps the new regime establish and expand

Using manifest destiny to siphon off the land

From native caretakers who can barely understand

How can land be owned by another man?

Lupe highlights the differences in beliefs and values between the oppressed and oppressor. Those indigenous to the land and who come from the land are in service and connected to it. Those who are not only see it as a means to an end to exploit for personal and material gain.

Warns, “One can not steal what was given as a gift;

Is the sky owned by birds and the rivers owned by fish?”

But the lesson went unheeded, for the sake of what’s not needed

You kill but do not eat it

The excessive and elitists don’t repair it when they leave it

The forests’s were cleared, the factories were built

And all mistakes will be repeated

By your future generations doomed to pay for your mistreatments

Foolishness and flaws, greed and needs and disagreement

And in your rush to have the most, from the day you left your boats

You’ll starve but never die in a world of hungry ghosts

True to Lupe, the twist of the song comes in the third verse, where he begins imagining a far off future, where our descendants uncover the artifacts from our time.

As archaeologists dig in the deserts of the east

A pit a hundred meters wide and a hundred meters deep

They discover ancient cars on even older streets

And a city well preserved and most likely at its peak

A culture so advanced, and by condition of the teeth

They can tell that they were civil, not barbaric in the least

A society at peace. With liberty and justice for all

Neatly carved in what seems to be a wall

They would doubt that there was any starvation at all

That they pretty much had the poverty problem all solved

From the sheer amount of paper, most likely used for trade

Everything’s so organized. They had to be well behaved

Assumed they had clean energy, little to no enemies

Very honest leaders with overwhelming sympathies

Religions kinda complex. Kinda hard to figure out

But this must be the temple

This White House

Lupe’s third act on this song sees the future have an incomplete and total misread of history. What they find has them conclude that in the twentieth century, poverty and starvation didn’t exist, and that society was highly advanced. The underlying idea in each verse of how history is misunderstood is laid out in this verse. The way in which Lupe ends this song is again representative of the skepticism that wrongs will never be righted. When the documentation of history is misread how can justice be done?