Lupe Fiasco’s new album introduces itself with a shocking display of force: “Dopamine Lit (Intro)” is two minutes and 49 seconds of foghorn bass, fiery bars, and a half-joking, half-drunken chorus that includes a Billboard flip-off, a Lord of the Rings reference, and some self-consciously nonsensical trap grunts, for good measure. The song especially feels like a pleasant surprise attack when held against the eternally put-upon rapper’s consistently inconsistent delivery over the last few years. DROGAS Light may not surpass his auspicious debut, 2006’s Food & Liquor, but it is easily the least scattered statement he’s made in about a decade.
Not coincidentally, it is also the first album he is releasing independently after concluding his long and unhappy relationship with Atlantic Records. So rather than turning in a collection of songs that are easily sorted into column A (safer, radio-playable, label-approved) and column B (self-indulgent and somewhat superior), Lupe goes hard at a coherent sound on every single track, most pointedly on the album’s stellar first half. But coherence is not the only or most important difference here. There’s also an unexpected sonic strategy that finds Lupe unleashing a relentless assault of huge 808s, bomb-tick snares, and constantly chopped’n’popping vocal samples; he’s simultaneously trying on sounds of the moment while retaining his contrarian viewpoint on modern trap trends.
Unchained from major-label groupthink, Lupe doesn’t go completely left with a set of stiflingly dense art-raps. Instead, many of these tracks seem purpose-built to compete with Rae Sremmurd and Migos for sheer bumpability, while lyrically running laps around them. The trap-heavy production is a major asset; 808s and psychedelic ambience provide Lupe with a vehicle for his worldview, which is critical of the genre’s gangster tropes. “You seen the movie/They killed the n***ga/Why you still wanna be like Scarface?” he raps on “NGL.”
This novel collision of style and substance is a welcome switch in approach for the rapper. Lupe never quite felt comfortable in the boom-bap lineage of backpacker rap that some fans and critics have wanted him to stick to ever since “Kick Push” cast him as an unlikely torchbearer of the Native Tongues ethos back in 2006. He soon found his own mold—a mix of West Coast and Midwest gangsta rap influences with an emo/goth-pop aesthetic that never quite worked for anybody except diehard fans. Unfortunately, a few DROGAS cuts, like “Made in the USA” and “Pick Up the Phone,” still fall into that underwhelming category. The filter house outing “It’s Not Design” and dance-rocky “Wild Child” also feel like throwbacks to the days of base-covering radio singles—concessions to a label boss he’s already fired.
DROGAS’ bold new sound, however, demands to be measured, less against Lupe’s own catalog than the current field of sources he’s drawing from and bouncing off of. The best songs on the album feel kindred in spirit to some of Kanye’s The Life of Pablo but are nowhere near as original, transgressive, or transportive. Run the Jewels have combined 808s with subversive strains of anger and paranoia to stronger effect, not to mention Kendrick. And even compared with artists like 2 Chainz and Migos, Lupe’s bars lack a certain snap. That’s because he is only here to flirt and subvert—he is not really in the moment, not really about that life. Plays on drug slang provide this album with much of its imagery—“Tranquillo,” in particular, serves as sort of a key to the record’s central conceit—but overall the listener gets the sense that is Lupe still too self-conscious to truly loosen up, get lifted, and achieve the altered state that is so key to Future’s screwed soul or Kanye’s gospel-inflected high.
Ultimately, DROGAS Light reaffirms, rather than fundamentally alters, Lupe’s place in the rap pantheon. He’s always been too lyrical and heady to count out as an innovator in the game, even if his moves sometimes make you want to do just that. But here, with a newfound urgency to his sound, he proves once again that he is still the brainy smurf of rap.
