Lupe Fiasco's A Storyteller, Not a Skater

Lupe Fiasco's only been on the hip-hop scene for a short time, but his Food & Liquor debut is expected to do big things. His first single, "Kick, Push," is already cultivating a hard-to-manufacture allure that make people want to know more about him. "It's not about me," Fiasco clarifies. "The song is about a skater.

"It's kind of an amalgamation of a lot of people that I know, and the skater stories that I heard. It's more than just a sport, like it's a lifestyle, it's deep, It's a culture. And so I'm like, 'Somebody needs to tell that story,' and so I told it."

Born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, Fiasco admits that his moniker is actually inspired by two unlikely people.

"I had a friend in high school named Lupe and, at that time, I was really in love with Spanish culture, so I was like, 'Yo, I'm going to be Lupe.' Then, Nas' album called The Firm, they had a song on there called 'Firm Fiasco' and I liked the way it looked on paper. So I was like, 'Yo, I'm going to be Lupe Fiasco.'"

While it might seem a little weird that Chicago-born Fiasco, a Muslim, would call his album Food & Liquor, he has an explanation for that, too.

"In Chicago, a lot of the corner stores are called food and liquors," says Fiasco, adding that because he doesn't drink or smoke, "alcohol always had a bad connotation. So the liquor represents the bad and the food represents the good."

Fiasco's road to success hasn't been an easy one. He missed out on a deal with Roc-A-Fella Records a few years back. More recently, he was dumped from Arista. But now that he's affiliated with Atlantic, under his own 1st & 15th Productions label, he can look back at his struggles with appreciative eyes.

"It taught me the importance of things, like quality control, you know, and to not take the music business as serious, you know what I'm saying," Fiasco says. "It made me a businessman as opposed to just being a fancy free artist just jumping around and stuff, just doing whatever. I was like, let me approach this like a business because they're going to approach you like you're a business. That's all they see you as. So you know, it was good. It kept me safe."