Lupe Fiasco - Lupe Fiasco's Food and Liquor

For many thousands of years, scholars have argued within the annals of intellectual, learned places as to what constitutes good hip hop. Some believe the source of the best black street music continually references its origins - a "musical, cultural expression based on reality," in the words of Guru. Therefore tracks should be necessarily autobiographical, citing the hardship of the ghetto and the danger, and rewards, of selling crack on said dirty streets.

Others have found this to be extremely onerous, and as a consequence these people place the onus on hip hop's infinite potential as the perfect post-modern medium: resurrecting sounds from the past, be it early jazz, Mozart or wailing 80s guitars and reinterpreting it for a new generation which is impressed by nothing and seeks irony in everything. If you believe in the latter, then Kanye West is the principal exponent. Raised in affluent surroundings, West has no reason to source the gang culture of Compton, say, as a reference, and indeed to do so would sound insincere.

Maybe good hip hop lies in a compromise between the two. And if this is the case then Jay-Z, sitting in his mahogany-clad study smoking a huge cheroot, with a hyper Beyonce dancing around him as he puffs blue smoke into the languid air, is the man who fuses it together most suitably. Jay- Z once tried to sign Lupe Fiasco, and it would have made a fine marriage, but Lupe went to Warner Bros' Atlantic record instead.

And what of the result of this enterprise, this Autumn's 'Lupe Fiasco's Food and Liquor'? It launches with an 'impromptu' rap, "The days of Martin and Malcolm have ended, our hope has descended," with supposed sounds of the street in the mid distance. Whether this sounds synthetic or genuine is for the judgement of the listener, but its intention cannot be questioned - this is a record with its entomology in the harsh climate of Lupe's Illinois.

Or is it? The second and third tracks see the racing car guitar loop of Real run into Just Might Be Ok's foreboding strings with surprising ease. Smooth summery strings continue through two thirds of the album until we reach Daydreamin', which affirms the album's slippery poet-modern status. It is either very intelligent or very lazy to take a loop from I Monster's hit single, which itself borrows from the The Wallace Collection's original work. Is sampling a sample - essentially abstracting the abstract - wise?

Lupe counteracts the philosophical quandary with strong narrative thought in his rhymes - every track moves towards a single motive; every lyric has a point. This is in direct opposition to, say, Talib Kweli, who rhymes like he's flicking through an encyclopaedia, and who, vocally, Lupe resembles. And The Instrumental wittily has more rhymes than any other song, alluding to the notion that Lupe may well be aware of what he's doing.

Ultimately the main body of '...Food and Liquor' is a long, clever parentheses of innovative production, around which the brackets of the outro and the intro affirm the origins of the song maker. This album will do little to quell the debate between the two factions of hip hop thought, but, thankfully, it demonstrates a competent fusion of both points of view. [Mike Duffy]