History has suggested that the older you get, the worse your music becomes. After so long in the industry, you eventually run out of good ideas, and your work progressively declines. Some artists have been able to buck the trend, especially across the 2020s. The Cure released one of their best, most haunting albums with their 2024 record Songs of a Lost World. Clipse proved that after two decades, you could still make a premier rap album.
Lupe Fiasco also circumvents the notion that you get worse as you get older. His ideas have only gotten weirder and more interesting. For instance, his Samurai LP imagines Amy Winehouse as a battle rapper. Additionally, Lupe would argue that you’re supposed to get even better as you get older.
In a 2022 interview with The Ringer, the Chicago MC compared and contrasted basketball to the art of rapping. Where athletes will physically decline in sports, Lupe Fiasco argued that it’s all a mental battle. “It’s not like we need knees to rap, need ACLs to rap. The things that come under pressure and get damaged in the career of a basketball player—we don’t have those. Our muscle is our cognition,” he explained. “Neuroplasticity lasts throughout your entire life. Even if you get to be 90 years old, your brain is still creating new pathways—maybe not at the speed or at the intensity it did when you were a child.”
Lupe Fiasco Believes That You’re Not Supposed To Fall off With Age as a Rapper
Ultimately, Lupe believed that the audiences are the ones who eventually taper off, not the MCs. “Rappers just get better and better and better and better. Melle Mel is just as good—he’s probably better now, 40 years later, than he was when he first started. You said rappers fall off—no, rappers don’t fall off. They don’t get worse at rapping,” Lupe Fiasco stressed. “What happens is the audience changes, they lose interest. The dopamine, that wash of neurotransmitters that you got that first time you heard it, it tapers over time.”
Ultimately, the Food & Liquor rapper leads with the idea that artists may eventually lose their interest. But the craftsmanship will always remain because of how they developed it over the years.
“I do think there are some rappers and producers who aren’t interested in being relevant or novel in every field or style of the time,” Lupe Fiasco continued. “Even at the A&R level—you have record execs who retire because they were more interested and had more of a grasp on the technicalities and mechanics of the music business in the ’80s than in the ’90s. A&Rs in the ’90s might have quit in the 2000s because it was just a different type of music, a different feel, with different expectations. That don’t mean that they’re terrible A&Rs—that don’t mean that they lost their edge. I think it’s all contextual.”
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