Lupe Fiasco Talks "T.R.O.Y." Sample and Features on New Album

Following the debut of his new single “Around My Way (Freedom Ain’t Free)” earlier today, Lupe held a conference call with Atlantic Records which was moderated by DJ Whoo Kid. The song samples Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s “T.R.O.Y.,” but Pete Rock did not take the sampling in a good way. The famed producer took it to Twitter to communicate his discontent with the song.

“No disrespect to lupe fiasco and i like him alot but TROY should be left alone. Feel so violated,the beat is next to my heart and was made… Outta anguish and pain. When it’s like that it should not be touched by no one!” he wrote. “It’s so hard for folks to make original music, I possess that, but these dudes are scared of that and this is supposed to be HIP HOP?

“Man I’m a lupe fan and everything but TROY was my homie man. I think about him and Hev every fucking day!!!! Smh,” he continued. “Who ever Re-created that didn’t do a good job @ all. #nohate.”

“This business can be so lame, sometimes I make beats blindfolded with one hand tied behind my back and still these cats can’t be original to,” he wrote. “So untalented and unoriginal. Makes me feel like I’m truly the best that ever did it. Yo hev and t-Roy I love and miss da shit outta y’all.”

Accordingly, Lupe discussed the controversial sample but also delved into Food & Liquor 2: The Great American Rap Album Part I and Part II. The first installment will not host any rap features but only guests providing hooks. The tentative release date for the first is September 26 with the second part to be released a little bit later. Read excerpts below.

On the Pete Rock sample in “Freedom Ain’t Free”:
“All the credit goes to my partner and manager Chill, he just felt like it was time to bring back a joint… Go back and take one of the iconic records of Hip Hop and put a new spin on it and put it back out there. I spit on it a couple times before, some mixtape stuff back in the day, Chill felt it needed a bigger look than that.”

Jay-Z and other features on the new album:
“It’s Food & Liquor 2: The Great American Rap Album Part I. Part I, which “Freedom Ain’t Free” is the single off of, is coming in the next few months. It really ain’t got no features on there. It got a few people on the hooks and stuff like that, but no other real features other than myself. But that’s part one. It’s a double album. We’re probably 80% finished with part 2, which is going to come out a little later. It’s not finalized. You don’t know who’s going to be on it… Part 1 is done and there ain’t gonna be any features on there, but part 2, it maybe somebody coming at the last inning to drop a verse. We’ll see.”

The New Album As An Interpretation of America:
“The album is meant to be my interpretation of America. Politics, society, religion, class, race, food, all across the board. It was only right that we had to have a song that was a collage of that so people got it from the door that all these different things, topics that make up America, that make us Americans, the things that influence us and the things that we influence. You needed that first record to be the embodiment of that whole piece, the whole direction that we’re going in. This record is a collage, but it’s a more like an introduction. As you get into the album, as we release new records, and hopefully we’ll release the album in a few months, you’ll see that we focus on particular issues on particular songs. We will expand on something that may have came up in the second verse of “Freedom Ain’t Free”. There will be a whole song that speaks about this particular relationship in American society, or this particular phenomenon in American society, so people can get a good direction of where the album is going. You get it all in the first joint. But it’s not necessarily angry. The whole record’s not angry. It’s not coming from an angry place, it’s coming from a serious place.”

Making People Change Through His Music:
“Over the past couple years, in the midst of being on tours and doing L.A.S.E.R.S. and doing all that kind of rapper, professional stuff, I’m a human being too. You study, read, hear different people speak, come under the tutelage of certain people, and expand your mind. That’s nothing to do with music, or trying to make money later on, just for me personally. You start to come up and start to realize certain things, which are just gonna be what they are. It’s just human nature. We’re pre-conditioned a certain way, conditioned to act a certain way, conditioned to consume, and walk, and talk a certain way. There’s a lot of things that we may personally hate, but we professionally support. We may hate that the environment is being destroyed. We may want our kids to have a certain environment, but we don’t buy Prius’. We’ll go buy the muscle car that will spit out all the oil, and damage and destroy the environment and what have you. We don’t necessarily see the connection of what we actually do and how it effects the rest of the world. For me, I’m not even on that anymore. I’m not even trying to get you to change anymore… There’s people who don’t want to get beat over the head all day with lyrics and crazy wordplay and metaphors. There’s people that just want to sit down and listen to music for what it is, and not feel like they’re taking SAT’s every time they come to a show.”

Connection to B.o.B., Pharrell, Kanye West, and fascination with space:
“It’s just a mode. There’s a certain things, you look at them in the sky.. It all depends on where you come from. The album cover for my first album, Food & Liquor, where I’m floating and got all the stuff around me, It ain’t that deep. That album cover came straight from a comic book. I was looking at a comic book that I had as a little kid and was like, ‘I want my first album cover to be like that, so there you have it.’ It’s not that deep. There’s definitely some things though in the music that’s less about me trying to tell you something brand new, but moreso trying to reinforce something that we already know. We already know we’re being watched or controlled in some way or another.”