Is Lupe Fiasco the Isaiah/J.R. Rider of the rap game? (Answer: No! He's more like Ricky Williams!)
Just asking. Here, we find the following quote, a la Lupe: “I don’t want to say I’m 100 percent sure, like, ‘Yeah, this is it.’ But 85 percent. That 15 percent is the X factor. That could be bills. Like, ‘Lupe, you got to pay the bills.’”
Would Lupe Fiasco really retire? Really? The only people worse at retiring besides athletes are rappers.
Also, I just learned that Lupe Fiasco wouldn’t be the next J.R. Rider. First of all, he hasn’t changed his name three times. Also, he doesn’t have an encyclopedic rap sheet; it looks like J.R. Rider was arrested over 78 times, and is now penniless. I always thought J.R. Rider preceded Ricky Williams in quitting sports to smoke weed (except Williams never got a ring). It’s so much worse than that. Somebody needs to do the J.R. Rider story. Dude was a thug for life.
So Lupe is more like Ricky, who, while he doesn’t have a ring, was once a Pro Bowl MVP (an equatable level of Lupe’s success: discovered by, played with, and can hang with the best), is openly spiritual (Ricky does Yoga, has professed appreciation of Eastern Religions; Lupe is on the record often about being born Muslim, and following through), and is generally liked by pretty much everyone except for that time he abandoned his stellar career and couldn’t step it up for his fans (which could happen to Lupe very easily).