Wow. Wow. Wow.
It is one thing to call Bush a terrorist, but Barack Obama???
Say what you will about Lupe Fiasco, and I am not all that keen by any stretch of the imagination, the album, Lasers, came and went with precisely one real good song to show for itself. That would be "The Show Goes On". The other stuff, even the agitprop, I didn't take very seriously.
But controversy has reigned since he called Barack a terrorist. Actually, i still can't believe I just wrote that. Didn't he get the memo?? Even tom Morello gives Obama a free pass… Anyway, when Billboard asked him to clarify this is what Lupe said: ""I've got nothing to clarify. It's Obama and the U.S. government. It's every president that came before him and every president that comes after him.
"It's funky because everybody's pulling soundbites from this one interview that we did, but they don't talk about anything else from the interview. So it's really about, 'What do people want to listen to?' It's not what I want to talk about, cause I want to talk about all types of shit… there wasn't the same reaction about me having a book club… about me trying to promote literacy in a country with 50 million functioning illiterates walking around, because we have a failed and flawed education system."
Yeah, why is everybody so excited about calling Obama a terrorist.
the truth is, if you consider Bush or Reagan a terrorist, you kinda hafta consider Obama a terrorist.
Of course, to the winner the spoils. The Brits considered the Colonists terrorists back in the day. And nobody REALLY believes, the US (or anybody else, really) doesn't kill innocent civilians. What do you think those drones in Afghanistan are doing? Asking the children to run on home while they find the third in command of the second brigade of the Taliban??
Yup, life sucks. And now Lupe is gonna hafta suck on it for al long while.
Elaborating on another point from the interview that's raised ire — that he doesn't vote in elections — Lupe said his reasoning is simple. "Voting doesn't work, because everybody who voted, voted for the same people who are in office right now that are actually allowing these policies to go forward… You have to educate the populace — the masses, the voters, the people who don't vote, the people who pay taxes."
"You have educate the masses to exactly what their tax dollars are going to pay for," Lupe continues. "I think once people educate themselves and open up their minds to understand that on that really basic level, then you'll have some type of change in the way that Americans associate themselves and participate in their own political process."