Lupe Fiasco: "The Words I Never Said (f/ Skylar Grey)"

If the central hypothesis of Lupe Fiasco’s “The Words I Never Said” posits that it’s better to express all your opinions—flaws, inconsistencies and all—than to censor yourself and later wish that you’d spoken up, the first few lines of the song knock that hypothesis flat on its ass. Because before releasing this single Lupe should have considered for a moment, taken a second look at the mealy-mouthed, knee-jerk screed he’d penned for the track’s verses, and promptly shut the fuck up.

Instead, Lupe went ahead and weighed in on just about every geopolitical issue that has graced a New York Times headline in the past five years or so. Now, the problem is not so much that he’s decided to speak about these issues, it’s that he does so all at once, and all in the style of a liberal humanist Mad Lib:

1) The situation in/with Israel is fucked because Obama is complicit with Israel’s brutal repressionist policies.

2) The situation in/with the banks is also fucked because the Federal Reserve is complicit with high-risk investment policies.

The track is also just filled to its sanctimonious brim with sub-bumper sticker forehead-smackers like: “If you are not an actor / You’ll never be a factor.” Which, yeesh. It may be too obvious to need stating, but you can’t really take back the things you do say either, Lupe.

But one thing must be said in praise of this song, or at least one thing stuck out to me as not unrepentantly horrible. In the third verse Lupe blurts out: “Limbaugh is a racist / Glenn Beck is a racist.” At first this seemed like just another borderline irrelevant political truism. But the line stuck with me because it’s odd that so few rappers mine this particular territory.

Last year in an episode of the very occasionally insightful Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher put a gloss on what has come, in some circles, to be known as the new racism. He conceded, “okay, the Tea Party isn’t racist. They’re just nostalgic for a time when black people didn’t exist.” Now, that’s a pretty incendiary take on a political movement whose salience and efficacy are proven anew with nearly every election cycle of the past three years, but that’s kinda my point. Rappers are near-starving for ways to be incendiary and, ahem, notorious. So why has the “Fuck Glenn Beck” movement of 2010-2011 been relegated to the dark corners of NPR blog posts?

No matter whether you believe that the coded new racism of neo-conservatism is real or imagined, isn’t this something that rappers et al should be hype about? Isn’t it the corollary to the inevitable triumphalism that followed Obama’s inaugeration? Sure, you have Jeezy’s Recession (2009) and Kanye’s acerbic goofiness, but, for all their big-picture fury, they don’t deal with the particular anachronistic microcosm of paranoia and cultural insularity currently breeding on Fox News. I mean, you don’t have to be overtly political to say, “Hey, wait a minute! These cheese-dicks are back to blaming inner-city youth for the wide ranging social ills of America! I thought we cleared all that up in the ’90s!!”

Instead, it seems that maybe the clearest evidence of the allegedly post-racial America that Obama hath wrought is the fact that the new racism isn’t a subject worth treatment even by the majority of those against whom it is directed. And that’s good. The marginalization of racism is good. But for a musical institution that has been a watchdog of racial progressivism in the past four decades of American history, it also seems weird. The ground is just so fertile. Even in a song that’s otherwise begging to be forgotten, Lupe may just have been smart enough to be the first one to sink his shovel in.