Racking Up Plays: “All Black Everything” by Lupe Fiasco
These are the posts where I gush about some song that I’ve got a huge crush on at the moment, and you put up with it and listen because you’re a good friend.
As much as Lupe Fiasco tries to hem and haw in interviews about his long-delayed third album, it’s clear that the Chicago rapper’s love-hate relationship with Lasers tips a bit more easily to the “hate” side of the equation. Yeah, yeah, he likes most of the songs OK, but he hasn’t been shy about painting the album as a painful compromise with the commercially minded suits at Atlantic Records—a contractual obligation rather than a passion project.
“I had to acquiesce to certain forces,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Hopefully within that I snuck in some things I actually wanted to say any way I can.”
One of the things he snuck in was “All Black Everything,” about which critics have been lining up to declare Lasers’ standout track. Lupe approaches the song as a thought experiment. Accompanied by a breakbeat and a sample from Jimmy Durante’s version of “I’ll Be Seeing You”—which lurches and speeds ahead like a fevered dream sequence from a forgotten Hollywood musical—he imagines that the African slave trade never happened. The result is a world in which W.E.B. DuBois was Father of the Constitution, Bill O’Reiley reads from the Quran at Malcom X’s funeral, there was no crack epidemic, and hip hop isn’t concerned with complexion nor street cred.
In the final verse, he snaps back to reality and turns the song’s title on its head, inviting everyone who feels the pull to revert to racial classifications to just close their eyes so that all they’ll see—all together now!—is “all black everything.” (That is what makes Fiasco more than just a deft rapper; spinning narratives with surprise endings is the mark of a great songwriter.) It’s similar to what Brother Ali says in the title track to his album Us, in which the legally bind rapper says that everyone looks the same to him and urges listeners to “close your eyes, and you’ll see what I’m saying.”
Idealistic malarky? Maybe, but deep down I’m an idealist, and I’ve always been a fan of well-executed malarky. This is one track that Fiasco was fully engaged in, and it shows.
