The rest of the album plays out this way, with the first person expunged from the frame and replaced by Fiasco in storytelling mode. As these become increasingly portentous, the album's production style moves towards darker, more cinematic flourishes as if moving in time with the circling pianos, brooding strings, and moody guitar squalls, Fiasco pulls the camera back from himself to take a rooftop-level view of his surroundings. There are also two other highlights upfront: the bittersweet chamberpop lament of "The Coolest", on which Lupe, backed by a choir and dripping strings, weighs up his conflictedness with a laser-sharp opening line ("I love the Lord/ But sometimes it's like that I love me more") and the lazy jazz of the shuffling "Paris, Tokyo", which adds another dimension to this past October's Fiascogate by sounding pretty much exactly like vintage A Tribe Called Quest.Ĭonflict is a big part of Fiasco's persona, and in this record's first half, he wrestles with it accordingly, tempering any allusions to his comfortable lifestyle with what sound like warnings to himself. Instead, we get tracks like the virtuosic double-time of "Go Go Gadget Flow" (mostly just a lyrical flex) and the hooky first single "Superstar", with Fiasco protégé Matthew Santos (who has probably heard a few Coldplay albums) playing Adam Levine to Fiasco's Kanye West. Forgetting the cringeworthy and condescending opening monologue "Baba Says Cool for Thought" (which you should probably play once for laughs before banishing to the trash can), its first portion is relatively untroubled by any of Lupe's big-picture proselytizing. The Cool's overarching story may exist mostly in Lupe's head, but there is some sort of vague logic to its structure. Add it up and you have an album that unwittingly delivers on its promises, even if it takes a slightly convoluted route there. There are genuinely thrilling moments to be had here some of it from Fiasco's storytelling abilities, some of it from his lyrical dexterity, and some of it from his willingness to submerge himself in the theatre of it all. But here's the thing: The Cool ultimately features enough isolated moments of widescreen drama that what it fails to deliver in terms of a linear experience, it makes up for in sheer pathos. There's a fine line between respecting your listeners' intelligence and mistaking your own vague allusions and abstrusities for some kind of coherent statement, and this time around, Lupe's landed on the wrong side of that line.
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