Have you ever found yourself comparing the career trajectories of Kendrick Lamar and Lupe Fiasco?
Well, YouTube channel HipHopMadness dropped a new video earlier today called “Lupe Fiasco: The Original Kendrick Lamar.”
The video compares the path each artist took on the road to success—one hailing from Chicago and the other from Compton—and why some believe Lupe deserved more recognition than he’s received.
As per usual, HipHopMadness drops a detailed description of their videos with almost every upload. You can find it below the embedded video.
Lupe Fiasco: The Original Kendrick Lamar
By HipHopMadness
Every cultural figure doesn’t exist in a vacuum. While originality is a quality that many of the most important artists in the world possess, there are generally a few like minded souls who came before them and fulfilled similar purposes within their chosen industry.
Sometimes, the influence can be directly felt and acknowledged, such as the innumerable artists who are all too happy to praise Kanye West for the immense impact that he had on them during their formative years as he blazed a singular trail through hip-hop. In the same vein, there’s no shortage of modern stars who accredit André 3000 with broadening their horizons to what could be accomplished through the medium of beats and rhymes.
But for others, their connection to another individual in their field is more unspoken, with the artist in question acting as more of a spiritual ancestor who’d set the precedent for the field that they inhabit rather than being the person who drove them towards the mic in the first place.
In this lane, we find some rappers who were perhaps before their time, meaning that in the years to come when someone came along and fulfilled the same role, then they received the degree of acclaim that others maybe rightfully deserved for taking bold steps for the genre.
Within this precarious position, we find Chi-Town’s own Lupe Fiasco. As with the benefit of hindsight, some believe that he followed a similar path to Kendrick Lamar, but only received a shred of the recognition.
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