I'm Nick Monfort, professor of digital media here at MIT in comparative media studies and writing. Along with Mary Fuller from literature, I'm very glad to be hosting Lou IT, the visiting scholar we all know as Lupe Fiasco, a.k.a. Wassalu Yeko, through the Martin Luther King Junior Fellowship Program. My thanks to the Institute Community and Equity Office for bringing Lupe Fiasco to MIT this year and for the other good work they do on campus. Once in a while recently, people have been asking me, wait, what's Lupe Fiasco doing at MIT? It turns out they're not asking this because they're skeptical about Lupe Fiasco. They're skeptical of MIT. Well, our institute is a very distributed place with a lot going on. It may surprise some of you to learn we have a rich curriculum for undergraduates in media studies, writing, and literature. And there's more on offer in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. While technical studies are certainly the focus, MIT has the first architecture school in the United States, as well as the MIT Media Lab, a program in art, culture, and technology, and another in women's and gender studies, the Sloan School, and more. I know many of you have come from off-campus. You made it through the Eventbrite registration system. And it's not as bad as Ticketmaster, I know, but you found your way to the building on this rainy night, got into it, and got through part of the MIT maze to this numbered room. Now, even though MIT has had to limit public access because of the pandemic, we're very glad that people in the community come to join us for events like this. I look forward to Lupe Fiasco's talk and to hearing your questions for our speaker, because I know that what you have to say and what you have to ask will help me learn. As of tomorrow, December 1, the MIT campus will be opening up further, and it will be easier to visit us. On campus, you'll find a newly opened MIT museum, the MIT Press Bookstore, the art shown at the List Visual Arts Center, a public art collection that includes many sculptures outdoors, the MIT Libraries, and a new Welcome Center. If you like rap, I suspect some of you do. You should know that in this room in 2017, thanks to the Center for Art, Science, and Technology, Professor Michelle DeGraphe and I hosted Haitian poet, singer, songwriter, rapper, Bic Roosevelt Sayant, who gave a public concert. Just two months ago, Bridgeside Cipher brought a live band and welcome rappers from the community to an outdoor area near the Kindle MIT teastop, thanks to MIT's Open Space Initiative, which had brought rappers to the space before that. To those who made the trip to be here tonight, thank you for coming, welcome to MIT, and please consider yourselves welcome to visit us again. Now, what can be said to introduce tonight's speaker? MIT Visiting Scholar, Grammy Award-winning rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, activist, a founder of the Society of Spoken Art, a founder of the Société Internationale d'Hur, with eight studio albums that run from Food and Liquor to this year's Drill Music and Zion, colleagues, neighbors, friends. Here's Lupe Fiasco. Hello, thank you, doc RT. Appreciate the introduction. I don't know if Mary Fuller is here as well. Hey, Mary Fuller, appreciate you both. As well as Dr. Fox, I.R., I appreciate you as well. My family here at MIT, as well as Sophia, the Literature Department at MIT, what's happening, comparative media studies, entire Shass, as well as the Mechie, the Hobby Shop, the Sailing Pavilion. Verdies, appreciate you all. What I'm going to try and do is keep this very casual. And what I'm doing is a little bit of what the class is, the class I'll be teaching. And we're trying to run like a little mock beta version of that in here. So relax yourselves, but you're conscious to be free. You're not rolling with the thugs from the MIT, really. Not thugs, but you know, wrappers. So it's an introduction. We'll paste it out. There'll be a little call and response. You have some duties. If you have a piece of paper, a pen, or some type of writing material, or even something digital, we're going to need that very soon. So do that. Well, let's get into it. Rap theory and practice, an introduction to what I'm doing here at MIT and what the plans are for the future. But first, I have to introduce myself. See if this works. There we go. That's me. That's my high school yearbook picture, right? I think I was 17. I think as you can see, I clearly invested into this thing. So that's my high school talent show. I'm going to skip forward to that picture. That is Springfest 2015 here at MIT. So that's me performing at MIT. And then we'll do another jump. And that is me a couple months ago in Central Park, New York, performing as MIT. Rap has always been a scholastic pursuit for me. I learned how to rap in school. That's where I hone my skill sets. That's why I learned everything that I do now. It's always been in a school environment. So this isn't foreign. This isn't anything completely novel. And the proof is kind of in the pudding. So for me, this makes perfect sense that I would be back in a school environment teaching. Because I learned this craft at a school, at my high school. We'll belay the biography and other things, and we'll get right into the meat of the matter. What are slash is raps slash rap, acronyms only. So this is your job now. We've got about a few minutes. Acronyms are, you take the word. I'm very fundamental. You take each letter in the word, and then you make a word out of that letter that describes the original word, the source word. Let me know when you've got a good one, like a real good one. And then you can stand up and blurt it out in a disciplined way. But think through it. Think about it deeply. I want you to reflect aggressively. I want you to penetrate subconsciously. And really think about it. What are raps? What is rap?  This is familiar to you, doc Hattie. Hey, guys. Welcome. I need you to come up with an acronym for rap or raps you can pick. Not now. You can just stop. Whoa there, cowboy. Hold on. All right, that's eight. OK, who we got? That's how we're putting people on blasts. Come on. Riffs and poetry.  OK, let's do the newcomer. Well, I mean, things mine was rhythm and poetry. And I'm trying to pull it off. OK, so you're biting styles already, I see. Doc Hattie. Rhythm and people. Routed autobiographies pronounced, uh-huh. Nice. Cowboy, what's up? I just don't want to give it up. OK. Realizations and passions. Realizations and passions. E. This is randomly the point. Realist perspectives. Realist perspectives. OK, it's a lot of ass in the room, I don't know why. Advising to ask, we'll take it. Rhymes and pacing. Rhymes and pacing, yeah? Rhythmic access to people's souls. Rhythmic access to people's souls. Jesus Christ. That's utterly beautiful. Deep and meaningful. Very full of. Righteous artistic performance. Jesus, he beat. This is great. D1. My brother. Hey, anybody else want to throw their last? Everybody's welcome. Running after purpose, I like that. Shout out. One of us kind of already said, I said rhymes and pace. Rhymes. And pace. Yep. The story's fun. You know that's not a rap, right? Do you play the bass? Is that why you did that? No. OK. All right, all right. That's unacceptable, just FYI. We enjoy it. Ian Conjury. Hey, rare artistic power and style. OK. Cowboy? Did you have another one? No? OK. I think about this constantly. And I'm constantly revising and setting new rules about how the acronym should be developed. The original acronym that we started at SOSA and built SOSA, Society of Spoken Art, upon, was rhetorical, anthropological, philosophical structures. And then we created an entire curriculum about investigating that particular definition of rap. The most recent one that I had was relationships, associations, parallels, and, well, I can't say the other. I can't say the S. We'll leave it at that, because that's Conjury later. While I was here, maybe a month ago, I came up with these, recognizing analogous patterns, maybe reconciling adversarial patterning, and just goes on and on and on and on. Constantly revising, constantly being dynamic, because that's what rap deserves. It deserves constant attention, constant focus, constant alteration, constant changing in the face of new ventures, new places, new spaces, new ideas, new generations as they take it and make it what it means to be for them. But it's also really, really sexy, I think, this idea of defining it by its own structures, what's already there, not trying to go too far out and make it something that it's not. Can we define it within its own terms? And then what is the process to get to that? What happens when you do that to your name? What happens when you do that with your job description? What happens when you do that to your belief systems? What is the mechanisms and the tools and what changes? So it's meant to constantly be defined and then dug into. What does it mean to reconcile adversaries? What does it mean to be righteously aggressive? What does it mean to be based? So shapes and details, right? Sometimes we get this confused when we talk about rap. I like to keep things very fundamental, very simple, very basic. We can get complex later. We're already complex. That's the problem, too complex.  To me, this is very clean, right? The metaphor or the analogy would be bodybuilders, right? If you want to become a bodybuilder, first thing you have to do is get into shape, right? Just a general shape, a general workable shape, right? Big exercises. Just do some squats. Just do some bench presses, right? Just big exercises. Then as you start to want to get your pro card, you got to get into the details, right?   Get into these details, right? Shapes and details, right? Big, big ideas, big, big concepts. Then how do we execute through those concepts, right? How do we filter through and come on and get the details, right?  You got to have both. You can't just be super-duper detail-oriented with no shape, right? You can't just have shape all the time with no details, right? If you want to be subjectively good, but even objectively good, right? Because this is happening whether you want to or not.   Shapes and details to keep it really basic. So get a little bit more precise. This is my favorite word in rap. She knows where it was in rap. Use it all the time. Microdecisions, right? Your details. We'll get into what these are. A couple. Microdecisions may consist of stretching or extending specific vowels in words to achieve or regulate certain tones, moods, or temporalities, right? So you don't have to do all of this, I need this punch line. I need this, I need that. Like, no, I need you to put a little bit more stress. Lay on that O. So it goes, oh, did you behold what I did, right? I need that ah, and what, to be very quick, right? So behold feels like this. How do you do that in words? We have to say, behold, right? Seems silly. It won me a Grammy, right? Seems like, ah, that's nothing. So millions of records, millions, millions of dollars. Cars, jewelry, it's ridiculous. What you could do with stretching vowels, right? A one simple tool, a one simple micro decision, right? And you could just play with it all day. You sit with words and say, ah, take the word itself. Micro decision, micro decision, right? I'm going to do micro decision. I got what I want to put my stresses on my vowels, right? And now I'm going to go right to the verse, right? I already got the shape. I already know what I'm going to talk about. Now let me get into these details. Work on these micro decisions. And there's more. There's a list, but we don't have time.  Big old things, big ideas, right? Big shapes. We're going to dive deep into this next one. One of the best macro decisions. And what I've been studying here on the research side, since I've been at MIT, has been studying surprise, right? Surprise is one of the fundamental primal pieces of life. Now this rap of life, bullshit, right? I can make the claim that everything you learned was by surprise in one way or another, right?   You didn't know before, you know it now. What was the mechanism to get it? To traverse that distance, that gap. It's probably surprise, right? Let's go deep. Ready? Ready to get deep? Ready to go to class? Check this out. That's right, I read white papers and I cite. Surprises not only influence individuals' attention, learning, memory, attitudes, and behavior. They can also have larger scale social influences. This is because people seem to be interested in sharing surprises with others. Who shared the meme today? Who shared the video today? Right? What's the word? I give you $2, not in real money, but in Lupe dollars. If you tell me what's one of the phrases that we always see, one of the common phrases that we see in videos being posted on social media. Viral, yeah, yeah. We don't really see, this is viral. What do we see in the comment section in the description? Watch till the end, right? Or wait for it. What is that? Wait for it, right? Share that, right? It goes viral, because you see that one thing and then you're like, she's like, boy, right? You know that one?  He's like, she was surprised that I knew that, didn't she? But it's right, you're laughing. How many times did you watch it? Yeah? Boy, boy, right? Didn't expect that little girl to do that.  Right? And as others, what's going to happen? Boy, right? Stories with surprising elements tend to degrade and change less as they are passed along than stories without surprising elements. That's surprising, ain't it? Right? How does Lupe Fiasco persist this long? People can't believe it, right? I don't talk about sex, I don't talk about gun, I don't talk about anything. I kind of do, but I don't. I want to, really bad. It's just littered with little surprises, little landmines of, whoa, that's all. Bars that you don't get until like five years later, when you're watching some random cartoon from Turkmenistan, maybe like, Lupe ain't like, oh. They sustain, they're stable, right? Ain't that what we want in careers, right? Isn't that kind of the essence of longevity, right? Doesn't degrade, how do we get to that? Maybe do surprise. There's another one, I got them all day. Surprise and information has been shown to impact what we remember and to facilitate transfer of learning strategies. Inducing an uncertain mood like surprise has been found to lead to more systemic processing, which might aid learning. What does rap do all day?  I learned how to buy Rolexes from rap. Did you know Rolexes are 501C3? That's a non-for-profit. I didn't learn that from rap, but surprise, right? Right? I bring that up, not lightly. Rap teaches a lot. It's one of the most ultimate teaching tools. It teaches you how to dance, teaches you how to dress, teaches you how to talk, teaches you how to walk, teaches you how to think. It's ridiculously, ridiculously capable, right? Can also teach you how to kill people, teach you how to sell drugs, teach you how to die, teach you how to go to prison, right? Teach you how to survive in prison. It can teach you politics, right? Teach you how to vote for. It's a teaching tool, right? How many people intentionally use it as that? How many people just do it for fun? How many rappers in here? For fun, right? For money? For money and fun. Money and fun, there we go, right? He didn't say teaching, because unfortunately most rappers don't know how, right? We live by a phrase at Sosa, that rappers know how to do it, but they don't know what they're doing because rap was never formally trained. It was never put into an institution and all of these things like this, you didn't have to take a test to become a rapper. Your test was, does it work at the strip club? Which is the Atlanta formula? For real. Does it work at the strip club? That is the test for rap. Don't care how you got there, but can you have that effect? Can you teach strippers to dance, right? That has its place, right? But rap has so much potential, right?  We're not gonna have, we're gonna have some fun, I'm gonna make it fun, but we're gonna be doing this. That's a warning to the students out there who thought you was finna be in here making strip club music with Lupe Fiasco. We're gonna be reading white papers about a surprise. And then teaching you how to do that with intention. So you can really elevate the power of the craft, right? And really use it as a teaching thing. Cause if you do it successfully, guess what? My man's, you'll make more money and have more fun. Cause you'll have more followers. Cause more things will go viral. You create deeper relationships, associations, parallels and surprises, right? Here's another one. Surprise! We still don't surprise. Surprise is evoked just to give you a little sense of what it is, right? That stuff was kind of descriptive. This is what it is. How it works. Surprise is evoked by unexpected schema discrepant events. And its intensity is determined by the degree of the schema discrepancy, right? How far off is this from normality for you? Right? It's how big the surprise is. Unexpected events cause an automatic interruption of ongoing mental processes that is followed by an intentional shift and intentional binding to the events. It's like, oh, what is that? Oh, what's that? Right? Which is often followed by causal and other event analysis processes and by schema revision. Schemas are kind of worldviews, kind of conceptual frames, cognitively how you view the world, how you pursue through it, right? And run after purpose, right? You do that in certain ways, in certain paths based on what your kind of fundamental schemas are. These schemas are constantly being changed as you interface with different types of information and different types of experiences people's places, right? So that's why you have to be careful what you listen to. Be careful who you listen to and where you go.  And not necessarily your neurons or like neuroplasticity and stuff like that, that happens, but on the front end, just the way that your schemas change, right? Story time, repetition, break, plot, structure. Here's a tool of how you can use surprise. Let's bring it back down to earth. Let's come out to white papers, right? Let's take it to the streets. Are you in a gang? You. You, you in a gang? No, okay. This is actually if you was in a gang. You got a lot of blue day, I'm just making sure. Nice sweater, I like it.  I'm just joking, I'm just joking.  First pig, builds his house out of straw. Big bad wolf comes, he says, I'll huff and I'll puff.  Wolf is like, yo, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down. And he goes, blow this house down, right?   Not by the hair on my, that's the call and response to the power of story. So I just made you do that. Why did you do that? I've been in front of millions of people that I've never met before and have them doing all kinds of things, right? Consciously, unconsciously, they just want to be. That's power, be careful, rappers. I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down. He huffs, he puffs, he blows, house down, right? Those two little pigs go to the third pig's house. His house is made out of, no, it's made out of a carbonite material, okay? At least here at MIT it would be made out of that. We made out of nuclear energy or something like that. It's made out of bricks and he knocks. Little pigs, little pigs, let me in. Not by the hair on my, I'm still saying it, why? Oh dude, we got to, ooh, jazzy.  Repetition break plot structures, what happened? There's a break in the repetition, right? First pig did a thing, wolf did a thing, a thing happened.  Right, next thing, pigs do a thing, wolf does a thing, thing happens. Same thing happens, chinny, chinny, chin, right? Go to the third one, oh, they do a thing, they do a thing. Surprise, nope, can't blow on these bricks, right? Repetition break plot structure. Where have we seen this? Who you seen this? I know you've seen this, everybody's seen this. You seen this in rap, verse hook, verse hook, verse. Is that really, you know, one, two, one, two, one, two, that's, maybe, so it's not really a macro, right? It's not some rap macro's that act like that, but not really. It happens musically, it happens in Beethoven, right? Training, training, habituation, habituation, divergence. Has the same kind of effect, right? Training, training, training, same, same, different, right? Similarity, similarity, divergence, right? The verses in Gold Digger were like the verses more from the perspective of the guy, and it's from the perspective of the girl. Portray is the original narrator, it's the villain, so. It's repetition. The greatest example of that is this. Anybody not aware of Stan, anybody not blowing away about his list? Don't know what this means. Stan is probably Eminem's greatest record, right? Arguably, hands down, probably Eminem's greatest record, right? The song is about a fan, is where we get the word stan from, right? Anybody got any stans in here? I got a couple of stans, I have a lot, I'm a stan of you. Yeah, I do, I appreciate that. There's a stan reciprocity going on right here. Hey, stan by me. The song is about a fan who writes Eminem a letter, and he's writing this letter, dear Marshall, right? Who writes a letter in the first verse? Then he goes and he writes a letter in the third verse. And the second verse, I apologize, right? Writes another letter to Eminem.  He knows the third verse. Third verse isn't a letter, per se, it's a recording. And this stan, this fan of Eminem, he's recording himself kidnapping in true Eminem fashion, this guy. His girlfriend. And doing this weird kind of murder-suicide plot. And he's recording this thing to Eminem. And then at the end of the verse, at the third verse, he comes to the realization, like, we're gonna drive this car over this bridge.  But that's not the plot twist, is it? For the stans of Eminem who know, right? That's not the plot twist. But that's great, he could have stopped right there. But there's a fourth verse, right? Kind of breaks this two, this one, one, two, structure, this three, this trifecta, this tricholin. It's like one, one, then the twist. He does one, one, one twist. And the twist is, Eminem finally receives the letter from the first verse, right? And he sits down to respond to it. And he says, dear Stan, I appreciate that you got all my records, right? I'm sorry I couldn't get back to you, I was on tour. Hey, man, I hear you going through a lot. Hey, just chill out, you'll be all right.   The layering and the complexity of how he worked, right? That repetition, break, repetition, break structure, right? Masterful, right? Taking a very simple concept that we all learned when we were kids, because we all knew chinny, chin, chin, right? So it's very, very simple macros, right? That we all can process and all of them privy to. But then how do we turn around and use that in our work as rappers, right? Very basic things. Instead of trying to do a bunch of details, right?  Am I rapping and tapping and hitting again and then, right, right? Okay, that's cool, right? Well, why don't, can you master these basic things? And then the argument becomes, Stan is one of the highest selling records of all time in any genre of music, right? To the point where the name of the song entered into common vernacular, the power of rap, right? On par, right? On par, culturally, we eat an E equals MC squid, right? On par, right? And other kind of catchphrases from different fields, science, social sciences, archeology, whatever you want, history, right? Stan is right there. Janila forever is a song that I wrote. It's about a little girl, true story. Name was Janila. She was six month old. She was murdered in Chicago. She was shot about six times. The gunman was trying to kill her father in retaliation for stealing a PlayStation. He didn't know that Janila was sitting on the lap. He just ran up to a car and started shooting. Missed the father, hit her six times, a six month old baby, destroyed the city, right? I was like, I need to make that a song right now. And the song was about Janila growing up, going to school, being really smart. Going to school, going to med school, becoming a doctor, instead of going to work at, let's just call it, I don't know, MGH or whatever the hospital is. She goes to open up a free clinic in the neighborhood in which she grew up in. And then one day she's in the office. She hears some gunshots outside and then she runs outside to this van and gets this little girl, triages her, stabilizes her, so the pediatrics can come and eventually she's saved. Saves the little girl. She doesn't realize that she just saved herself, right? Repetition, repetition, repetition, the puppet, the twist, the power of that, the surprise. All surprises don't have to be good surprises. They can happen in a, they call it valence. Could be somewhat sad, right? Doesn't have to be, but a little glimmer of hope in there. Doesn't change the situation, but cathartic, it helps. Yeah? Sing about me, Kendrick Lamar. Me, to me, one of his greatest record. Just the first verse, where he's singing about a guy, rapping about a guy who was in the streets and was involved in some violence and he does it a different way. So I reveal, I say it, I reveal it. Bet you didn't know you just saved yourself. Eminem reveals it, the words.  Kendrick and his genius. He's writing a letter in the person as if he's this guy. And he's like, hey, if I live to see your album come out, do, do, do, do, do, do. You just hit a series of gunshots. Then the verse stops. The beat keeps going. So the guy, he dies, right? If I live to see your album come out, I just want you to do, do, do, do, do, do, right? Repetition, blah, blah, break structure. In the class, we study this, right? We'll take examples. We'll set up a theme. We'll say, okay, we're gonna talk about surprise. We're gonna talk about a very specific type of surprise and how to utilize it and execute it and we'll use this particular frame, right? We'll start with three little pigs and then we'll end on Kendrick Lamar, right? And show you different ways to navigate and assess and then hopefully accomplish that process in your own work. You can talk about whatever you want. You can talk about three little pigs if you want, right? Just ask the rhyme. It's the only thing I ask and it has to be to a beat. There's more. It's not just surprise, right? I call them primes because I like to sound smart, mathematical, but fundamental rap primes. We just went through a surprise one and there's different ways. There's different mechanisms. There's different approaches to generate surprise, right? To navigate through it, right? To process it. The hope would be the same way that you get the acronym for rap, you do that for surprise, right? You look at this thing. You look at this word, the single word, the single concept and you approach it from all these different angles and ways to try and hack it, right? Come up with new novel surprising ways to surprise, right? Maybe do it in a group, right? Do a little think tank, right? Do a little something. Do, figure out different avenues to generate that. Rhyme is the another one. Metaphor, tone, and then et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? We can do this all day, right? All of those very, very fundamental, very, very powerful things that we interface with on a daily basis. I'm just kind of sitting dormant in rap, waiting to kind of be explored in a very methodical, very classical way with the goal of creating new work, right? Not old work, new work, to create new work, we have to advance some of these problems or rethink them in fundamental ways with the new knowledge or the new perspectives that you as a younger generation have that I don't possess. Yeah, yeah, cool. That is the name of the class for MIT Undergrads. It is also open to Harvard. We'll see and mass art in terms of cross-registration. So if you're interested, you are a student of any of those schools, you know somebody that's in any of those schools. They're more than welcome to apply. That is the course number, special subject, CMS S60, RAP Theory and Practice. It'll be up for pre-registration tomorrow, actually. And then outside of this, one of the conundrums that me and Doc IT have been trying to solve is making sure that the community of not only Cambridge, but Boston-wide and beyond those are able to participate in the course and in the class in some capacity. So the syllabus will be up if you wanna follow along. Nine times out of 10, we will be working with OCW, which is OpenCourseWare here at MIT to at least record it. There's other things that we're thinking about and primarily we still wanna hold sessions like this. So talks that are open to the public, open to the grad students, open to faculty, open to staff, anybody that wants to come in and kinda address and run through these in a different way. For folks that are interested in taking a class, wanna have a little bit more information, you will be rapping and recording in the class. Your final project is an EP.  Right? I will. I so will fail you. My name is Fiasco, so that is a failure. And I have no problem sharing you with myself. Oh, no, but I do want you to take it seriously. You don't have to know how to rap. I'll teach you. But you will be expected to rap and you will have rap assignments that you have to turn in, okay? So if you're afraid or if that's a challenge for you, I cordially invite you. So it's a wonderful experience. I've taught this before, so I know it works. But yeah, so that's just a little information on the class. If you're interested in going through some of those white papers about surprise, this is the, it's a body of papers called the ubiquity of surprise, developments in theory, converging evidence, and implications for cognition. And it goes from computational, like actual computer science, all the way to cognitive theory. It's a basic, even more kind of theories and applications, a way to approach surprise. And it's in a journal called Topics, which is topics in cognitive science. And it's online with Wiley Library, for those who are kind of astute. But you'd be able to, if you're looking for it, that is the bundle of papers, if you want to continue on. Yes! There is an ER tournament. I play ER. There's a few other people who play ER in this room. Maybe you don't know where ER is, but now's your time to do the thing with the phone. Maybe you'll pick it up, maybe not. Or you can go to player.org. It's something that we started here at MIT, not too long ago, the Society Internationale de ER. It is the governing body, the only governing body for ER in the world. I did it when I was finishing my syllabus, because I got bored. And now we're throwing our first tournament at the BSU, the Black Student Union, in Walker, and it is Friday, five o'clock. It is $10 to register, but there are sponsored slots for the Brokey Brokes. And there's a 250, a lot of first prize. So come have some fun with us. There'll be staff there, there'll be students there. It's a great, we've been playing for a couple, like a month. So if you're interested, there's that. And then, thank you. Appreciate your time, coming out in the weather, in the rain, and I hope it added value. And I will leave the balance of the time for questions, or insights, or follow-ups, or hate mail, which I also will take.  I'm here for that. But yeah, so appreciate you all. Hope it added value. All right, I'm back as the Q&A bouncer. And I wanna direct your attention to the two microphones we have set up. Please come to one of these. If you have a question, Mr. Fiasco over here will be glad to address it. Absolutely.  This is your chance. All right. What made you write the song, Help I Save My Life? I mean, because it did, a lot of my friends are dead.  I'm sure that I would have survived, you know? But it preserved the life that I wanted to lead, right? Because it's multiple lives. We lead a different life every day. Multiple lives in a day, right? But which life do you wanna lead the most? You know, and hip hop gave me the tools and the opportunities. Proof is in the pudding to live the life that I wanted to live, yeah?  So there's weird dichotomy and this balance that we're trying to do. The song itself was an homage to Houston, Texas, though. To the rap, to the scene, the hip hop scene in Houston, Texas, which I was a huge fan of, a huge fan of the artist. It's actually kind of loosely based on the life of Slim Thug. And if you see the video, you see like Bumbi in there, you see a few other cats from Houston in there. And yeah, it's an homage to that scene. I thought they were superheroes. Like when you look at Houston rappers, they mouth saw Iced Out, the swag, the whole, I was like, God, these dudes like Paul Wall and all those guys. So it was an homage to them. But the message overall was, you know, it does save lives if you let it. You know, if you want it to. First off, I want to say thank you, Lupe, for being here and sharing your art throughout the years. Really appreciate it. My question is actually regarding just your philosophy for learning. I spent a lot of time listening to your podcast during the pandemic. And one thing I really appreciated was hearing how you talked about your father and how he knew just a lot about everything.  So I was just curious to hear about your philosophy for learning and how you approach new things each day. I mean, I love learning, man. You know, I love it. We got nothing else to do, you know. Part of it is everything materially that I've ever wanted I had, you know. Everything experientially to a degree I've experienced. And that's not to like humble flex or anything like that. But it's like, the only thing left was to learn, you know. So I come to school every day. I don't even go to college, right? So this is my freshman year. And I'm treating it like my freshman year at MIT, right? And so I just go to my office every day and read white papers, you know. And people come by and they drop off books. They say, hey, do you want to go to lab?  And I've been doing that since I was a kid. I've been reading this, my sister's legend about me is that I used to just read The Encyclopedia. You know. And I think even just through rap, I want to talk about other things. I don't want to talk about the same old Rigor-Moroll. I want to talk about different things, novel things, surprising things. And that requires kind of extending yourself, opening yourself up to other conversations, right? To other knowledge bases, to other ideologies, even if you disagree with it, right? And I look at my track record and I've made records about nuclear weapons. I've made records about Houston, Texas. I've made records about skateboarding. I've made record anything that I could, you know, that spoke to me, I pursued and pursued it deeply, right? And even me being at MIT part of this is like, yeah, I'm gonna teach some of the things that I know, but I'm really here learning more than I'm teaching, you know, because I want to get deeper into, you know, surprise, you know, I want to get deeper into rhyme, I want to get deeper into rhythm, I want to get deeper into other things. So I'm just constantly learning. Never stop learning, right? Because you're gonna have a choice. That's the real thing. You're always going to learn. So you might as well be very intentional about the things that you want to learn and then be very intentional about how you want to operationalize and submit those learnings in your own life. Yeah? Which idea did you have first? The song, The Cool, or the album, The Cool? And what was your inspiration behind it? The Cool started out, my mentor was Cornell West, Dr. Cornell West, and him, Tavis Smiley, I want to say Dr. Dyson, I call him Dyson as well. They were doing like this speaking tour kind of randomly, right? And I don't know if it's part of the state of black America, it was something like this very just interest, they would go to these theaters in different cities and they would just sit up there and be smart, right? And Cornell West said, we have to find a way to make the things that are harmful, uncool, and make the things that are good, cool. And it was like, I gotcha, right? And that became the initial point, right? A command was given by one of the elders, you know, to the artistic class who spoke to the youth with a mission to make those things uncool. And I went, right? And then the whole process, you've not seen some of it play out here, whole process of okay, what do we do? What is the most immortal story that persists through all culture, right? What is that trope that just never dies? Zombies, right? Thriller is one of the biggest records in the world. And I was like, oh, zombies. Oh yeah, zombies, right?  But I'm gonna do it through a frame so that it sticks and it stays, right? And it's my most popular album. It's my highest-selling album, right? And so there's something to that, oh yeah, being very intentional about that work and how you do it. And then it was just putting other pieces to it, building out the storyline with the streets and the game and putting them in a narrative and having them play against each other and creating these different ideologies and then pulling in these different concepts of the cool. A lot of it was, Miles Davis, the birth of the cool. So it was like, he did the birth of the cool. I'm gonna do the death of the cool. I can die, right? So a lot of those decisions were very intentional to speak to history so that when questions are asked, like that, I could say, oh, there was a little influence from Miles Davis' birth of the cool. Have you ever heard that album? Have you? Yeah, now you're gonna hear it now. Yeah, so indeed, indeed, right? Learning moments to help build into your own craft, right? But if you don't have that type of intentionality of how you learn and how you operationalize the things you learn, then you won't be able to pass those things along, right? What's up, Ian? Mr. Professor Connery. Great talk, thank you so much for tonight. Yeah, so about surprise. One thing so interesting about it is it keeps changing, right? There's no, the old surprise.  And now it's like, oh yeah, it's breakdancing. And look, he's scratching the record. Oh my God, what's that? And then it's like, oh yeah, he's scratching the record. Are the things that you've noticed lately in sort of how hip-hop's evolving and say, oh yeah, I thought there was nowhere to go, but now this surprise, or because we're already used to all this other stuff, like for you, what's a new frontier for surprise? Devolving, right? There's a de-evolution taking place, right? And that's surprising because hip-hop was all about evolution, right? It was all about multiple forms. And that still exists, and I don't wanna take away from that, but it's devolving content-wise. Or if it's not devolving to that degree, it's super adapted to the point where it has no other place to go, and it's starting to become complacent, and it's setting itself up to get overthrown, and that is surprising. And so what I look for is what is the thing that's coming next to disco hip-hop, right? Punk got disco out of there a little bit, then rock and roll and hip-hop kinda got punk out of there. Now hip-hop is doing, and rap is doing some of the same things that those genres, which are still there, but they're there calcified, right? And they're kinda being pulled from maybe an electronic music or just then and the third, but as a genre-leading type thing, or a genre in and of itself where people are still Giorgio Moroder is like, I mean he did the Daft Punk piece, but it's like, maybe that counts, but it's not everywhere, right? But maybe it is. We'll have that conversation later, right? But I feel like that's what's happening, right? I feel like there's a paradigm shift that's about to happen and that some of that ultraviolence is contributing not only to the death of the artists themselves, but to the death of the genre, right? Because it used to be surprising to hear somebody say, I'm gonna kill such and such, right? I was like, whoa, my God, he said he was gonna kill such and such, did you hear that? Cut that music off, boy! Now that there is no alternative and you can't cut the musical, right? Can be that stock gap, it's too democratic. So anyway, that's what I think it is. But in terms of rap itself, I really, as you know, I really enjoy Japanese hip hop. It's always interesting to see the new artist that come out of these places where you don't expect it. I expect it, because I know the history, but it's still interesting to see how they're taking the forms that are coming out in the new generations and then processing it, right? And then giving their kind of cultural spin on it. So yeah, appreciate you. Yo! What's going on, boss? Appreciate you for the night. So I got two questions. The first one is really light. It's more or so about the class. Like, what's the process for a tough student, particularly a tough graduate student that they wanted to register for this class? And the second one is, in light of what you kind of discuss it, it kind of like sheds light on the morphine or the appreciation of rap as an art and a science. So what's your process for writing, particularly in periods where you might have like a block of some sort in your writing? I don't believe there's such a thing as writer's block. There's some, we've had some interesting conversations in Sosa about that. It's a very, very interesting kind of, like there's a physical thing that is supposed to represent writer's, it's very interesting. Anyway, I don't believe in writer's block. I believe that, like, there's some times where you just shouldn't write. I do believe that. Like, put the pen down, my God. Go experience. Maybe you take that as a signal for, you need new experiences. I don't necessarily believe in writer's block because I have such a fascination with the base of word. Maybe this is a lesson for you. If you're experiencing writer's block, maybe there's something to you asking that question because you get writer's block, right? Like I fell in love with words. In the same way where you can go back and analyze and assess just stretching vowels in the same word. Very basic things. And pull out new meanings, if not new semantic meanings, new kind of structural kind of presentations or new sonic ideas that come out of that. And just work with the material that's there until something comes up of interest, right? That's not necessarily a block, like you're working, right? If that's what you're doing, right?    But then I also come up with a little fire thing here and there, but a majority come up with is concepts and a ways to approach a particular concept as opposed to like I need this bar to be dope because I wanna sound like I'm on URL with every verse.  You know, enjoy the feeling that you get when you have a novel idea and you get that cascade of dopamine and it's like, oh, lovely, right? So you got it. Ooh, yeah, what's up, brother? Hey, what's up, Lupe? Firstly, thank you for coming, huge fan. So I was gonna ask you two questions. The first question was just asked. In regards to how do you approach writing?  But you just talked about that, so I'll go on to my second question, which was, what's your perspective on redrafting something you've already written or perhaps something you've already recorded? I mean, I draft in real time, I edit in real time, right? So as I'm writing, I'm editing, right? And there's some things that I want, depending on what I'm writing for, right? If I'm just writing for the joy of writing, then you don't edit, because you're writing for whatever comes out and you're writing things that feel good to you, right? If I'm writing to sell some records, it'll be different. If I'm writing to go into a battle, it'll be different. If I'm writing to go into history, it'll be different. There is something to approaching things very systematically, right? If you have all of this kind of nascent knowledge there, right? If you're coming in with, you've been practicing very intentional things, right? And then you can kind of suspend, there was a great jazz player by the name of Bill Evans, right, jazz pianist, right? And he says, well, you learn all of this kind of classical training and all these different chord structures and you learn all this static kind of stuff and very academic and you go through these standards and standards and standards and standards and standards. So these things become innate. And once they become innate, you can then collapse all that and then you can create, right, freely. But you're creating from a space of education, you're creating from a space of knowledge, as opposed to creating just pure virtuosity, right? And so that idea of build up your basic skill sets, right? If you build these muscles, then no matter what you do, right? You'll already have edited, your synapses would have already kind of built in certain ways where it just be like, oh, we only do this. So if you build yourself just to dope, because you can do that, you can build yourself to just do punchlines, right? And at the expense of what though? But you can do that. You can build a certain schema set that only makes this type of writing or that type of writing. But sometimes I do freestyle it out too, right? There is something to just top lining. B-I-B-I-B-I-T-I-B-I-T-I-B-I-T-I-B-I-T-I-B-I-T-I-B-I-T. I'm gonna get in the back of this place and show everybody what I can do with my face.  Maybe I'ma move into the south. Maybe I'ma go and do Atlanta. Do, be, zim, zim, zim, zim, zim, zim, zim, zim, zim, zim. Maybe I'ma hit them with the cameras and scanners and anus, right? So that's just like, got this top line. Just, which is just these words, but a feel, and then I'ma come back and I'ma find the words that match that. But if your vocabulary is this big, you're not gonna be able to do that, right? So focus on the basics. Mastery of the basics is mastery, period. Right? Thank you. You got it. Yo! Song of Gumbu Lupe. Peace. Thank you for doing this. I'm not an MIT student. I'm studying film at Emerson, so the fact that it's open to public is really cool of you, so thank you. I have another writing question. I think we've got a lot of writers in here, but all of your albums and songs feel like you build a world and then fill it with your ideas and thoughts. So do you build a world and then go from there and develop an album through that, or do you do it retroactively? Do you have specific song ideas and individual ideas you wanna express to people and then build a world going backwards from there?  You're never not building a world, right? Or borrowing a world, right? And maybe colonizing different parts of that world, right? Rarely do I hear somebody building a world from scratch. I hear a lot of borrowing of worlds or invading of other worlds, right? So be cognizant of that. But with that said, as just kind of like a general framework, like, yeah, I start with a word that sounds good, right? Like paper tiger, right?  Origami, that's Japan. Oh, but that's also these sharp edges. Ooh, okay, what else have sharp edges? Maybe that Radiohead album cover for Kid A Amnesia. Oh, and you start to populate just all that one word, right? But you wanna start with something very strong, very visible, but also maybe something very mysterious. So it can become a surprising moment for somebody. Once you unfold that tiger and you realize it's the note that Eminem was writing back to Stan, right?  Look, they've combined all the songs in the talk together. That's a little wild, right?  Like how I just borrowed Stan's world, right? But now I incorporated this idea into it to point it toward this culture. So now we can have this type of conversation, right? But that other world is still here. So instead of building a world, let's build a universe, right? Let's build a system, right? And that's kind of where I am. I wanna build systems, interconnected things. But it also depends on what the project is. Drew music as I am, I need to record an album in 24 hours from scratch, right? The first record is gonna decide. Or here's the title, cool, it's a little vague, but it sounds good, right? But it's from the matrix. So if anything happens, we always got the matrix, right? Anything happens, that's from the matrix. Look, I don't understand what this means. Is this like Pac-Man or something like this? Like it's from the matrix, it's from the matrix, right? And then you'd start to just, it's a time thing. It's not even about what I wanna do, it's what I have to do if I'm gonna meet this time limit, right? Kinda like this talk. But yeah, so it depends on what I'm trying to do at that time. Some records take a very long time. I'm still writing this record called Samurai, right? Which is the life of Amy Winehouse as a battle rapper, right?  But it's like, yeah, right? So it's a lot of different things, a lot of different ways to go. But do you understand all of them? Can you do all of them, right? As opposed to being aware of them? And then how many different paths do you have at your disposal? That's more important, right? Having multiple paths, hmm? Yes. Hey, so Lou, my name's Chris. What's up, Chris? First off, Lee, thank you. Cause Food and Liquor's the first album. What in my household was the first secular album I bought? Oh yeah, thank you. Yeah, and it made me widen my perspective on what I perceived to be true. Maybe look into a wider scope. And so I thank you for that, for sure. Cause I learned from Abu Ghrae to from a gold watch, everything that was on Gold Watch, from learning about how high somebody was to high beast is looking up the websites. So I appreciate you for that. Oh, you got it, you got it. But a question I got is cause, so I remember you did Japanese cartoon. And I remember Hello Goodbye had a real punk feel to it. And how early on did bands like, I assume Joy Division was one of your inspirations? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Queen, how early on did that inspire you in like effect your writing? Punk music is always just aesthetically, we get. I actually get it. Okay. They're not gonna turn the lights off, but our audio visual support. Will bounce. Ends in six minutes. Six, okay. We want to see if we can get to as many questions as possible. Maybe about the shapes. Indeed. Rather than the details. Devs and details. See how you use that against me? Did you catch that? You see how you did that? I always been a fan of punk from a performative aspect to an aesthetic aspect, right? The energy of it, the vibe. I based my live shows, if not the music.  But more for the performative aspect. So my stage shows, a lot of that is pulled from bad brains and NERD and Ian Curtis and stuff like that, right? How they performed minimally without a lot of shit and we're still able to put on an energetic show and what does that take, right? So that's kind of like the cue for that and what I kind of pulled from that genre in a direct way that you can see, right?  You know? Good evening and thank you. Maybe I can keep mine brief with an invitation. You mentioned earlier how you can get more of this out there. I am a public school teacher. Just across the other side of Mass Ave in Arlington. So you can come on over anytime because what I was going to ask is both for the kids and for the teachers, definitely and especially the district in which I work, this is probably not the type of literature that is embraced. So I'm wondering how to maybe get more teachers to kind of cultivate this different type of poetry in their classroom and also for the young kids that are dreaming of this being the next Lupe Fiasco who have no time to pay attention to my English class. What message would you give them? The message I would give to your English class directly is without 1984, the book 1984, which I got in my English class, right? There is no Lupe Fiasco, right? Arguably, right? Because it was like, oh, you can tell a story like this and it has double think, the concept of double think at the back of 1984, there's a whole dictionary which defines all the words that they were using in the book and there's a whole weird breakdown of it. I was like, oh my God, double think. I have two ideas operating at the same time. Oh man, these bars, punchlines, metaphors. I need to have triple entendres, double entendres when I write raps. So it became a teaching moment, right? But I had to do that, right? Nobody said that. Now that you know, you can see what are you interested in? My greatest teacher, his name was Mr. Kendrick, Mr. K, rest in peace.  I'm gonna just give you this D so you can pass. So you can focus on what you wanna do, right? And I'm just here to empower and surround what you already are good at and what you wanna do. So take this stuff, right? And then how can we apply it to what you already do? And it's meeting them where they are, right? And then at least for me, humbly, I would say. So just tell them like, hey man, you can rap about this. Right? Because Lupe Fiasco said so. Appreciate you, but I will pay a visit, yeah? Absolutely. For sure. Hi, Lu. So I have a question. You mentioned the repetition break technique and you listed three songs, but I'm curious if I have the wrong idea about that because the first thing that came in my mind is he say, she say and the cool because it comes back from the dead, goes back to the people that killed him. I was wondering why that wasn't listed or if I just have the wrong concept. Sometimes I forget my own songs. And I'm trying to find the most obvious examples. Oh, okay. And that's why, but you're correct. You're correct. That frame is there. Sometimes it's there unconsciously, you know? Cause that's just, we were taught to tell stories in a certain way and we referenced the stories that we know the most and are the most simple, right? So, but you're correct. It is in a cool, it's in other songs as well, right? And sometimes it's reversed, right? It's about, oh, how do we reverse that process when we actually start with the reveal and then it becomes educate you after the fact.  That was a giant robot, right? Kind of deal. So, yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Mars. Yo. Hello, Lupe. Nice to see you again. Nice to see you. So I'll give my question short. How do you think that we like MIT students like scientists, physicists, engineers, like walking, we contribute to the rap scene or to the hip hop music or the culture? Say that again? The first part. Oh, what part? Like everything? OK. So what do you think that say us like MIT students like physicists, engineers, mathematicians, what can we contribute to?  So one of the best rappers at MIT right now is a nuclear physicist. Brincino? His name is Alex. All he raps about is nuclear physics, right? And I'll put him on blast. He came to me, he's a grad student. He went to Caltech, and then came here for a grad student. All right, doc IT? All he raps about, all of his raps are about nuclear physics, right? And he gets, oh my god, right?  And he can perform them at length. He came and did a five minute thing just kind of like, and I'm learning and excited and dancing and going crazy. And I was like, oh my god, right? So it's how you approach it. Do you want to use it as a learning tool? Do you want to think about it? And do you want to come up with a mathematical formula that represents this? Because the other part of these papers is there is a mathematical formula for a surprise, right? It's like, here's this delta sigma thingy with a zoobie to zoopie and a bobby to bobby, right? And that's how surprise look if it was a mathematical equation, right? And that exists for everything. So maybe the support would be like, hey, take a look at what we do the same way that you look at nanoparticles, right? And what do you see? And then come and have, come be in concert with us and come conversate with the rappers, right? And then we can give you what we see in you and in your field and how we can say, hey, you know, if you talked about it this way or maybe if you approached it this way, you know, maybe people would get it, right? Instead of saying like, what's the thing in calculus, right? Just say a little bit of, right? Just say a little bit of, like this dx over the, that's just saying a little bit of this and a little bit of that, right? Cool? Cool? You good? All right, cool, bye. So I tell you, this is going to have to be our last question, but before we take it, you notice that you could hear everything that we were saying? So let's give it up for the people in the booth. Round of applause for the audio visual guy. You made that possible, right? I'll have this one more. Yeah, yeah. Hi, I'm the daughter of two professors over here. Hey. That's why I'm here. I was wondering, I think you had an interesting point about how current state of rap is like, you know, come home devolving. There's like a lot of rap. Big up again, I'm sorry. I think you made like a really interesting point about how a lot of current rap is sort of like devolving, like there's a lot of violence, et cetera. I was wondering if there are any newer like rappers that you feel like bring something new to the game and have been like interesting to you? New rappers, I mean, Alex here at MIT raps about nuclear physics.  Like he's ridiculous and amazing and phenomenal. And he's like running a particle accelerator right now somewhere and writing raps about this and I'm like, oh my God, right? When I look at rap, and this is something that's going to be relevant in the class, right? Is there's rap, music, business rap, and billboard, and the charts, and Spotify, and all these other things. That is this much of rap. It is very, very tiny reflection of what rap is and who's doing rap and where. And I try and be tuned into all of it, right? And when you tune into all of it, even though that piece, the violence is there, and we can't shy away from that, right? All of the other things are there, the ills are there. But there's also a lot or not. I meet a guy who everything he raps about is nuclear physics. I meet another guy, everything, and he doesn't even curse. D-1 doesn't even curse at his raps at all, which is wild to me. You should curse, man. Listen, it's delicious, baby. So that's a range. And I don't want to pigeonhole. And I also don't want to just point out or limit you to think that what's available on Spotify, on the playlist, is the only thing that you have, and the only thing you have access to, right? Some of the best rap that you're ever going to hear is the rap that you go out and find and discover, that you go out when they're doing an open mic at the Middle East, or they're doing a thing over at What Have You, or Cambridge Cypher is doing something or something like that, right? That's where you're going to see these moments in a context that'll really speak to you, right?  But there's something about discovering some random God freestyling on the corner, you know? And this is, wow, what he incorporated, or she, or they, or them, or whomever incorporated this little thing. And it was like, wow, that was really good. That's rap, and it counts. And it's valid, right? So yeah, and by more Lupe Fiasco albums, he's great, I hear he's, I hear that guy's really good, you know? Maybe, maybe not, we'll see. But, good? Thank you. You're welcome, appreciate the question. I'll wrap up, Doc. I do want to highlight my brother D1 here, stand up D. It's, what is it, serendipity, or like, it was meant to, what's that word? Yeah, serendipity. It was serendipitous? That's good, right? Okay, cool. How we arrived here in Cambridge on the same plane, not on the same airplane, but in the same timeframe with the same mission. So while I'm here at MIT doing this, my brother D1 is a NAS fellow down at Harvard at the African-American Institute, right? With Skip Gates and the other folks that are there, Professor Morgan.  But D is down there doing amazing work, researching the relationship between hip-hop and violence, hip-hop and divinity, all these interesting layers and chambers that are of interest to him and doing it at the highest levels at some of the highest and greatest institutions that America has to offer. So two boys who have been welcomed into the Cambridge family from our respective cities, D is from New Orleans, from Chicago, on that same mission to kind of show hip-hop in a different way, to show rap music in a different way and expose it to you in a different way. So I just wanna give you your flowers. And he just released a record called God and Girls 2, which he released, not on streams, to your point, right? It's not on streams, right? You can go to his website, you can download it for free or you can pay $5,000 for it, cause he's a... You, they pay the $5,000.  You get to name your own price, thank you, brother. Name your own price. And then he's also doing more things at Harvard next semester and stuff like that, so make sure you tune in to my brother, D1. So yeah, lastly, thank you, again, audiovisual, thank you guys for hanging in there for us. We appreciate it, thanks to the staff here at MIT. Thanks to all the faculty for showing up, really appreciate you. And we'll see you all next, we'll see you all Friday at the ER Tournament over at Walker, pull up. But we'll see you next time. Hopefully we'll have another symposium like this. And if you see it, for the students, for the students that are here, I have office hours all the time. I'm in building 14 on the fourth floor.  So appreciate y'all, enjoy the evening, try not to get wet, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.


You know what happens when you get a $1.5 million contract? People stop insulting you with projects that are $10,000, $20,000, $30,000. Not that there's anything wrong with those projects. It's just that it puts you at another plateau, another level where people start to expect that you're this multi-million dollar contractor. And that's what you want people to believe. So what I want to tell you today is go after the largest contract that you can find. Donald Trump said before he became president, he said, somehow when you go after things that are much bigger, it attracts better type of people, better quality people, better suppliers. And I found it to be true in my experiences. The larger the project, the less headaches that I have. And that's with me personally.