For Lupe Fiasco, rap has always been a scholastic endeavor

There’s a moment in Amy, the 2015 Amy Winehouse documentary, where she’s leaving a voicemail for producer Salaam Remi, explaining she wanted to become a battle rapper. She even calls herself a samurai.

When Grammy-winning rapper Lupe Fiasco heard that sound bite, he took it as an invitation. His new album, Samurai, envisions the late star as an up-and-coming underground rapper. While the genesis of the story is mystical, Lupe says hip-hop is not.

“I believe there’s just form,” he says. “There can be unexplored form, but I believe that everything we do, by default, is process and procedure.”

In this session, we chat with Lupe about how he collects ideas and how he transforms those ideas into whole worlds. Plus, he explains why rap has always been a scholastic endeavor for him — he founded the Society of Spoken Art in 2015, and he’s served as a visiting professor at MIT.

“There were days that the only reason I went to school was to perform the rap that I wrote the night before for my rap crew at school,” he says.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.