S. Samuel
Grammy-winning rapper Lupe Fiasco is making nationwide headlines on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day for reportedly slamming President Barack Obama at an inaugural party event last night (January 20).
Details of what went down have started to circulate online across music blogs and sites.
Lupe Fiasco was booted off an inaugural party stage last night in Washington after dedicating his 30-minute set to the song “Words I Never Said,” Politico reports. The rapper, performing at an event hosted by StartUp RockOn, repeated the lyrics, “Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist/ Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit/ That’s why I ain’t vote for him, next one either,” for an usually long time and said he didn’t vote for Obama. He was told to move to the next song, but refused and was escorted off the stage. (Rolling Stone)
The company behind Sunday’s party has already stepped up with a statement.
“Lupe Fiasco performed at this private event, and as you may have read, he left the stage earlier than we had planned. But Lupe Fiasco was not ‘kicked off stage’ for an ‘anti-Obama rant.’ We are staunch supporters of free speech, and free political speech. This was not about his opinions. Instead, after a bizarrely repetitive, jarring performance that left the crowd vocally dissatisfied, organizers decided to move on to the next act.” (USA Today)
In summer 2011, Lupe stood behind not rocking with President Obama.
“I’ve got nothing to clarify. It’s Obama and the U.S. government,” Lupe said, echoing his comments to CBS. “[It’s] every president that came before him and every president that comes after him…It’s funky because everybody’s pulling soundbites from this one interview that we did, but they don’t talk about anything else from the interview. So it’s really about, ‘What do people want to listen to?’ It’s not what I want to talk about, cause I want to talk about all types of sh*t… there wasn’t the same reaction about me having a book club… about me trying to promote literacy in a country with 50 million functioning illiterates walking around, because we have a failed and flawed education system.” (Billboard)
The Chicago rapper initially raised eyebrows after describing the president as a terrorist days prior.
“In my fight against terrorism, to me, the biggest terrorist is Obama in the United States of America,” Fiasco said in an interview. “For me, I’m trying to fight the terrorism that’s actually causing the other forms of terrorism. The root cause of the terrorism is the stuff that you as a government allow to happen and the foreign policies that we have in place in different countries that inspire people to become terrorists. And it’s easy for us because it’s really just some oil, which we can really get on our own.” (CBS News)
