S. Samuel
Grammy-winning rapper Lupe Fiasco has reignited talks of the upcoming Child Rebel Soldier album, which also includes Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, still being in the works.
Admitting the collaboration would mean a complicated behind-the-scenes process, Fiasco still envisions the group project coming to fruition.
“Honestly I don’t know, it’s all scheduling,” Lupe explained in an interview. “We’re all three independent artists, all working. It’s not like we’re dormant, we’re all working, so it’s about finding that moment where we can all get together and sit down, and come up with the songs and the ideas. We just haven’t had the opportunity to do that as of late, enough to put an album, a serious album together, and even if we get to that point, the business of the album coming out is ridiculous because it’s three separate labels, three separate interests and that’s going to be a paperwork nightmare. So there’s elements to it – big hurdles that need to be jumped before we can proceed with it properly and give people what they want, which is an album.” (Gigwise)
In mid-January, Fiasco blamed West and Jay-Z‘s upcoming Watch the Throne joint album for possibly delaying the CRS project.
“I think the Jay-Z/Kanye collabo [Watch the Throne] kinda was like, ‘Aww man, aww no,'” Lupe said in an interview. “Whenever we get to go in [the studio] and have the time and the opportunity to do it, we’re always working on some other project. Pharrell gon’ do a soundtrack for a movie, Kanye does another project. It’s becoming less of an album and more of everytime we do a song together–me, ‘Ye, and Pharrell, a CRS thing.” (Hot 93.7)
Circa 2007, West, Fiasco and Pharrell were planning to form a hip-hop super crew entitled “Child Rebel Soldier.”
Having already released one song via an online mixtape, CRS (Child Rebel Soldiers), the hip-hop supergroup featuring Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, is hoping to find time to craft an entire album. “Us Placers,” which samples Thom Yorke‘s “The Eraser,” was performed by Fiasco earlier this month during his set at Lollapalooza in Chicago. “Now [our labels are] working it out,” the artist tells Billboard.com. Whoever is going to pay is going to pay a whole h*ll of a lot. Everybody is excited, [but] ‘Us Placers’ is the only record we have.” (Billboard)
Last year, when West’s G.O.O.D. Friday track “Don’t Stop” hit the Internet, Fiasco revealed that the track was created by the soon-to-be-launched Child Rebel Soldier.
“We went on the Glow in the Dark tour and it was just kinda like, maybe, maybe not, let’s do a record, let’s see … so, ‘Don’t Stop’ is kinda one of the records from that creative process a couple years ago,” Lupe said, adding that West’s bars may have been updated. “The song is two years old. I think ‘Ye verse might be a little recent but I don’t know…That song is like a song that we did in the midst of being [Child Rebel Soldier] when we were actually going to put out an album and just really wanted to test records and see if we should do more records like that, or should we do more records like ‘Us Placers’ or … more down-low records, up-top records. We were just trying to figure out what should we do and that was one of the experiments that was bananas.” (MTV)
Check out some recent Lupe Fiasco footage down below:
