Not only is this all radio adverse, it’s often difficult to know where to place it in current hip-hop. There are four “seasonal” vignettes interspersed throughout the album––one minute violin or bass solos, usually with the sound of frolicking children woven into the background. At certain points, on “Little Death” for example, you half expect Lupe to break into scat. There’s a trumpet here for every synth-squelch and a baby-grand for every keyboard. The instrumentation, meanwhile, is mostly anti-pop. Most of the tracks run over five minutes long the album itself is a sort of triptych strung across a few monolithic eight/nine minute tracks. Perhaps he still has a bad taste in his mouth from Lasers with just one single, Tetsuo & Youth is one of the most radio unfriendly Lupe albums to date. It would be a mistake, however, to label Tetsuo & Youth a comeback album, mostly because Lupe doesn’t sound like he has the slightest interest in coming back.
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For example, halfway through “Mural” he hits a rough patch in which he gets caught up in a series of questionable puns, all in order to clarify the meaning of “rain.” But then, seeming to address himself in the middle of his own performance, he observes the importance of “treating every…one of your words like reinforcements,” and comes out with a tongue-twister like: “It’s still hooker heels on my sugar hills and sweet spots / Crying shames, make margarita rims from cheap tops.” To say that it’s easy to hear the free-styling counts as a compliment for Lupe, in whose case the rap/gymnastics analogy truly applies. The subsequent verses–-which, according to Lupe, were mostly free-styled––are of the same caliber. The first 25 bars, pre-written, are highly polished, and some of the best on the album. While it is common among MCs these days to open with a harangue, Lupe’s intro is more of a guided meditation there are a few oblique shots fired, but it’s mostly a series of interesting images, seasoned generously with word play. The opening track, “Mural,” is nine minutes of uninterrupted rapping: bars upon bars upon bars…a veritable pub crawl. Tetsuo & Youth, however, firmly sets Lupe back in the pantheon. His reputation that summer was working equally for and against him. Add to this that Lupe, at the time of the rebuttal, hadn’t had a well-reviewed album since 2010. Being the senior MC by five years, a reply from Lupe couldn’t look like anything but a concession. Although the track did what it was supposed to, namely, remind everyone what a talented MC Lupe is (he parodies the flows of half the rappers mentioned in “Control” without breaking a sweat), it was nonetheless doomed to fail. Within 36 hours Lupe released “SLR2,” a track responding, in no uncertain terms, to Lamar’s diss ex silentio: “You will respect me, you will reject me/ But I’ve done so much, no matter how far you go, you will reflect me.” Strong words. The insulting omission did not pass without notice. Kendrick Lamar’s hit list on “Control,” in which he catalogued all the rappers he considered worthy of competing with him, was notable in part for the names not mentioned.
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