Lupe’s voice has just a little bit of a nasal tone –– enough that he’s still, at present, able to sound much younger than he is when he chooses –– but is fluid and adaptable. He emotes well. There’s not a moment on The Truth Is Among Us, which sprawls across a half-dozen different takes on 2005 hip-hop, when you doubt whether Lupe is in precise control of the tone and direction of a song. He will lunge out of one pocket within a beat and into another one you hadn’t even considered, fitting two cadences into a space where there should only be one, and sticks the landing on the exact snare drum he was aiming for all along.

The high water mark for that careening style is “Champ Is Here,” which finds every crevice in the Jadakiss beat. He rhymes things like “forest to the floor of it” with “stethoscope to the floor of it”; he cracks non-jokes like: “I be concentrating on the crack, get it straight / I was so high up the food chain, that which I mentioned before? I ain’t know how to make.” By the third verse, he’s extending lines past the ends of bars to squeeze in punches –– see the way he strings you through and they itchin’ to come up out the magazine like the posters that unfold.



Despite the looseness of its construction, Truth has a magnetic emotional center. Lupe’s version of Anthony Hamilton’s “Comin’ From Where I’m From” (he smartly leaves in Hamilton’s hook) is a masterwork; its second verse alone imagines a kid on the curb, captivated by a local hustler’s passing car, a man sitting in county fretting about whether or not his partner will wait for him if he takes a plea deal, and ends with the heartbreaking couplet “We bring our sons up to get gunned down, our daughters to have more / It’s war.” That verse thankfully gives way to a final one that allows a little optimism to creep in.

Elsewhere there are showcases given to the next 1st & 15th artists earmarked for stardom (the brash introductory freestyle from Shayla G), straightforward testaments to Lupe’s Muslim faith, sunny fever dreams. Before mixtapes were de facto albums, they served as a sampler of what a rapper might be able to do with more time, greater resources, or a bigger sampling budget. Truth is exactly that sort of glimpse, a series of fragments from someone more talented than nearly all of his competitors. On “Welcome Back Chilly,” he thanks Jay for holding him down while Chilly was in jail –– sincere gratitude, sure, but there are worse ways to signal that you’re up next than to mention, offhand, that Jay-Z made sure you had new shoes while the record companies were slow to pay.

