Throwback: An oldie but a goodie...Pitchfork Interview 06'

Here's another throwback for you all...this is an interview Lupe did with Pitchfork back in 2006. Its a great read so for those of you that may have missed it CHECK IT OUT!!!

Pitchfork: On a smaller level, you've got one song where you're talking about how you didn't like rap, you didn't like that women were degraded, but you liked Too Short, and you'd quote the lyrics back but take out the word bitch. That's something that just about everyone I know who likes rap has done. That's something that I still do, but I've never heard anyone talk about that in a song before.

LF: People have their morals, but morals aren't concrete. People think because I'm a Muslim that I pray five times a day, but you're never going to see that on a day-to-day basis. People fluctuate. To me, that was the most specific way to put it, the best way to be like, "I listen to this music, but it's the most violent music on the planet." But I like it, and to make up for it, I don't say the cuss words. That's how I get away with it. People are hypocritical. That's just human nature. I embrace my hypocrisy. Once you come to grips with who you are and what's in you, and you aren't ashamed of it...[but] people are made to feel ashamed. You start thinking, like, "Is this human nature? That I like certain things, but I don't like certain aspects of certain things? Should I just shun it altogether?"

I don't like to degrade women, but I like pornography. So what is that? It's weird, the stuff that we do. You see it everywhere; it's not just here. I have a friend from Pakistan; Pakistan is a Muslim country. And he is mad at America, everything that's going on in it, chant down Babylon. But he'll also say, "I would never raise my kids in Pakistan." It's like, what? You'd raise them here? Pakistan is a Muslim country, what's going on? And he'll say, "Yes, but you can't open a business unless you give someone a bribe. You gotta worry about people coming in and buying your daughter, worry about the people who are going to come in and try to marry your daughter." So you have this weird juxtaposition of good and bad. That's why I named my album Food & Liquor, because it's a mix; everything's not always what it seems. I really embrace that. I embrace that because after I do that, I can move on; I can try and go away from that. You gotta understand what your problem is and know what it is, and then you can change it. You can't just be like, "I'm a hypocrite, and to not be a hypocrite, I'm just going to not do hypocritical things." You can't do that; you don't even understand what a hypocrite is.

CLICK HERE to read the entire interview