Lupe Fiasco made headlines (and heads turn) last week when he called President Barack Obama “the biggest terrorist” during an interview with CBS. After receiving heavy flack for his comment, Lupe recently opened up about the incident and defended his critique of President Obama.
In a recent interview with Billboard’s The Juice, Lupe was asked to clarify his negative remarks about President Obama, but the L.A.S.E.R.S. rapper said that he has nothing to explain about the comment.
“I’ve got nothing to clarify. It’s Obama and the U.S. government,” Lupe said. “[It’s] every president that came before him and every president that comes after him.”
Although Lupe doesn’t regret his remark about President Obama, he does admit that he’s frustrated that his critics are only focusing on the negative comment and dismissing the other topics brought up in the interview.
“It’s funky because everybody’s pulling sound bites 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 s–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.”
Lupe also addressed his controversial refusal to vote in elections, explaining that there’s simply no point in doing so.
“Voting doesn’t work, because everybody who voted, voted for the same people who are in office right now that are actually allowing these policies to go forward … You have to educate the populace — the masses, the voters, the people who don’t vote, the people who pay taxes.
“You have to educate the masses to exactly what their tax dollars are going to pay for. I think once people educate themselves and open up their minds to understand that on that really basic level, then you’ll have some type of change in the way that Americans associate themselves and participate in their own political process.”
Considering Lupe’s long history of political critiques and his candid comments against his own record label, earlier this year, did anyone really expect Lupe to take back his comments against Obama?
–nicholas robinson
