Lupe Fiasco: "There are songs on Tetsuo & Youth that have five narratives at the same time"!

Lupe recently talked to Billboard for an interview (which he subsequently called his last interview ever) and here is what he had to say about Tetsuo & Youth:

BB: Can you explain the meaning behind "Deliver"?
LF: A song like "Deliver" is the autobiography of a myth in the hood. You don't really recognize it until you are there. The hood doesn't really have the basic amenities that things that aren't the hood has. The pizza man might have two or three thoughts before he comes to your neighborhood. The pizza man might pull up, see your building and then keep driving. It's almost like a myth. Does that really happen? Does the pizza man really not come to the hood? In some cases it's true. In some places it's probably more of a story. One of the interesting things when we put the record out was that people were posting news stories about pizza men getting killed. There are some very serious reasons as to why. But it also speaks to the nature of those places like the places I grew up in, West Side of Chicago, South Side of Chicago. It's things like that, that are those odd aspects of the hood that don't really get a lot of attention like all drug dealers. But they have effects too.

BB: This is a Lupe Fiasco song after all, of course the pizza man must represent something other than just a pizza man.
LF: [Laughs] It's interesting you would say that. As an artist, me doing music, or any artist, you do it for so long, you start to become -- I won't call myself a master but you become very proficient in being able to structure things in subtle but powerful ways. Take a song like "Deliver" and the pizza man. It's kind of also saying 'peace of man' like 'peace of man don't come here no more.' Once you look at it from that perspective, it changes the dynamic of the song. We kind of did something like that on "He Said, She Said," which was about the single mother and single parent talking to this father and they used the exact same verse but kind of switched the pronouns around, but it was the exact same thing but it came from two different sources.

It's almost like the inverse of four, five albums later, you learn that switching out one word changes the dynamic of the entire song, and pizza becomes a metaphor for something else and the words become double entendre and even triple entendre. From an artistic level of learning how to work with words and understanding words, "Deliver" is like the most prominent example because that's the record that's out now, but when you get into the rest of the body of the album, it's even deeper. It's taken to extremes on certain songs where it kind of takes 10, 15, 20 listens to really pick up on what the song is saying. That's why you get songs like "Deliver" first. "Deliver" is, like, the simplest song on the album. It's somewhat of a straight narrative. There are songs on the album that have five narratives at the same time.

Click HERE to read the full interview where he speaks about his relevancy, painting, quitting Twitter, Bobby Shmurda, leaving Atlantic, Spotify, and his music being taught in schools!