After Anti-Semitic Rap Blows Up, Lupe Fiasco Says He’s Quitting the Music Business
Image by Getty
By Thea Glassman December 13, 2016
Lupe Fiasco has apparently decided to end his music career after being accused of an anti-Semitic lyric.
The artist faced backlash over his freestyle verse on J. Cole’s “Everybody Dies” track in which he rapped: “Artists gettin’ robbed for their publishing/By dirty Jewish execs who think that it’s alms from the covenant.”
In a series of disgruntled tweets, the rapper fought back against accusations that his lyrics were anti-Semitic. “All day…dirty as hell,” he wrote in one tweet, responding to a user who quoted the lyric back to him. He then went onto say that he has “studied the Hebrew bible,” “swayed to the songs of Rosh Hashanah” and “walked inside the ovens of Auschwitz.”
The rapper finished off by announcing that he will no longer be releasing new music.
“Getting beat up for telling the truth is not how I plan on spending the rest of my life,” he said.
The rapper has since set his Twitter profile to private, but Complex captured his series of tweets below:
Thea Glassman is an Associate Editor at the Forward. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter at @theakglassman.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
